AT the same time as leading members of the Bush administration are seeking to shut down the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp after experiencing a series of humiliating defeats at the hands of the US judiciary, the British police force are seeking to impose Guantanamo Bays here, where ‘terrorist suspects’ are to be held without charge or trial until either the police collect enough evidence to charge them with an offence, or they die in captivity.
After a savaging yesterday morning, the ACPO police chiefs’ boss, Ken Jones, had to agree at midday that he had indeed spoken of indefinite detention without charge or trial to the Observer newspaper, and also, that up till now the police had not needed a period longer than 28 days to decide whether a suspect should be charged or released.
He then sought to pacify, or mislead, his opponents by declaring that the period of detention should not be mentioned in any new legislation, but that judicial checks and balances should be allowed to achieve the legal continuation of the period of detention without trial when and where the police wanted it.
A time limit should be left out, but there should be a legal procedure that would allow the police to establish a British Guantanamo Bay!
Jones’ public political intervention has created a shock, with the realisation that Brown’s boast that he will get a 90-day period agreed by parliament for the police to detain a suspect without trial or charge has been rejected by ACPO, the national organisation of police chiefs, as being completely inadequate for the situation.
Parliament, which has already voted to reject a 90-day internment period, has been told by ACPO to think again, or else, and that a much more draconian measure is required.
Since it was the police chiefs who were insisting on the 90 days, and claiming that this would be enough, people are asking just what has changed in the situation that has so disturbed and alarmed the ACPO police chiefs that they are demanding that a fully fledged police state be imposed by parliament at once.
One of the major changes that has taken place is that the US-UK occupation armies are being defeated in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This means that a massive increase in oil and gas prices is on the way. As far as Afghanistan is concerned there is now a great fear in the British General Staff that a Taleban victory in Afghanistan will see the Musharraf regime overthrown in Pakistan, an Al-Qaeda regime take power there, and see the Gulf and central Asia explode in revolution.
What frightens ACPO is that it can see that British living standards and the housing market are set to collapse and that many millions of workers will be forced into massive revolutionary struggles to defend their jobs, wages, houses and basic rights against the attacks by non-tax paying bankers, equity capitalists and others.
A lot of the legal work to face this situation has been done. The government can already declare a state of emergency and rule by decree, without a parliamentary vote for 40 days.
Also, the definition of terrorism has been widened so that it includes any trade union activity that endangers ‘health and safety’.
All that is missing is the legislation to bring in internment camps, to hold thousands of ‘terrorist suspects’ during a state of emergency. ACPO is preparing to fight a workers revolution.
Faced with the immediate threat of capitalist state dictatorship, the working class has no alternative but to organise.
It must join and build the WRP, to organise a socialist revolution to smash the capitalist state into smithereens, disbanding all of its bodies of armed men, in order to expropriate the bourgeoisie, and go forward to socialism in Britain, while aiding the struggle for socialism internationally.
