State Surveillance, Political Policing and Counter-Terrorism in Britain, 1880–1914 by Vlad Solomon (review)

Vlad Solomon’s State Surveillance, Political Policing and Counter-Terrorism in Britain, 1880–1914 is an interesting study of the development of what Jean-Paul Brodeur, the Canadian criminologist, described as high policing in counter-point to the ordinary low policing of nonpolitical crime. In the case of Britain this means the manner in which the patriarchal, bourgeois state dealt with the violent threats presented by Fenian bombing campaigns, working-class strikers, continental anarchists, and militant suffragettes in the late Victorian, Edwardian, and pre-First World War periods. This involves close scrutiny of the official records of the British Home Office and Metropolitan Police, as well as of newspapers, memoirs, and other records. The book is in three chronological parts, 1881 through 1891, 1892 through 1903, and 1904 through 1914. In the latter period, the shift from policing violence to preparing for war is emphasized.

Much of the work is a detailed, blow-by-blow account of the violent acts of the forces ranged against the British state and the actions of the men who were employed to police them, often outside any established legal framework. Solomon does tend to imply that prior to his period of study the British police always acted within the law, which is perhaps an unwarranted assumption. He broaches broader structural factors in his introduction and conclusion, but his main contribution is to show how the personal intrigues, rivalries, and preferences of politicians, policemen, and civil servants explain the twists and turns in the development of the Special Branch, Military Intelligence, Section 5 (MI5), and other organs of the surveillance state. The tale he tells is one of endless fascination, with vivid descriptions of the violent activities of the forces ranged against the state, and of the personalities and “foibles” of the servants of government and ministers of the Crown involved (6). As he shows, the story is one of struggle both within and against the surveillance state.

Over the course of his detailed account Solomon does come to some broad conclusions about the development of British policing in his period of concern. He argues that the reluctance of the British to cooperate with continental police forces in addressing common threats, such as anarchist violence, had less to do with liberal principles than with a desire to keep the arrangements for political policing in Britain suitably vague. This desire smacks of British exceptionalism, and perhaps reflects the country’s lack of a formal constitution. In addition, he argues that the development of extra-legal policing cut across party political divisions, with senior figures from both the Liberal and Conservative Parties blowing hot and cold on the activities of high police. These are valuable contributions to our knowledge.

However, rather than stressing the contingent nature of these developments as Solomon does, might the lack of principle in, or middle-class public opposition to, the expansion of political policing point to structural factors at work? Since Solomon concentrates on the period 1880 to 1914 he has comparatively little to say about why Britain did not need more covert forms of policing during the mid-nineteenth century, compared to the earlier post-French Revolution years and the Hungry Forties. Did this simply mean that the mid-century was a period of comparative prosperity and ideological quiescence compared to the fraught social and economic conditions of the Great Depression of late nineteenth-century Britain? Similarly, stopping in 1914 means that his account does not consider the expansion of MI5 during World War I, and its equally startling decline after 1918. Nor does Solomon examine how during the war the activities of the secret state meshed with the existing information gathering activities of the state, as evidenced in the probable use of the 1911 census to organize the internment of enemy aliens. Ironically, given the story that Solomon rehearses, in...