[D66] The stench of a police state

[Antid Oto]

The stench of a police state
17 August 2011

The events of the last 12 days are a warning to the working class in Britain and
internationally. The state repression and right-wing hysteria unleashed in
response to youth rioting in London and other cities reveal the preparations of
the ruling class for police-state forms of rule.

The riots were triggered by the police execution of Mark Duggan, a black
29-year-old father of four, in Tottenham, north London on August 4, followed by
an unprovoked police assault on a peaceful protest over his killing two days
later. Almost a fortnight later, no officer has been identified, let alone
charged, for these crimes.

Instead, the political elites who sanctioned the looting of public funds to bail
out the banks and the super-rich, and who covered up the illegal phone hacking
of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, have sought to whip up a lynch mob atmosphere
against the “criminality” and “immorality” of working class youth.

Cheered on by the Labour Party, Prime Minister David Cameron and his
Conservative-Liberal Democrat government have organized vicious state
repression, authorizing the use of water cannons and plastic bullets and the
possible use of the army against further social unrest.

Basic democratic rights have been thrown to the winds. The presumption of
innocence has been jettisoned as police carry out mass arrests, with those
detained subject to show trials presided over by courts acting directly at the
behest of the authorities.

Some 3,000 people, the majority aged between 16 and 24, have been rounded up in
sweeps across the capital and elsewhere, with police battering down the doors of
people’s homes for what are, in the main, petty misdemeanours. The names and
photographs of people not even charged with any offence—let alone found
guilty—are broadcast daily by the media. Juvenile defendants, some as young as
11, have been stripped of their right to anonymity.

Magistrates have been told they can “ignore the rule book” on sentencing norms,
following what the chair of one London magistrates court inadvertently described
as a government “directive.” Over 1,500 people have to date been dragged before
courts—in some instances sitting for 24 hours at a time—where, with paperwork
barely completed and a shortage of solicitors, the most vindictive and punitive
sentences are being handed down.

Even though many of those appearing in court have no previous convictions, over
two-thirds have been denied bail. Mothers and pregnant women have been
incarcerated for six months for handling stolen goods. So too has a student,
with no criminal record, for stealing bottles of water worth £3.50.

They are just the first of many others facing summary justice. Hundreds more
young people are being remanded for months at a time to await trial before crown
courts that can impose more draconian punishments, including up to ten years for
rioting.

Collective punishment is the order of the day, with reprisals underway against
the family members of those allegedly involved in the disturbances. Without any
proof of guilt, mothers and young children are being served with notices of
eviction from their council housing, while plans are made to strip people
accused of involvement in the riots of their welfare benefits, even if they are
not convicted of any offence.

Last week it was revealed that as the disturbances swept London, police broke
into encrypted social messaging networks, gaining access to the mobile phones of
hundreds of people and their messages. They had even prepared to close down
BlackBerry messaging and Twitter. Simultaneously, the government brought in MI5
and the giant eavesdropping national security centre GCHQ to access electronic
communications.

This same ruling elite sings the praises of the social media to undermine
governments in other countries when it suits its foreign policy interests. It
promoted the so-called “twitter” revolution in Iran as part of US-backed efforts
to overthrow President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and install a more pro-Western
regime. On its own turf, however, it reacts ruthlessly to any form of
communication not controlled by the state.

All this is legitimized by the branding of working class youth as “feral rats”
and “wild beasts.” Anything now passes as acceptable discourse, as
representatives of both the right and “left” of official bourgeois politics
denounce a “criminal underclass,” supposedly generated by the welfare state and
“multi-culturalism.” Similar statements can be found in the fascistic manifesto
issued by Anders Behring Breivik before he slaughtered 76 people, mainly youth,
in Norway last month.

On the BBC, the historian David Starkey recently proclaimed that the
proto-fascist Tory politician Enoch Powell was correct when he warned in the
1960s that immigration would lead to civil unrest. Powell’s mistake was to
consider that this would be the result of inter-racial violence, Starkey
asserted, when what has actually happened is that white working class youth
“have become black,” taken over by a “black” culture that has “intruded in
England,” which is “why so many of us have this sense literally of a foreign
country.”

Though Starkey characteristically uses racial terms to denote the targets of his
hatred, he clearly is using the term “black” to denounce all working class youth.

This hostility is shared by the liberal establishment and the corrupt purveyors
of identity politics. One-time civil liberty advocates such as Ian Dunt, editor
of politics.co.uk, declare that their previous injunctions against authoritarian
measures must be abandoned. Having caught “a glimpse of the breakdown of
society,” Dunt writes, we “must show we understand the need for tougher sanctions.”

Ken Livingstone and Dianne Abbott, prominent representatives of Labour’s
so-called “left,” call for greater police numbers and the use of water cannons,
while its minority commentators, who for years have milked racial politics to
feather their nests, demand greater repression. Derrick Campbell, chief
executive of race equality in Sandwell, West Midlands, calls for youth to be
birched.

The hysteria sweeping the political elite cannot be attributed solely to last
week’s unrest. The bourgeoisie is aware that it has entered a second stage in
the global crisis of capitalism that will exacerbate the class divisions already
exposed across Europe, the Middle East and internationally, producing enormous
shocks and upheavals.

They see in the disturbances in England only a foretaste of what is to come and
are panicked by their own political unpreparedness. In private, they have asked
themselves again and again how much longer the Labour Party, the trade unions
and the life-style “left” can contain popular opposition to deteriorating social
conditions and savage spending cuts. In the eruption of social anger among the
youth they see a frightening precursor to a much broader movement of the working
class.

Their reaction to the riots makes clear that their response to the eruption of
class struggles against the economic catastrophe caused by the failure of the
capitalist system will be to junk democratic rights and rely on naked state
violence.

The most far-reaching political conclusions must be drawn. Only the
revolutionary overthrow of capitalism can provide a way out for the working
class and the youth from a future of poverty, unemployment, war and dictatorship.

Julie Hyland

http://wsws.org/articles/2011/aug2011/pers-a17.shtml