THE fact that the Home Secretary maintained in the House of Commons yesterday that she had not known Tory MP Damian Green was to be arrested by nine anti-terrorist squad police officers, and that even if she had known it would have been ‘wholly inappropriate’ to intervene, spells out just how close the Labour Party has become to a section of the capitalist state.
It now considers a police raid on the House of Commons, the alleged political masters of the state apparatus, to be within the remit of a police force and an example of it exercising its ‘independence’.
She tried to maintain that the police had been called in by the Cabinet Office over Home Office leaks, and that although she had known that a Home Office employee was about to be arrested, neither she nor any other government minister knew that a Tory shadow cabinet member was about to be arrested.
In fact, it turned out that the police did not have a search warrant during their foray into the House of Commons in which they seized equipment and examined computers – they behaved as if they were the master and not the alleged servant.
The Speaker, who did not stop the police invasion of the House of Commons, but revealed that they did not have a search warrant, has set up an inquiry into the affair by seven MPs.
However, this committee will not meet for some time after the House of Commons leader, Harriet Harman, said that it would not be ‘wise’ to set up a probe while police inquiries continue.
The police are the primary force in relation to parliament, according to Harman.
In fact, the rise of political policemen and army officers who think that they could do a better job than parliament, has coincided with the rapid decline and near fall of British imperialism, which is seeing the historic bourgeois democratic compromise between the working class and the ruling class, established after 1945, breaking apart and then disintegrating by the impact of the financial collapse.
The army and the police feel the weakness of parliament and sense that they are going to have to take more and more control if the capitalist system is to have a chance of surviving.
The political parties themselves have courted the police and helped bring them into politics.
Former PM Blair used ex-Met chief Blair to campaign to organise MPs to vote for holding suspects for 90 days without charge. The police chief was Labour’s protégé.
Boris Johnson, the Tory mayor, sacked Commissioner Blair as a Labour Party policeman who was due to get his comeuppance. He is now presumably shopping around looking for a policeman who is more attentive to the needs of the Tory party.
The ruling class is losing its control over its state apparatus, which is starting to splinter and become divided into political factions.
The police raid on the Tory party has even awakened memories of the 1640 English revolution and the rights of parliament that the victory of that revolution established.
However, it is to be remembered that while Oliver Cromwell defended the rights of parliament against the King, in order to carry through the bourgeois revolution, he also directed Colonel Pride to purge the House of Commons, and also disbanded the ‘Barebones Parliament’, governing as Lord Protector without parliaments till his death, using the power of the revolutionary army to rule.
The News Line defends the rights of parliament against the emerging political police chiefs and army officers who one day will seek to establish their own regime of colonels, as in Greece in the 1970s.
While we will defend parliament from the right wing, it is obvious that the working class will not achieve socialism through either of the Houses of Parliament.
A socialist revolution that overthrows the rule of the bankers and bosses will have to shut down the Houses of Commons and Lords and rule through workers councils.
These will smash the capitalist state and disband the judiciary, the police and army officer corps to cement workers power and establish a socialist planned economy.
The splits in the ruling class, in its political parties and in the various wings in its state apparatus, and the enormous attacks that are being made on the working class signal that the moment of revolutionary action in Britain is fast approaching.
