A SCOTLAND YARD review into the 2010 summer riots ‘Four Days in August’ shows very clearly that the capitalist state in the UK is actively preparing for a civil war on the streets, and to be able to attack large numbers of people using water cannon, plastic bullets, and CS gas.
The review says the Metropolitan Police is developing more ‘assertive tactics’ to tackle disorder, and admits that the police wanted to fire plastic bullets at rioters in south London last summer.
The police review into the handling of the riots reveals that commanders twice considered using baton rounds, and that on the second night of riots, when rioting broke out in Enfield and Brixton, senior officers decided against using plastic bullets, fearing that doing so could ‘raise the level of retaliation of the crowd thus increasing the likelihood of individuals, with the capacity to do so, arming themselves with firearms’.
So, on the second night of the riots the police were already working on the assumption that firearms could be used against them, meaning that engagement under these conditions would have to be carried out by heavily armed policemen.
People in fact condemned the police during those four days for failing to help them or for driving past when their homes were threatened by fire. This is acknowledged by the review.
It also states that more than 4,000 people have been arrested since the riots and this is described as an ‘overriding success’.
The report blames failings in the police’s community engagement to spot ‘tensions’ over the death of Mark Duggan, whose shooting to death by police was the initial trigger of the rioting in Tottenham and nationally.
In fact what happened was that leading police officers refused to speak to the family over what was a police execution of a black man, and the uprising resulted from that.
The police did not expect it and they also did not expect it to spread like wildfire.
They let London burn, contenting themselves with the fact that they would be able to arrest thousands in the aftermath, who were caught in their large numbers of CCTV cameras.
Now the police are playing catch up with the social and class struggle implications of a situation where mass unemployment is growing, over a million youth have no jobs, students are being forced to pay £9,000 fees, wages are being frozen or openly cut, and benefits are being abolished, while the bankers and bosses are paying themselves billions.
A situation is developing where last summer’s uprising will be seen as very small beer compared to the tsunami of anger and revolution that the crisis is provoking.
This is why the review does not just deal with the suppression of youth. The report suggests that water cannon could have been successfully deployed against demonstrators outside the Israeli Embassy in 2008 and 2009, and during the 2010 student protests.
In an earlier review of the riots, legal advice was given that firearms could ‘potentially’ be deployed where arson posed a threat to life, or of serious injury. It was reported that the Chief Inspector of Constabulary Sir Denis O’Connor had suggested officers could shoot arsonists if they posed a threat to life.
Obviously the government is preparing its state apparatus to attack the mass movement of opposition to capitalism that is rapidly developing, when it takes to the streets, with every conceivable kind of weapon, including firearms and even drones.
It is also startlingly obvious that the working class in order to get rid of capitalism to go forward to socialism will have to smash this state apparatus to smithereens with a socialist revolution.
