BRITAIN’S top counter-terrorism officer, Assistant Metropolitan Police Commissioner Yates, has demanded that paramilitary police forces be established in the UK, and insists that they must be armed with heavy weaponry and be prepared to kill.
Speaking at an anti-terrorism conference in London about the need for this force, he said ‘we’ had to be prepared for a Mumbai style attack and for hundreds of people to be slaughtered by terrorists using automatic weapons and bombs.
Looking forward, he said: ‘There has to be an understanding that in the first hour that there will be a lot of challenges, a lot of dead people.’
He wants the Heckler and Koch assault rifle, that the police now use, to be modified so that it can be used as a machine gun, to its full capacity of 750 rounds a minute, as well as the police being equipped with the C9 Minimi machine gun.
Used by the British army it can discharge 1,000 rounds of 5.56mm ammunition a minute.
His paramilitary force is to have weaponry that puts it on a par with the army. Its members will be trained as soldiers, i.e. professional killers.
Since the ‘terrorists’ will have the option of surprise, the force will have to be mobile, and ready for action 24-hours around the clock, and also have to be pre-positioned in what are felt to be threatened areas.
Its job will be to fight fire with fire. Street fighting and storming houses and hotels, using massive firepower, and inevitably killing both ‘foe and friends’ with the heavy calibre machine guns and grenades which will be its stock in trade.
These killers will also be beyond the law. This is the lesson from the failure to convict any police officers for the shooting to death of Harry Stanley, or Jean Charles de Menezes.
So untouchable are these types of forces, that in the recent case of the very small lady who was beaten by a very large riot policeman, the officer was able to plead successfully in court that he was terrified that he was about to face a deadly attack, and his evidence was accepted by the authorities.
The proposal by Yates for paramilitary police forces that would fight it out in the cities with terrorists, shell for shell and bomb for bomb, and have immunity from prosecution, and domination over society proves the point that Marx made. This was that ‘a nation that enslaves another forges its own chains’.
The attempt to enslave the Arab and Asian peoples and steal their oil and gas has led to the ruling class being able to propose a body of armed men that are above the law, have the right to kill, and will strangle what is left of democracy at home.
It is also no accident that the proposal for paramilitary police forces comes at a time when the class struggle is sharpening and when the ruling class, to save itself from the crisis of capitalism, will be willing to use such forces against the working class to force them to accept the savage cuts that it has in mind for them.
For the ruling class the main enemy is at home, and it is targeting the working class and the gains that it has made, namely the Welfare State, the NHS, free state education, and the whole range of benefits that have been wrested from it.
There is not the slightest doubt that if the ruling class is allowed to build paramilitary police forces they will be used against the working class, to drive it back a hundred years.
The News Line calls on workers not just to reject Yates’ plans but to fight them.
The working class must organise to put an end to capitalism through a socialist revolution to expropriate the bosses and the bankers, and also to smash and break up its bodies of armed men organised in the capitalist state.
The period for carrying out this task is rapidly approaching.
This is why all workers who are serious about the struggle must join the WRP and build the revolutionary leadership that the working class requires to take the power.
