FOLLOWING a mass walkout by armed police over the decision to charge an unnamed armed police officer with murder over the shooting of 24-year-old Chris Kaba last year, the Tories wasted no time in declaring their full support for total immunity from prosecution for the police.
Home Secretary Suella Braverman on Sunday gave her full support to the police and ordered a review of armed policing insisting they ‘mustn’t fear ending up in the dock’ following reports that up to 300 armed police in the Met and across the country were turning in their guns to ‘step back from armed duties while they consider their position.’
This is the same tactic deployed by the police following the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent, unarmed man shot dead by police at Stockwell tube station in 2005.
In this and all cases involving the shooting of unarmed people, the police were completely exonerated with no prosecution let alone findings of guilt.
But even this record of police being given a free pass over killings is not enough for them or the Tories.
Now they are demanding total immunity from even the threat of any investigation, with a Met statement saying that officers are ‘worried’ about how an investigation ‘impacts on them’.
In other words, there is not even to be an inquiry that might cause the police involved some stress.
The Tories also seized on this walkout by armed police as an excuse to draft in the army as replacements, with the Telegraph reporting that special forces could be asked to cover Counter-Terrorism Specialist Firearms Officers who are refusing to carry guns.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) confirmed yesterday that it had received a Military Aid to the Civil Authorities (MACA) request from the Home Office to ‘provide routine counter-terrorism contingency support to the Metropolitan Police, should it be needed.’
MACA has been used by the Tories as a strike breaking instrument during the official strike of Border Force staff called by the PCS union last December, while around 1,200 soldiers were drafted in to break strikes by ambulance workers over the same period.
Health Secretary Steve Barclay insisted at the time that the military was being directed by the Tories to ‘serve the nation’.
When the Tories talk about ‘serving the nation’ they mean serving the interest of a capitalist class in the grip of a massive economic and political crisis.
It’s a crisis that has led to the crunch point of a revolutionary confrontation with a working class that is rising up in defence of its living standards and the right to use its industrial might against a capitalist system determined to drive it into poverty to protect the profits of the bankers and bosses.
The Tories have passed laws that effectively make striking illegal and withdraw any legal protection for workers refusing to cross picket lines on the order of their bosses.
The Tories have torn up all the legal protection for trade unions against being fined by the courts for losses incurred by the bosses and made the unions responsible for policing their own members.
At the same time that workers and trade unions are being legally emasculated, the Tories are determined to ‘free’ the state forces from the law, allowing them to get away with murder and with no fear of any legal repercussions.
Striking will be illegal while murder by the armed wing of the capitalist state will be perfectly legal, as in its desperation the ruling class prepares to junk bourgeois democracy and turn to a police/military dictatorship to crush the working class.
What is being assembled is a brutal capitalist state prepared to take on the powerful working class that is increasingly demanding a general strike to defend itself from being driven into poverty to keep bankrupt capitalism from crashing.
The capitalist state cannot be reformed in the interests of the working class, it must be smashed and replaced with a workers’ state and socialism.
The urgent issue today is for the working class to force the TUC to act by immediately organising the general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers’ government and socialism.
This is the only way forward.
