Like these academics, the authorities are becoming increasingly concerned with disorder at the micro level, the level of the individual and interpersonal relations, where once they would have been concerned with 'macro' social policy. The prejudice that individuals left to themselves cannot be trusted to behave in an orderly way, has lead to an ever greater intervention on the part of state agencies into everyday life. Once the twin roles of police force and local services were distinct, with the police presenting the hard face of the state, while the local council was its soft face. Today those distinctive roles have changed, the ines blurred. Senior police officers have pioneered a 'multi-agency approach' to social and public order problems.
Local authorities undertake the social control of estates alongside the police.
Third party' intervention in personal disputes is an outcome of this blurring of the definitions of state intervention. The role of the third party is as ambiguous in its parameters as it is adhoc in its organisation. Consequently, the safeguards allowed defendants disappear. This is a world which justifies the overused adjective Kafkaesque. Mediation used to be a word reserved for international and company law.