THE CRISIS of the capitalist system has led to huge attacks on working class and middle class youth who are daily being told in words and in deeds that they have no future under capitalism.
On December 9th, 2010 the Tory-led coalition lifted the cap on university tuition fees so that fees could be raised up to £9,000 a year, creating misery for students, massive indebtedness, and a situation where the student loan debt has now been sold off to professional debt collectors.
In this period of capitalist crisis it is now normal for unemployed students to work for nothing in the vain hope that this will lead on to paid work.
In January 2011, the Tories followed up on their vicious attack on students by abolishing the Education Maintenance Allowance, the EMA, for schoolchildren. Under the EMA, hundreds of thousands of school children were assisted with their education to a maximum of £30 a week.
Before the Tories carried out the abolition of the EMA, the Department of Education explained that ‘EMA is a hugely expensive programme, costing over £560 million a year, with administration costs amounting to £36 million…Young people currently receiving the EMA will continue to receive it for the rest of the academic year. However, they will not receive it next academic year.’
This abolition was another massive blow at youth – £560m was just too much to pay to assist youth with their education. Youth now are going straight from school into the Jobcentres where regimes of vicious sanctions have been established to break their rebellious spirit.
Losing the Jobseeker’s Allowance, ie hunger, is being used as a weapon against youth to try and get them to bow down to the established order.
Youth, however, are rebellious and question everything. Their instincts are revolutionary. In the face of such repressive regimes they rebel, and then the strong arm of the state, its bodies of armed men, are let loose on them, or the decision is made to start the disciplining of youth at an even younger age.
The Children’s Rights Alliance for England (CRAE) disclosed yesterday that Taser use against children by the Metropolitan Police rose six-fold over four years.
Tasers have already killed numbers of people whose systems could not take the shock of being hit by thousands of volts of electricity.
The police are now Taser happy. There has already been a scandal of a blind man being hit by a police Taser after the officer allegedly thought that the blind man’s white stick was a Samurai sword!
However, very young children are now being Tasered.
In the Metropolitan Police area, Taser guns were used on nine young people in 2008 and 53 in 2013, Children were targeted 131 times between 2008 and 2012, with varying rates across the city’s 32 boroughs, the group revealed.
The Met said the rise was in line with the number of police carrying Tasers.
CRAE’s director, Paula Uccellari, has shown that there is a very clear class basis for the Tasering of children.
Uccellari said: ‘Children living in the same city are experiencing vastly different treatment, depending on where they happen to grow up, and this is not always linked to obvious explanations such as high child poverty or crime rates.’
She said 70% of the occasions when Tasers were used on children occurred in a quarter of London boroughs. In Croydon, Southwark, Lambeth and Lewisham, children were Tasered 51 times between 2008 and 2012 – 40% of the total – according to the figures.
About 2,000 officers out of the Met’s 31,000 are trained and equipped to use Tasers, a spokesman said.
CRAE published the Taser figures as part of a wider report into children and human rights in the capital.
It discovered that 91 children a week were stopped on average in Southwark, compared with 19 a week in Kingston upon Thames, Merton, Hillingdon and Sutton, while children in London were imprisoned at almost twice the rate of children in England as a whole, CRAE said.
The truth is that capitalism in crisis is terrified of youth and sees the Taser as a massive weapon for instilling fear. In fact, they are instilling defiance and a more and more revolutionary attitude amongst youth to capitalism and its state apparatus.
There is no doubt that the youth whom the police are seeking to Taser today will tomorrow learn revolutionary politics and that no acts of defiance are a substitute for a socialist revolution that will destroy the capitalist state and its bodies of armed men to go forward to socialism.
