JUST over a month ago, Tory prime minister David Cameron announced that hundreds of extra armed police would be sent around the country to ‘deal with a Paris-style terrorist attack’.
400 more armed police, Cameron promised, would be deployed in cities outside London on a round-the-clock basis along with a nationwide fleet of armed response vehicles.
Not content with flooding the streets of British cities with hundreds of heavily armed police, the Tories intend that these will be used to complement existing military contingency plans to deploy 10,000 troops in the event of a ‘terror attack’.
The response of the police to Cameron’s announcement has been overwhelming. After five years during which the number of armed police has been recorded as declining it was revealed last week that 1,500 are now being retrained across England and Wales.
In the West Midlands the number of armed police on duty at key times during the day has already doubled, with senior officers reporting that they have been inundated with volunteers for armed duties.
The same West Midlands police force last night embarked on a massive training exercise at the Trafford Centre in Manchester – the second largest shopping centre in Britain. The centre will play host after midnight to an exercise involving officers, armed with machine guns, from Greater Manchester Police, Merseyside Police, and the North West Counter Terrorism Unit invading the Trafford Centre as part of a three day operation called Exercise Winchester Accord.
Local residents have been told not to take any notice of loud explosions or response units careering through the area. All this begs the question: is this massive increase of armed police on the streets aimed at thwarting a terrorist attack?
An expert on armed violence Iain Overton, Director of Policy and Investigations at Action on Armed Violence (AOAV), gave the answer; he wrote: ‘Anyone visiting Paris in the years before the terror attacks of Charlie Hebdo and last December would have seen, plainly, armed French police throughout the city. But did their presence stop the attacks? No. Did their actions swiftly limit casualties? No.’
The real enemy as far as the Tories and the capitalist class they represent is concerned, is not a handful of terrorists but the working class. The threat of terrorism provides the fig leaf for the capitalist state to gear up its forces to confront a working class that is being revolutionised by the historic crisis of capitalism.
The capitalist state is shedding its ‘democratic’ and ‘peaceful’ skin as it prepares to have it out with workers determined to fight for their rights against a capitalist system that is determined to solve its crisis by dumping it on the backs of the working class through savage austerity.
The police will be operating a shoot-to-kill policy under the same banner of the war against terror, immune from prosecution as the Tories push through changes in the law granting them immunity from any ‘accidental’ killings arising from this policy.
While the police are armed and above the law, workers face seeing strikes made illegal and their unions emasculated under the new anti-union laws being pushed through. The working class must respond to the civil war preparations being made by the Tories by forming councils of action in every area to unite workers and the community in the fight to halt the destruction of jobs and industry and defend the gains like the NHS through strikes and occupations.
These councils of action must organise defence squads to protect picket lines and occupations from state attacks. Above all the way forward is to demand that the TUC stop all its collaboration with the Tories over the anti-union bill and call a general strike to kick out the Tories. This would put an end to their police state preparations and go forward to a workers government that will overthrow the capitalist state and replace it with a workers state and socialism.