HOME Secretary Clarke is currently on holiday, after the Prime Minister insisted that he should not bow to public pressure and cancel it, as the Home Secretary had done, because of the crisis caused by the July 7th and 21st bombings and attempted bombings, and the police warning that there are almost certainly more bombings on the way.
Far from every man and woman remaining at their post at this supposedly critical juncture, Clarke is due to be joined by Prime Minister Blair and a number of other cabinet ministers, also fleeing the country for Tuscany and other parts.
The Blair admonition that people must soldier on in this crisis, is apparently only for the masses. The masses can only infer, from their leaders’ insistence on holidays as usual, that the situation is not so desperate as the police commissioners are making out. The leaders would not go away if there was the prospect of another fifty or so people going up in fire and smoke – or would they?
There is another, Marxist, interpretation for the grim reluctance of the leaders to give up their holidays.
This is that the presence of the government leaders makes little difference, and that it is the state’s bodies of armed men, from the police and SAS armed gangs to the MI5 and MI6 spooks who are in control, and running the country.
After all, the Prime Minister has already implied that he was not informed of the change in policy after the 2001 9-11 assault on Manhattan. This gave the go-ahead to the police to shoot-to-kill terrorist suspects.
At a recent press conference Blair said that if he had been informed of it, he would have agreed to it as being absolutely necessary.
So Blair is going in his holidays, but there is no question of his namesake Police Commissioner Blair going on holiday.
It is he that is in charge. It is Commissioner Blair that is appearing on Any Questions, side by side with politicians, and spelling out his amazement that the police in Birmingham used a Tazer stun gun on a terrorist suspect and did not take the agreed course of putting a number of bullets into the suspect’s head, destroying his brain in the proscribed manner.
It is commissioner Blair and his colleagues in the armed forces and the special services that are taking the life and death decisions.
Bourgeois governments are just frontmen for these bodies of armed men as Marx, Engels Lenin and Trotsky pointed out in many of their writings.
These frontmen are expendable, they come into fashion and go out of it, as the career of Prime Minister Blair illustrates.
The state and its bodies of armed men go on, they have a continuity, they have a training, they are the force that guarantees the bourgeois order, with seven bullets in the back of the head.
This is why there are no holidays for the leaders of the capitalist state.
The whole episode of the cabinet going on its hols, when Commissioner Blair is saying that more innocent people could have their brains destroyed by police gunmen, illustrates that the politicians are the frontmen, incidental and disposable, and that it is the bodies of armed men who count.
Only the Marxist movement grasps the nature of the capitalist state and what must be done about it.
The armed police gangs must be disarmed and disbanded, and all British troops must be withdrawn from Iraq. To achieve this the trade unions must call a general strike to bring down the Blair government to go forward to a workers’ government.
This will carry out socialist policies at home and abroad, and smash up the capitalist state, ending its right to execute innocent civilians whom it deems to be suspects.
