STUDENT Alfie Meadows, who underwent an emergency brain operation after his head was broken by a police truncheon, when he was kettled during a police operation against a student protest, has been charged with violent disorder by the police.
Once again the capitalist state is seeking to turn the victim into the criminal after the police officer or officers who truncheoned Meadows have not been named or even officially reprimanded.
The same method has been used against other victims of capitalist state attack such as Harry Stanley. He was shot to death by armed police who thought that the coffee table leg that he was carrying in a plastic bag was a shotgun.
He was left lying in the street for hours as it was stressed that the police were in genuine fear for their lives.
Then there was the case of Jean Charles de Menezes, shot to death, in fact executed, by an armed policeman with seven shots to the head, on the grounds that he was a terrorist about to explode a bomb.
He was entirely innocent, but an enormous effort was made by the police to suggest that he was the guilty party.
An innocent man was murdered, but the police officer in charge of the death squad that murdered De Menezes was not even demoted. In fact she has been rewarded for her work with one of the highest offices in the Metropolitan Police Force.
Finally, there is the ongoing case of Ian Tomlinson, who was flung violently to the ground by a riot police officer and died immediately after the incident. He had not even been taking part in the G20 protest.
It was falsely suggested that he brought the attack on himself because he was either drunk, or seemed to be about to attack the police. Both allegations were false.
In the period that we are living in, when the ruling class is attempting to force the mass of the population to accept the end of the Welfare State, the NHS and free state education, the riot police who are given the job of coercing any opposition can do no wrong.
When it was rumoured that a police officer would be charged with the murder or manslaughter of Harry Stanley, the Met’s armed officers threatened strike action, and that was the end of that particular line of inquiry.
Once it is accepted that state force is necessary to force government policies through, then the state forces have to have immunity from prosecution, otherwise they cannot do the job!
They do have such immunity as the above cases prove.
In fact, the incredibly crude and vicious treatment of Meadows, both during the kettling, and then when he had recovered from the beating, is calculated to put fear into the hearts of students and youth that if they fight for a better life, the state has a license to beat them, and as well has immunity from prosecution, and that they will be charged with a crime.
This increasingly will become the class content of the rule of law, since ahead are major struggles between the youth and the working class as a whole, against the ruling class supported by its state apparatus trying to smash and destroy all of the basic rights and gains that the working class has won.
Meadows has been bailed by police to appear at City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court on June 9, along with other youth.
There must be a mass demonstration and mass picket outside the court on the day in question of thousands of workers and youth, to insist that the charge or charges be dropped, and that the police who fractured Meadows’ skull must face trial.
All trade unions must go on record as demanding that the charges be dropped and that the police who injured him are charged.
The essential issue however is that there must be a socialist revolution to expropriate the bosses and the bankers, and smash their capitalist state into smithereens, so that it can never be put back together again.
