TO the impressive list of concessions won from French President Emmanuel Macron by the insurgent citizens of France we can add a substantial payout to the police. 

The bill might mount to €275 million. The cops will get a backlog of unpaid overtime settled and a new deal for the future. This adds yet more burdens on Macron’s Economics Minister Pierre Moscovici, who has pledged to keep spending within the EU’s guidelines. 

It is always risky to draw comparisons between Britain and France, but this is reminiscent of the serious wonga handed out to Margaret Thatcher’s boot boys during the great miners’ strike. When under threat the state can always find a secret stash of cash.

Whereas Thatcher, as far as we know, doled out the money unasked, the French police took what in Britain would be deemed illegal industrial action unsanctioned by cooling-off periods or secret ballots.

There are reported instances of French riot police removing their protective helmets when confronted by the massed ranks of the gilets jaunes and gilets rouges.

Meanwhile frontier police created chaos at Charles de Gaulle airport and there have been instances where police became mysteriously absent or untypically tardy in their response times.

Seated in his gilded palace, Macron might consider precedent. As spectacularly unpopular as was Louis XIV, he has today to rely on a gendarmerie that owes it origins to the Sun King’s own worries about his security situation.

The French system of policing is shaped by the centuries-old conflict between authoritarian state and a periodically insurgent population. 

It is managed by competing ministries of defence and the interior, divided between frontier, forestry, fiscal, urban and rural forces and complicated by a tangled web of semi-secret agencies responsible for intelligence, security and surveillance. Britain’s set-up is less complicated but no less ambitious in its reach.

Policing class conflict and the myriad social problems that crisis capitalism creates means police officers face great stresses. 

There is an increasing contradiction between a professional necessity to rely on the co-operation of the citizenry and the imperative to enforce public order. 

Police unions rightly complain about these stresses — just last month Maggy Biskupski, founder of the independent Mobilisation des Policiers en Colere (the Movement of Angry Police Officers), died at home by her own service weapon. 

Routine crime affects working people most. In as far as crime reduction is amenable to police action, adequate resources must be provided. 

Labour rightly points out that police numbers have been cut by 21,000. Restoring these levels and making sure that such a powerful resource is directed at solving real-life problems will be a big challenge for an incoming home secretary.  

The labour movement, and an incoming Labour government, need to come to a clear agreement with the police about the principles by which policing by consent can become the basis of mutual trust.

This means that the police must be subject to a powerful measure of democratic supervision in which both local and national government have a decisive role. 

The bizarre and intolerable situation in which a private company — the Association of Chief Police Officers — made policy and exercised operational control and direction has ended. 

Its successor, the National Police Chiefs Council, is undoubtedly a focus of valuable professional expertise but the development of national and local policing policy needs to engage a wider range of public representative bodies and give a voice to organisations that reflect, independently of the command structure, the interests and views of police officers of all ranks. Police officers deserve trade union rights as much as other public servants.