Justice & Law Quote by Theresa May

“I believe” does a lot of quiet heavy lifting here. Theresa May wraps a hard-edged policy agenda in the language of managerial common sense, as if the only reasonable position is to modernize, to be “flexible,” to deliver what “the public” wants. The phrasing is deliberately bloodless: no mention of cuts, closures, headcount reductions, pay restraint, or the political pain that typically accompanies police reform. “Modern and flexible workforce” is HR-speak smuggled into public safety, a move that reframes policing less as a civic institution with democratic constraints and more as a service industry that needs to be agile, responsive, and cost-efficient.

The subtext is control. Flexibility, in this register, often means fewer guarantees for workers, more centralized direction from government, and a greater ability to redeploy resources without messy negotiations. It also cues a particular kind of “modern”: data-driven metrics, reorganizations, private-sector techniques, sometimes outsourcing. May’s choice of “service that they want” is a rhetorical shield: it casts any resistance (from police leadership, unions, civil libertarians, or opposition parties) as standing in the way of public desire. The public becomes a customer whose preferences are taken as self-evident, even though “want” can mean contradictory things: visibility on the streets, tougher enforcement, faster response times, more restraint.

Context matters because May’s political brand has long leaned on competence and security. This sentence turns policing into an administrative problem with an administrative solution, minimizing the moral and constitutional stakes that inevitably come with giving the state more latitude in how force is organized and deployed.