NEW Guantanamo Bay-style jails-within-jails are being opened for the first time in the UK to incarcerate ‘extremists of all kinds’, while police are being issued with assault rifles and given permission to fire at moving vehicles that they deem to be a threat to ‘shoot the driver’.
These are police state, civil war measures. They are being introduced by a Tory government which has launched an austerity and privatisation war on the working class and knows that the working class are fighting back and will fight back even harder.
The essence of this situation is that the Tories have called an election because they need a much bigger majority for an electoral dictatorship to push through the privatisation of the NHS and to illegalise strike actions. They know that what they have in store for the working class will be met with furious anger and mass strike action much greater than in the miners’ strike of 1984-85!
The Tory programme is one of ending benefits such as housing benefit, ending the triple lock on pensions that allows them to rise with inflation, and then to sell off the NHS to the USA as part of some trade deal, and to bring in a way of life based on the Uber-style economy, where you do whatever the boss says and have no rights at work or join the homeless on the streets.
Not only do they need a large majority to push through these savage changes, the Tories also need to ramp up their state forces so that when their measures are resisted they can attempt to drive them through by force.
They know that their programme will be met with fierce resistance by the working class, with protests, strikes, mass strikes and general strikes, but they also know that there is no other way to save British capitalism.
This is why they need a new UK version of Guantanamo Bay and/or the H-Blocks that they established in Northern Ireland. The first such block is being built in Frankland Prison, County Durham, and is near completion. It is the first jail-within-a-jail with two more to follow at other prisons.
The three purpose-built units are to open within high-security jails to hold ‘extremists’ and keep them segregated from other inmates. The Ministry of Justice said the blocks will have their own facilities and be able to hold up to 28 people in total.
Justice Secretary Liz Truss first announced the plans last August, announcing that ‘all forms of extremism’ will be targeted with the new units, including ‘extreme far-right ideologies’ and no doubt those expressing ‘extreme left-wing ideologies’ will soon follow.
It was Deputy Chief Constable Simon Chesterman, the national lead for armed policing, National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) who spilled the beans about the new ‘far more aggressive’ tactics being adopted by the armed police.
The June 8 election is to bring in a Tory dictatorship. However, the real anger at the Tories’ barrage of attacks will find its expression in a massive anti-Tory vote, and perhaps another Brexit defeat for the Tories.
Tory PM May has taken a great gamble by calling this election. A Tory victory will usher in a rapidly developing civil war to defend the NHS and all of the gains of the working class. A ‘shock’ victory for Labour will however see the working class surge forward well beyond the reformist limits of Corbynism to seize back for the working class everything that it has lost since the 2008 crash!
While giving full support for a Labour victory in the general election, the duty of the WRP is to prepare for the revolutionary situation which will be its aftermath and to mobilise the working class to smash UK capitalism and take the power.
There is no doubt that the British socialist revolution will take place alongside the revolutionary movement of the working class of the world and particularly of the EU. This will bring down the EU as a whole and replace it with the Socialist United States of Europe.
In order to fight and mobilise for this perspective we will be standing a number of candidates in the June 8 general election.
