THE Tory-Lib Dem coalition government launched its White Paper Policing in the 21st century: reconnecting police and the people, on Monday. Home Secretary Theresa May described it as the ‘most radical reform of policing for 50 years’. The paper is to be subject to ‘consultation’ until September and will then form the basis for a Bill.
The consultation paper declares that neighbourhood policing is the key to Prime Minister David Cameron’s ‘big society’ programme. It says that ‘we want more active citizens taking part in joint patrols with the police . . . as part of neighbourhood watch groups or as community crime fighters’.
Key proposals in Policing in the 21st century are –
• Elected police commissioners to replace police authorities made up of local councillors. Populist Tory ‘law and order’ politicians are expected to get elected.
• The setting up of a centralised National Crime Agency to replace SOCA. This will have wide powers similar to those of the American FBI, including border controls.
• The country’s 141,000 full-time police officers will be let off the leash and not be bound by regulations, like health and safety directives.
• Increasing the number of Special Constables from its present level of 15,000 to around 65,000.
These are unpaid volunteers, receiving only expenses, who are rich enough to be able to work for up to 16 hours a month for nothing. Unlike the country’s 16,000 Police Community Support Officers, Special Constables have powers of arrest.
• Setting up a paid part-time police reserve force, people who have a job and leave it at short notice for policing operations. Once again it is to be expected that these will be people in well-paid, full-time employment. They will also have the powers of arrest.
This is all part of Tory leader Cameron’s ‘big society’ project.
As the Tory-Lib Dem regime imposes draconian cuts and smashes up the Welfare State, replacing it with charity, millions will take to the streets.
The government cannot proceed with the destruction of the NHS, state education, affordable housing, pensions, benefits and sacking hundreds of thousands of public sector workers and replacing them with volunteers or nobody, without provoking mass strike action.
The last time the Tory leadership called on the well-heeled middle class to volunteer for law and order duties to have a go at the working class was in the months before the 1926 General Strike.
Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s Tory government prepared for the strike for nine months, creating the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies (OMS). The armed forces and volunteers attempted to keep transport and delivery of goods going, with the government using the Emergency Powers Act (1920).
Workers and youth must be forewarned that Home Secretary May’s White Paper is a blueprint for a modern OMS, the aim of which is to defeat any general strike in defence of the Welfare State.
Her problems is that the middle class is not what it was, many of these people are working in the public services, like schools and hospitals, and they face the sack.
The working class must be forearmed to defeat this Tory-Lib Dem counter-revolution.
In every locality, councils of action must be formed immediately to defend every hospital, school and local council service, like the fire service.
Marches, rallies, strikes and occupations organised by the councils of actions will have to be defended against attacks from gangs of Tory volunteer thugs by workers’ defence squads formed from the local community.
Every trade union, particularly in the public sector, must adopt the policy of ‘one out, all out’ in response to sackings.
Any trade union taking strike action must get the backing of every other union through united action in a general strike to defend jobs and essential services, and to topple the Tory-Lib Dem regime and replace it with a workers government that will implement socialist policies.
Above all, the building of a new leadership is necessary in all the unions to replace those leaders who cravenly collaborate with the employers and the coalition government.
