TORY Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has summoned the country’s police chiefs to tell them they must use all the existing and wide-ranging police powers to crack down on demonstrations against Israel’s genocidal war to drive Palestinians from their homeland.
Sunak warned the police bosses that there was a ‘growing consensus that mob rule is replacing democratic rule’ and he wants ‘more robust’ police responses to protect politicians and ‘democratic processes’.
According to a briefing from Downing Street, Sunak laid the line down to the police saying: ‘There is a growing consensus that mob rule is replacing democratic rule and we’ve got to collectively, all of us, change this urgently.’
Sunak went on: ‘We simply cannot allow this pattern of increasingly violent and intimidatory behaviour which is, as far as anyone can see, intended to shout down free debate and stop elected representatives doing their job. That is simply undemocratic.’
In fact, it wasn’t any protesters who shouted down free debate on Gaza in Parliament last week but the Labour Party leadership, who pressurised the Speaker of the House of Commons to break all the rules of parliamentary debate to shut down the motion from the Scottish National Party (SNP) which called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
Tom Southerden, law and human rights director at Amnesty International UK, said: ‘Talk of “mob rule” wildly exaggerates the issue and risks delegitimising the rights of peaceful protest.’ Southerden went on: ‘The UK has undergone a major crackdown on protest rights in recent years, with peaceful protest tactics being criminalised and the police being given sweeping powers to prevent protests taking place.’
Sunak’s claim that the UK is now government by ‘mob rule’ and not the Tory government that has been in power for over a decade, has been dismissed as ‘hysterical nonsense’ but it is a clear signal that the Tories and ruling class are prepared to dump ‘parliamentary democracy’, replacing it with a police state where any opposition to Zionist genocide is an act of treachery to the capitalist state that will be crushed by the police and courts.
When tens of millions of workers and youth are rising up in massive demonstrations, demanding an end to the complicity of the British government with Zionist genocide, the Tories, backed by Starmer and the Labour leadership, are preparing a massive crackdown.
Meanwhile, the Israeli murder machine in Gaza has ramped up its attack on Palestinians with over 30,000, the majority being women and children, killed according to latest figures. Yesterday, over 104 Palestinians were killed and about 760 wounded after Israeli troops fired on hundreds queuing for flour, in what the Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned as a ‘cold-blooded massacre’, with Israeli tanks running over many of the dead and injured bodies.
The mass shooting was the latest in the systematic attacks on starving Palestinians waiting for scraps of food, with aid trucks being regularly shot at by occupation troops and forced to turn back, while children and babies die of hunger in Gaza.
The sufferings of the Palestinians, of course, pale into insignificance for the Tories when compared to the inconvenience experienced by MPs of having a handful of peaceful demonstrators outside their constituency offices, or peaceful demonstrations demanding an end to genocide and an end to the UK’s support for the Zionist regime.
Sunak’s demand for a police crackdown with demonstrations banned, and anyone supporting the Palestinian struggle against occupation designated a ‘terrorist’ supporter who should be jailed, is a stark warning to the working class that the capitalist state is preparing to crack down on all opposition.
Instead of waiting for the police to act, the working class must force the TUC to convene an emergency Congress to call a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers government, replacing the capitalist state with a workers state and socialism.
TUC leaders who run away from this struggle must be removed and replaced with a leadership prepared to lead the struggle for power.
We call on workers and youth to join the WRP and Young Socialists to build up the revolutionary leadership required for the victory of the British Socialist Revolution.
