TORY prime minister Rishi Sunak yesterday launched a ‘crackdown’ on anti-social behaviour and begging, as the centrepiece of government policies in what is a declaration of war against youth and the homeless.
To enforce this crackdown, Sunak announced sweeping new powers for the police including the power to move on anyone causing ‘public distress’ by blocking shop doorways.
Police officers and local authority workers will have the power to confront ‘nuisance’ beggars and the homeless at a time when, in London alone, homeless charities have produced figures that show 3,570 people were sleeping rough between October and December 2022, an increase of 21% over the same period in 2021, driven by a cost-of-living crisis that has forced many out of their homes.
At least 130,000 households in England were made homeless in 2020 despite the ban on evictions brought in during the Covid pandemic – a ban that will shortly expire. It is young people who are the main target of the new powers granted to the police to tackle the Tories’ ‘anti-social behaviour’ crackdown.
Sunak said: ‘Anti-social behaviour undermines the basic right of people to feel safe in the place they call home.’ Tens of millions of workers don’t feel any safety in their homes as they struggle daily with an inflationary cost-of-living crisis that is makes paying the rent, feeding their children and just surviving from day-to-day a constant struggle.
Included in Sunak’s crackdown are proposals for so-called ‘Immediate Justice’ to force anyone given a community order to wear high-viz jackets while working under supervision – including washing police cars – as punishment for anti-social behaviour as defined by the police and rushed through the courts.
Also, great play has been made by Sunak of banning laughing gas, on the grounds that discarded canisters are ‘spoiling’ public spaces, with police presence in crime hotspots being increased to enforce the ban and the crackdown.
In the midst of a massive economic crisis tipping the UK into recession, with trade unions engaged in strikes across the public sector against a Tory government that is refusing to even discuss pay increases, the question workers will be asking is why are the Tories suddenly putting anti-social behaviour as the burning issue of the day?
Why are the Tories granting even more powers and money to the police to patrol anti-social ‘hotspots’, clearly meaning the parks and recreation areas in working class communities frequented by young people? These are the same police who only last week were damned by the official Casey report into the Metropolitan Police as ‘institutionally racist, sexist and broken’ are now being turned loose on working class youth in an attempt to enforce a reign of fear.
In fact, it is the Tories and the ruling class who live in fear of youth as the most revolutionary force in society. Young people are not dominated by the reformist outlook of the leadership of the trade unions, whose leaders have been imbued with the outlook that the best workers can achieve under capitalism is to win a few scraps from the bosses’ table – and when even these scraps are denied, nothing can be done except complain.
Youth are by nature rebellious, and will not accept being hounded and criminalised by a police force that has been officially denounced as corrupt and racist, and let loose on them by a Tory government and a capitalist system that can offer no future for young people except poverty.
Young people will never accept this, and are openly embracing socialist revolution as the only alternative to a bankrupt capitalist system where a handful of bankers and bosses make billions while the working class is expected to drown in poverty.
The ruling class rightly fears youth as the revolutionary vanguard that will provide the revolutionary leadership to the working class.
The attack on youth will rebound on the Tories and the ruling class – just as the anti-union laws are driving the working class to demand a general strike to defeat the Tories, so the attack on young people will lead masses of youth to join the WRP and Young Socialists to build up the revolutionary party to provide the leadership for the organisation and victory of the British socialist revolution.
