ON Wednesday, a cabinet level task force set up by Cameron last June to consider proposals for new laws aimed at combating ‘extremism’ published its recommendations.
ON Wednesday, a cabinet level task force set up by Cameron last June to consider proposals for new laws aimed at combating ‘extremism’ published its recommendations.
The publication this week coincided with dire warnings from the police and security services about the terrorist threat from British jihadists returning from fighting in Syria.
According to their spying agencies, 300 British nationals have travelled to Syria to fight on the side of groups like the al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which both have close ties to al-Qaeda, in the imperialist-inspired war to bring down the secular Syrian government of Assad.
The fact that they have such a precise record of the number involved is scarcely surprising as their travel to Syria has undoubtedly been encouraged and facilitated by the British government and its state agencies.
The British state knows exactly who these people are and is able to track them precisely on their return. After all, they are the allies of British imperialism, waging war on its behalf.
Clearly, these new proposals are not being aimed at these individuals. On the contrary, having played one role as pro-imperialist fighters, they are now playing another important role, that of a smokescreen for new laws to strengthen the capitalist state for its real war – the war against the working class at home.
The clue to this is in the actual wording of the task- force remit and its proposals – to combat ‘extremism’.
In the past, all new legislation has been cloaked in terms of the war against terrorism, this was changed by Cameron when setting up the task force when he called for it to ‘consider measures aimed not just at violent extremists but those who seek to radicalise others’.
The catch is in the definition of what constitutes ‘extremism’. For capitalism, it is the working class. It constitute the main threat to its very existence. It is the real ‘enemy within’, as Thatcher famously said.
What Cameron and Tory Home Secretary, Theresa May, are proposing are legal powers to ban groups that ‘preach hatred’. They do not specify hatred of what.
They however mean hatred of British imperialism. Under it, the working class and the middle class are being plunged into poverty, while the masses of the world are being butchered in places like Syria, in attempts to reorder the world, to provide untold riches for the British bankers and capitalists!
Under this definition, any trade unionist or socialist calling for action to bring down the government and overthrow capitalism is immediately classified as an ‘extremist’ who ought to be banned. This is what Cameron and May have in mind.
Alongside this call to brand all opposition to capitalism as extremism is their demand for legislation to make it illegal for anyone to ‘spread extremist views’, and to stop such views being disseminated in schools, colleges and prisons.
Anyone judged guilty of doing this should, it is proposed, be subjected to anti-social behaviour orders, made to observe curfews, electronically tagged and banned from certain areas and meeting other people etc.
Under this regime, anyone agitating in universities, colleges and presumably places of work for a fight against government policies like tuition fees, wage cuts or redundancies could find themselves defined as ‘extremists’ and subjected to anti-social behaviour orders by the police.
May even wants the right for the British state to strip British nationals of their citizenship, rendering them stateless.
The last time such drastic measures were taken was back in the 1950s in the US, when members of the American Communist Party had their citizenship removed during the McCarthy witch-hunts against communists, socialists and anyone else designated as a ‘subversive’.
In fact, the real extremists today are the capitalist class and their political representatives.
The urgent task of the hour is to serve this government with a workers’ anti-social behaviour order by kicking it out of office through a general strike and replacing it with a workers’ government and socialism.
