Parliamentary Pressure (1969-79)

Abstract

The 1970s began in much the same way as the 1960s ended, with the large private security companies locked into the rules of the games set down by the Home Office and the police. However, this turned out to be only a relatively temporary arrangement, as over the course of this decade the politics of private security sparked back into life. The trigger for this third phase of the negotiations was the entry of numerous parliamentary actors into the political arena. The pro-regulation reform agenda shared by these actors interfered with the anti-regulation settlement reached by the Home Office and the police at the end of the 1960s, and accordingly brought these different parts of the state into conflict with one another over the issue of private security regulation. This conflict in turn created a window of opportunity for the executives of the large private security companies to manoeuvre their way back into the centre of the controversial debate over the composition of the post-war security sector. This chapter will chronologically map out this phase of the politics of private security.