THE uprising that took place in Tottenham on Saturday night came 48 hours after the police shooting of a local man, Mark Duggan, and five hours after a family-led community protest march that took place from Broadwater Farm to the police station to demand the truth of what had happened to Duggan, with many suspecting a police execution.
The suspicions of the family concerning the death of their loved one was extremely understandable – after people such as Harry Stanley and Jean Charles de Menezes and a number of others in recent years were shot to death by police gunmen, whose activities were then the subject of attempted cover-ups.
48 hours after the shooting of Duggan, his family were demanding ‘Justice’, starting with an explanation of what had happened.
They got neither.
The end result was the extraordinarily explosive uprising in the area in the evening, with local youth and residents of all ages, colours and nationalities taking part, with the police completely unable to cope with it.
In fact, the refusal of the police to talk to the family was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and the area rose up.
Tottenham is no different from every other working class area of the country.
Everywhere there are masses of youth who are being constantly told that they are uneducated and useless, and that they have no future. They are burning with anger about the way that they are being treated.
Young people are now being barred from going to university unless they are from the rich and can afford £9,000 fees. Even sixth formers have had their £30 maintenance allowance halted.
At the same time, large numbers of workers have lost their jobs or have found that their wages are being cut by wage freezes and rising prices on a daily basis.
They find, as well, that their pensions are now to be destroyed. While bankers can do no wrong and live like emperors, they are labelled as parasites because they won’t give up their public sector pensions.
In other words, in every area of the country there are oceans of inflammable material building up, that only needs a spark for it to explode into mass anger.
This is what happened in Tottenham on Saturday night.
This is what is going to happen in many parts of the country as capitalism forces more and more people into the gutter, while the rich are able to flaunt their wealth and say ‘let them eat cake!’
The truth is that they did not get away with it in France in 1789 and they will not get away with it in the UK in 2011.
The lesson of this experience is that the trade unions must not fiddle while Rome is burning.
It is the capitalist system, and its coalition government servants, who are the causes of the crisis and the eruptions of anger that are taking place.
Do not doubt that they will continue pauperising the working class and the youth remorselessly.
The only thing that the ruling class and its state will learn from Saturday night’s events is that they need a much stronger police force and will have to bring the army out onto the streets, to go forward to Britain’s own Bloody Sunday.
The trade unions must defend the working class and the youth.
They must call a general strike to bring down the coalition and to bring in a workers’ government.
This must expropriate the bosses and the bankers and bring in a socialist planned economy that will provide jobs, homes and training for all, at trade union rates of pay.
This is the only way to deal with the capitalist crisis. Only the WRP fights for this policy. Join it and the Young Socialists today.
