The big divide in politics isn't (just) between left and right, but between statists and anti-statists. This is the lesson of the Prism affair and of the Met's snooping on the Lawrence family.

The issue here is how we think of the state.If you think the organs of the state are passive tools which promote the public interest, you might be appalled by these revelations. Anti-statists, by contrast, merely feel vindicated. To public choice libertarians, government agencies are not mere arms of the public, but agents with their own interests who want to expand their powers and budgets. From such a perspective, the police's desire to cover up its bungled inquiry into Stephen Lawrence's murder or the Hillsborough disaster, and the expansion of the NSA's and GCHQ's operations are not examples of agencies being "out of control." They just show what such agencies do; they cover up their inadequacies and seek to increase their powers.

On this point, Marxists and right-libertarians have common ground. These examples vindicate Lenin's view that the police and security forces are "special bodies of armed men placed above society and alienating themselves from it." And the very existence of the Special Demonstrations Squad corroborated Marxists' belief that the state served the interests of capital. Why else would the police devote so much effort to protestors against McDonalds and power stations when they were, at worst, only low-level criminals? It because they inconvenienced capital. And as Marx said, the state is "a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie."

This, though, poses the question. If the police and security agencies are self-interested and power-hungry, why do we not see more examples of their corruption, brutality and mendacity? Why have centrists been able to have faith in their good nature?

Simple.It's for the same reason that good parasites keep their host alive. If the police were nothing but corrupt thugs, they would lose their legitimacy and public revulsion at their behaviour would lead to their budget and powers being curtailed. They must, therefore, perform some useful functions to keep the public onside. This practical consideration - which some policemen internalize with a norm of public service - curtails their greatest excesses.

In this sense, we have a glass half-full/half-empty issue. The state and its agents are both iron fists and kid gloves. Statists are apt to forget the former, whilst Marxists and libertarians sometimes under-estimate the latter. But let's be clear that the iron fist (and the grasping hand, to push the metaphor) is always there, and sometimes not only in the background.