THE Tory leadership publicly lambasted what it termed the police chiefs’ ‘wrong tactics’ for dealing with the youth uprising, during the special sitting of the House of Commons last Thursday.
The police chiefs, instead of immediately flooding the areas with police stormtroopers, completely underestimated the situation, and were merely observing it, and rubbing their hands with glee at the numbers of youth that they would be able to arrest, at their leisure, in the aftermath, making use of the tens of thousands of CCTV cameras that are now positioned everywhere for this purpose.
The Tory elite were however on their summer-hols, didn’t have a clue as to the gravity of the situation, and had to be dragged back to face the music.
They decided to blame the police for this crisis, saying that it was not police cuts or any cuts that were causing the problems, but the wrong tactics of the police.
One immediate result of the Tory rubbishing of the domestic police chiefs has been Cameron’s turn to the US gangbuster, Bratton, the ex-police chief of New York and Los Angeles. Bratton’s mission is to advise just how to terrify the so-called ‘gang leaders’ from morning to night, inculcating a deep fear of the state amongst youth, and thus saving society from the mob. As if this has not been tried before!
The accent is on draconian measures. Making youth who have ‘offended’ and their families homeless, removing their benefits, forcing them to live in tents and in underpasses, where they will be harassed and beaten by the ‘super-cops’ until they permanently take to the road, a beaten ‘underclass’.
This is Cameron ‘saving society’. It is in fact the reaction of a Tory ruling class that is terrified of the depth of the crisis, fearful of revolution, and is now trying to get under the protection of the US umbrella, having lost confidence in its own state forces.
Cameron’s hysterical measures fall just short of the docking of people’s ears, or their branding with red-hot irons, the tactics that the current ruling class’ forbears used to clear the common lands and drive one third of the population onto the roads in the 16th and 17th centuries, when the working class was formed.
History is being repeated as a nightmare. The Tories are returning to their roots.
The response of the police chiefs is to pour scorn on the US supercop and to condemn the Tory leaders as hysterics. They want the traditional solution – an unlimited coffer for the police and the state, a major paramilitary police force created with tens of thousands of special constables enrolled as auxiliaries, and the use of rubber bullets, water cannon and armoured Land Rovers – with the army standing by.
They point out that counter-revolution is an expensive business, as is preparing to meet the trade unions head on, and defeat them in a general strike.
The military chiefs are meanwhile complaining that their forces are being slashed when they should be being strengthened and forecasting that something stronger than the present coalition regime will be necessary to defeat the trade unions in the UK.
In this way, the basis of a military police regime is emerging in the UK, via the deepening capitalist crisis, and the weakness of the regime. It can only be halted by the working class taking power.
Currently, the trade unions are led by the tamest-ever reformists who are incapable of using the power of the working class to bring down the coalition and bring in a workers’ government that will expropriate the bosses and bankers, disband the police and the army and bring in socialism.
What is required is the building up of the revolutionary leadership of the working class, the WRP and the Young Socialists, to mobilise the working class to take the power and carry out this task.
