NEARLY 2,000 new spies are to be immediately recruited by the British state, prime minister David Cameron announced yesterday.
Speaking from the G20 summit being held in Turkey, Cameron said that government funding for the security services would be massively increased to provide for 1,900 more spies to be employed by MI5, MI6 and GCHQ.
The rush to recruit a new army of spies and to beef-up GCHQ eavesdropping facilities comes in the wake of last Friday’s attack by Islamic State in Paris. Cameron is not stopping with just recruiting another 2,000 spies. According to reports in the capitalist press, the Tories have ordered troops from the SAS onto British streets with orders to shoot to kill anyone suspected of being a terrorist.
According to reports this move follows high-level meetings of senior intelligence officers where it was concluded that army ‘special forces’, with all their experience in fighting imperialism’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, had the expertise in killing lacking in the armed police units.
As one military officer put it ‘It’s our bread and butter’. The bread and butter of the SAS is operating as the elite killing force of the capitalist state. Turning them loose on the streets in Britain teeming with a civilian population, is tantamount to declaring a civil war in the country.
The last time these troops were used in such a situation was in the north of Ireland from the 1970s onwards. There, the Catholic working class got first hand experience of the murderous tactics employed by the British army in pursuit of a ‘war against terror’.
A war was carried out by undercover spies and provocateurs, state killer gangs and the army special forces designed to terrorise the working class. What Cameron is doing today is bringing all these deadly methods honed in the north of Ireland, in Iraq and Afghanistan, back to the British mainland, once again using the threat of terror as justification.
The ruling class, through its Tory government, is preparing to bring in the police state under the pretext of fighting terrorism and not for the first time its own creation, IS, is providing the justification. Without the illegal war against Iraq waged by US and British imperialism, a war which killed over half a million innocent people, there would be no Al Qaeda in Iraq.
Without the funds provided by the imperialist powers and their Saudi Arabian ally to fight a proxy war to destroy the secular regime in Syria, there would be no IS. These jihadist groups are the creation of imperialism and now they are performing another useful role for capitalism.
For there can be no doubt that the real enemy, as far as the capitalist state is concerned, is not a handful of Islamic terrorists, no matter how many workers and young people they kill. The real threat to capitalism is the working class and its organisations. This was alluded to by Cameron when he said yesterday that ‘Economic security goes hand-in-hand with national security’.
The economic security which bankrupt British capitalism needs today is security from the working class and its unions – unions once famously described by Thatcher as being the ‘enemy within’ and ‘worse than terrorists’ during the 1985 miners strike. With the Tories preparing to bring in anti-union legislation which will make strikes and protests against government cuts virtually illegal and put the police effectively in control of strikers carrying out picketing, the capitalist state has already gone far down the road towards a police state.
The introduction of the army with shoot to kill orders shows the extent to which bourgeois democracy is being dumped by a ruling class that is fighting for its very existence against a working class that is rising up against savage austerity cuts designed to save a bankrupt capitalist system.
The only way forward for workers is to meet these class war preparations by demanding the TUC call a general strike to kick out the Tories. Only by smashing the capitalist state through a socialist revolution and replacing it with a workers state can the murderous wars and killings caused by imperialism be ended.
