ON MONDAY, Tory Home Secretary Suella Braverman announced that she is instructing all 43 police forces in England and Wales to ‘ramp up’ the use of stop-and-search powers as a further stage in the war against young people being waged by the Tory government.
Braverman has told the police to use all available powers to arrest anyone who ‘unlawfully’ obstructs stop-and-searches and she has announced that the Home Office is planning to put into law new conditions for using these powers.
These include the police informing the ‘local community’ when it is putting in place Section 60 orders.
This order gives them the right to carry out searches of anyone they choose, without having to justify their actions with the ‘reasonable grounds of suspicion’ line that the police usually turn to in order to explain their programme of intimidation against young people.
Now Braverman is instructing the police that they don’t need to invent any justification but to just get on with stopping-and-searching any young person in any designated area – which could be as large as an entire borough.
In April last year, a report by the Independent Office for Police Conduct called for the police to end the overuse of stops-and-searches aimed predominantly at black and ethnic minorities youth.
Braverman naturally ignored this this report – just as she dismissed the damning Casey report in March this year into the Metropolitan Police force following the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving officer.
The report concluded that the Met is institutionally racist, homophobic, and misogynistic.
Despite this finding by an official report, Braverman refused to accept that the Met is institutionally racist, telling Parliament that she rejected the charge of institutional racism on the grounds that it is an ‘ambiguous’ term.
In fact, there is nothing ambiguous about the charge of institutional racism, corruption, misogyny or all the other accusations levelled at the police force, not just the Met, and upheld by at least three public inquiries.
These same police are being instructed by Braverman to ramp up the attacks on working class youth to enforce a reign of fear in the hope of terrorising them into passively accepting that capitalism holds no future for them except one of extreme poverty and deprivation.
The aim of the Tories is to make young people used to living under state terrorism while the entire capitalist system collapses into economic recession and depression.
Youth will never accept being hounded and criminalised by a police force turned loose on them by a Tory government that is imploding by the hour.
Just as all the anti-union laws brought in by the Tories have failed to stop the working class from taking mass strike action to defend its living standards, so these laws against young people will rebound on the Tories and the ruling class as workers and youth rise up in revolt against a bankrupt capitalist system where a handful of bosses and bankers wallow in luxury while the rest of the people drown in poverty.
Young people must not stand alone in fighting against the attacks by the capitalist state forces.
The working class must stand with the youth as the future of the working class and join with them in organising to bring down the Tories by forcing the TUC to call a general strike to kick them out and bring in a workers’ government and socialism.
The ruling class rightly fears young people as the most revolutionary force in society with no future under capitalism and who are embracing socialist revolution as the only way forward – a revolutionary vanguard that will provide the revolutionary enthusiasm and leadership required for the working class to take power.
The way for young people to organise is to unite with the working class to put an end to capitalism by joining the Young Socialists and the Workers Revolutionary Party to build up the revolutionary party to provide the leadership required for the victory of the British socialist revolution.
Only socialism can provide any future for workers and young people – join the YS and WRP today.
