LABOUR’S war against the working class and the poor continues, with Birkenhead MP Frank Field advocating that nuisance neighbours should be evicted and ‘housed’ in steel containers in compounds on the outskirts of Britain’s cities and towns.
No doubt, they will be enclosed by razor wire and high fences, and tagged when they leave, so that their movements can be followed. Welcome to prison camp Britain!
Ex-Labour Minister Field, a Blairite extremist, has always believed that the poor should be punished and forced to submit to authority.
He was, not so long ago, urging that Britain should have the same social security system as the one that was introduced into Chile by General Pinochet, after the bloody mid-1970s’ military coup.
Now he is saying that his steel container ‘homes’, a modern version of the punishment cells, should be introduced urgently to deal with people who breach Asbos (anti-social behaviour orders)!
That this draconian measure is intended for the working class on the housing estates is obvious. It is definitely not intended for suburbia, and for the rural areas where the middle and upper classes fall out and do battle with each other over the height of their hedges and similar other vital matters.
New Labour believes that its mission is to punish the working class, the poor and the youth.
As regards the latter, we already have the notorious Asbos, the nine o’clock curfews for under 16s, the new police state powers of dispersal of groups of teenagers who have committed no crime but are deemed to have a threatening demeanour, the barring of youths from shopping malls, and the banning of hoods and baseball caps. Saudi Arabia has its Religious Police – Blair’s Britain is to have its Fashion Police.
It is not a long way to travel from these measures to an assumption that the real problem is that the working class as a whole is criminal.
No sooner said than done. On cue, Children’s Minister Beverley Hughes emerged on Tuesday to defend a Home Office call for the monitoring of children as young as three.
We will not have to wait too long before a Home Office scientist discovers a ‘criminal gene’, and then advocates taking appropriate measures while the child is in the womb.
Posing as being ‘reasonable’, Hughes said on Tuesday: ‘There is a balance to be struck between intervening early and labelling children prematurely.’
Nevertheless they are to be labelled, and at three at that.
The Home Office advises that professionals should look for signs in families, such as difficulties respecting boundaries or responding to adults, and offer appropriate help to problem families.
The Home Office leaked document said children who were not ‘under control’ by the age of three were four times more likely to be convicted of a violent offence.
It suggests putting children who were not ‘under control’ into ‘intensive foster care’ instead of care homes.
This treatment is also meant for the working class. The Home Office is not advocating that children whose parents are guilty of business crime, such as fraud or embezzlement, or City of London swindling, should be taken from their parents and put into ‘intensive fostering’, because the criminal environment they are living in is encouraging criminal tendencies.
This treatment is intended for working class three year olds who have displayed ‘anti-social’, ‘potentially criminal tendencies’.
The Blair government is terrified of the poor, the working class and the youth. Its policy towards them is ‘beat, beat and beat again.
The reason for this is that it knows that its policies are dividing Britain into the super-rich and an army of poor and poor workers. Labour dreads the retribution that is coming.
The only constructive solution for this situation is a socialist revolution to overthrow capitalism, smash its state, to bring in a workers’ government that will make poverty history, and consign the bankers, bosses and their political servants to the museums.
