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This chapter is devoted to analysing the historical peculiarity of the contemporary British politics of policing.

Research is based on an analysis of policy statements and debates, news reports, and official statistics, in the light of historical studies of the earlier politics of policing.

The Conservative government’s police reform programme severely diminishes the resources, powers, status and independence of the police, reversing the Tory’s traditional unquestioning support of the police. The package is shown to reflect broader changes in political economy and culture under neoliberalism.

There has been no previous academic analysis bringing together the various aspects of the reform programme, contrasting it with previous historical understanding of the politics of policing, and linking it to broader contemporary change.

This chapter considers how lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activists in Namibia and South Africa appropriate discourses of decolonization associated with African national liberation movements. I examine the legal, cultural, and political possibilities associated with LGBT activists’ framing of law reform as a decolonization project. LGBT activists identified laws governing gender and sexual nonconformity as in particular need of reform. Using data from daily ethnographic observation of LGBT movement organizations, in-depth qualitative interviews with LGBT activists, and newspaper articles about political homophobia, I elucidate how Namibian and South African LGBT activists conceptualize movement challenges to antigay laws as decolonization.