The first season of Sherwood, which Dave Kellaway reviewed for ACR, was set in the very late aftermath of the 1984 Miners’ Strike, the current day. Those who saw it will know (plot spoiler) that a police agent went rogue during those times, and they are now living in the local community. That first season focused a little too much on the personal and interpersonal agonising of the police, with central characters portrayed as caught in the middle, in between strikers loyal to the National Union of Mineworkers, NUM, and scabs organised by the Union of Democratic Mineworkers, UDM.

Sherwood sometimes drifts into police procedural television, and the way it depicts the police, and touches on the relationship between the police and the left, frames debates that have been around on the left for many years. It is that ideological framing we need to focus on for the moment rather than engage in a detailed review of Sherwood (a series which tries to tackle a number of “social issues”).

Sherwood Season Two

The second season recentres the action away from an explicit concern with the legacy of the Miners’ Strike, though there are hints aplenty that the ongoing violence and threat is a function of mass unemployment and austerity. There are key characters who are implicated in police infiltration of local communities, some of whom have come good from that work, and the themes of “infiltration” and “double agent” dealing run through the representation of community groups and drug gangs. What the second season does continue however, and actually ramps up, is an attempt to humanise the police.

While the first season did include attention to racism and sexism, and showed Black police officers (albeit those seen as “outsiders” who did not fully understand what the strike and its consequences were), this second season has a quite stunning increase in Black personnel in the police and judicial apparatus, ranging from central police sergeants to magistrates.

The ideological stakes of this representation of police as “stuck in the middle” are immense, and we need to take the consequences of this seriously, both in the way we understand the function of the police in class society and in the way we as activists relate to the police. We must be alert to contradictions, in ideology and in practice.

Ideology and the role of the police

We know that “all coppers are bastards,” but what kind of bastards are they exactly in different kinds of society or, more to the point, in our times here in the UK? For Marxists, it is just not good enough to simply resort to a term of abuse. Our understanding of the police is precisely that they are not “illegitimate” in capitalist society; rather, they are very “legitimate,” functional and necessary to it, and their role is legitimated in television series like Sherwood.

When it comes down to it, the police are part of the apparatus of the state, a state that is dedicated to the protection of large private property; not of your own toothbrush but of the means of production that you sell your time to service during most of your waking day. They guarantee the continued existence of that kind of private property that turns us, workers, into the property of an employer, the one who buys and owns your labour time.

The police force is, of course, a hierarchical power structure that maps onto the kind of state apparatus they serve, and just like the capitalist state itself, the different levels of personnel enjoy different kinds of direct links to the ruling class, to those who own or manage the means of production. At the upper echelons of the state are those tied into the family, school, college and industry networks that connect them by a million different threads to the economy, something you do not need any kind of conspiracy theory to analyse and take seriously. And at the lower levels are those who are granted a little bit of privilege, drawn from the working class, and even still often living in working-class communities.

This we see very clearly represented in Sherwood. Notice the way that one of the key characters becomes successful, emerges from the working class after having betrayed his class during the miners’ strike by collaborating with the police. Notice how another key character has entered the police apparatus in order to inform, to do the bidding of crime gangs.

Those tense links inside the working class when the police apparatus, part of the “repressive state apparatus,” open up contradictions, of course. Those contradictions explode into direct conflict at times when large private property is itself under threat. It is then, at times edging on national strike, even perhaps “dual power,” when the working class is able to operate as a conscious united force, that a choice opens up for each member of the police, whether to side with their own class – an easier more obvious done deal for those at the upper levels whose class is immediately part of or dependent on the ruling class – or to side with the state that guarantees the power of the ruling class.

Breaks and splits in the state apparatus

During the 1984 Miners’ Strike, there were police, few it is true, who left the force in disgust at their role in breaking the strike, and Sherwood makes great play of the anxiety this causes to those who leave and to those who remain. So, there are those who break from the police, even break from the army brought into restore order, and that is all to the good, minimal though it often is, for we should not underestimate what loyalty is inculcated during training.

This is important, but more important is the potential for a complete break in the state apparatus, when whole sections of the police and army may move over, en masse, to the working class, back to their class of origin.

This is possible because the police must, as with other workers, sell their labour power for a fixed period of time in order to live, in order to provide for those dear to them. We see this represented in Sherwood, and know it is the case in the real world. Nice Detective Chief Superintendent Ian St Clair, for instance, has, we learn, now left the police to do “community” outreach work, but, as he knows, and he is reminded often enough, he is still implicated in the apparatus he is so distrustful of. The police are often still closely linked to working class communities but disconnected from them, separated and, quite rightly, often treated with suspicion.

Workers in uniform

One way of making sense of this enduring contradictory link with working class communities is to say that the police are “workers in uniform,” but this is a mistaken idea, a fantasy, is what more often underpins incipient fascist movements than those on the left. It is the kind of misunderstanding of the police that confuses their social function and their personal lives. As a social function, they are not workers, though they might personally be conflicted about what they are doing to those they have been lifted away from, given privilege over. It is true that they are, in a sense, “workers” because they sell their labour power, but in their function as police they serve the state. The mistaken idea that they are “workers” and have common interests with the working class is often at the heart of nationalist, quasi-fascist movements that sometimes emerge from within the left.

Yet, still, outside their role, perhaps, police are other things, live other lives, even though we know that even that private life is often policed and segregated. There has to be an opening, a contradiction, our hope that the state apparatus will break at times of class conflict. If it does not, we are finished, game over. It is precisely this hope that is what is picked up and played with and exaggerated in Sherwood.

There will be times when we may even need to accentuate the potentially “positive” role of the police, and we need when and how to work with those occasions. At times, in cases of sexual violence for instance, the police will then be called upon, and we know the disastrous consequences of left organisations imagining that they can take on policing functions themselves entirely independent of the real police; what often happens in those cases is that the whole apparatus of the justice system is replicated in caricature, as an injustice system. The task then is to both get support and to demand that there is accountability, not to pretend that the police can be reformed, made into a force for good, but to lay the way for transforming the way we take responsibility for our own security.

Police defunding and abolition

In season two of Sherwood Ian St Clair (bullied at school for his girly name, we will remember from season one) is a sympathetic character who has now resigned from the force and is in some kind of more obvious social work role, but that does not go far enough, and the representation of this nice good guy actually serves to cover over the real contradictions that open up at times of political crisis. Those contradictions are covered over in season two, and replaced with the problem of drug gang crime.

There are moments in Sherwood when it seems like the problem is down to the occasional “bad apple,” and we are invited to side with the nice good apple guys who are torn between reforming the way the apparatus works and walking away in disgust, walking back to their own communities. We take a different tack. We call for “defunding” of the police, for the money to be channelled into social and welfare support and into local community organisation, and for a process of “police abolition” in which the police force as it exists in capitalist class society will be replaced with democratically-accountable forms of protection.

Even for the most thorough-going “police abolition” movements, there is a dialectical interplay between how we dismantle the oppressive apparatus of the police and how we build alternative forms of safety and justice, even in alliance with some of those inside the system, those who can already see that there is something rotten in the way it is operating at the moment. These are radical proposals but they are in a way “transitional,” that is they resonate with common sense.

Conflicts in the state apparatus

There is a question here about how we key into conflicts inside the state apparatus, inside the police, issues that have come to the fore in recent anti-fascist mobilisation. We need to notice how the representation of the police in series like Sherwood resonates with some of the peculiarities of the current conflicts between the police and fascists. There is peculiar kind of contradiction opened up. We are seeing, among other things, the fruits of years of quite staggeringly stupid (from the standpoint of the state) hostility to the police by the Tory Party.

There have been countless accusations by successive Tory Home Office ministers that the police are being soft on strikers, and then accusations, during recent wave of Palestine solidarity demonstrations, that the police are not clearing the streets, allowing the demonstrations to happen.

Those of us in therapy networks have also heard of internal dissension inside the police; there are internal “counselling” services that have been running focus and support groups for police called into deal with the Palestine demonstrations, and reports that the police, a force that now includes members from different communities, are divided. Some want to crack down on the demonstrators, and that is what we would expect, and some are openly sympathetic, surprising, even promising.

Now, after the Southport murders and riots there, and then in other places, the main aim of the fascists is to cause panic and to make anti-fascists race around like rabbits staring into the headlights until we clash with the police. We will clash with the police, and Starmer is now giving the go ahead for harsher policing of Palestine solidarity demonstrations. Some police will delight in that.

Our own self-organisation

This is not in any way to say that “community police” or wannabe police part-timers should be trusted. We know there are racist brutes inside the police, and they instil obedience among those from non-White communities drawn into the force. To trust the police at any level of engagement with them would be a stretch too far, but it does mean that we assess carefully local conditions for making the police take responsibility and us working independently. Facing the fascists, when and how, is now a pressing case in point.

We need to think carefully about how we organise to defend ourselves. In some cases where there are local Palestine solidarity groups drawing in different kinds of people with different political backgrounds, for instance, the priority is the peaceful demonstrations, and we need the maximum number of people for those.

A local mosque in the south of Manchester, for instance, has asked us explicitly not to assemble there at the moment, and to allow the police to deal with fascists. This is a tactic based on current relations of force, not a fixed position by the mosque, which has, at other times, welcome our presence, even asked for it when they have been under threat. Theirs is a thought through tactical approach that we should respect.

Fascism and the police

The fascists are currently (and this is not always the case, remember) a problem for the police, and there is nothing the fascists would like more than to get us along to their protests and for us to get arrested too, and to fuel the tabloid press accusation that we have something to do with it. The fascist circulation of many addresses around the country is, among other things, a ploy to get us racing around and into conflict, and Stand Up To Racism, SUTR, risk falling into that trap, something that also risks exhausting all of us.

We have the high ground at the moment, with even the tabloid press joining a (hypocritical) chorus of support for the latest anti-fascist demonstrations. We have to know how and with whom to build these movements. The police are not our friends, but at the moment, at least, they are certainly not the fascists’ friends, and we should keep that to our advantage. (Sherwood, by the way, would have you believe that there is no racism inside the police.)

This is important to understand in current conditions of fascist activity. Calls for solidarity and unity in the wake of the upsurge in fascist activity have been followed, quite rightly, by mass mobilisation in which communities have stood together against racism. What also needs to be addressed in such calls is a nuanced understanding of how the police are being called upon to act, and how we relate to the police. This is a question of tactics that are always informed by an overall analysis of the role of the state.

All of this is absent from Sherwood; those suffering from the “austerity” that is mentioned a few times in the series are drawn into crime and resentful hate crime, but not into fascist organisations. Political parties are not mentioned, and even the ecologically-minded councillors and the “Sherriff of Nottingham” (who in reality is in the Labour Party) seem to float free of those kind of institutions; even the church, visible in season one, is now invisible. As is so often the case in television drama, personal and organisational conflicts operate as if in a social vacuum.

What Sherwood does is to reframe such current conflicts between fascists and the police as a conflict between the desperate undeserving poor drawn into crime and a welfare support service in which the police and social workers try, and sometimes fail, to work together. In this way we are drawn into a kind of “ideological state apparatus” that runs alongside police, legitimises their role.

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