The following is political comment from this blog :
The recent riots that started in Tottenham, North London and spread first to other parts of London and then around the whole country have drawn widespread condemnation from most of the country and, rather disappointingly, the majority of my friends. I am looking here to put forward an alternative response that, hopefully, they won’t dismiss in a knee-jerk fashion. The main problem is that people miss things that the state are doing and the reasons for them; they miss the hidden (and sometimes not especially well-hidden) bias in every single news article, and they take as gospel everything they read in the bourgeois newspapers. Every article you read in the newspapers attempts to brainwash you to condemn all young people (and immigrants) and view them as the cause of the problems we all face in our everyday lives, thus taking the blame away from the real source of the problem, the system that keeps them all in their privileged positions, capitalism. Without capitalism, you would have no disillusioned youth, as the young people of almost the entire world are as angry as they are because there is no prosperity, no jobs, and violent protests are the only way to express these emotions.
“Why?” I hear you ask. Well imagine this: in response to their situation, working people, predominantly the young, go on a march against the government. They have a very good day out, shout a lot and wave banners, but what will really come of this? Exactly the same as came out of the anti Iraq-war protests- absolutely nothing. OK, scenario two: in response to their situation, the youth of this country go to the ballot box and vote out the Tory government. So Labour come back in- the second XI of the ruling class. The cuts are slower, but still happen, and unemployment still rises, all to save the system of capitalism. So what, I ask you, is left for the working class masses of this country to do? Can you still not see why people are drawn to rioting, however unproductive these particular riots have been in a political sense?
Another major problem comes when people suggest that the only ‘legitimate’ protest is peaceful. The reason the state supports and fosters this viewpoint is that they don’t feel threatened by it and the reason for this is that peaceful protest doesn’t make the blindest bit of difference. The only protests that usher in real change are ones that leave the location they are held in ruins. I say that with no blood-lust or sick joy, simply the pragmatic knowledge that the ruling class does not care about our feelings; the privileged top tier of society does not bat and eyelid when the majority of working people are coming dangerously close to poverty, they do not take notice when we feel angry at our situation and show it peacefully. The only way to get them to take notice is to actually threaten their position on the highest rung of the socio-economic scale, and only direct action can achieve that. I am not an anarchist, but when the time comes for a real revolution, violent protests/rioting will be part of it, mark my words.
The riots that broke out in Tottenham, north London, on the night of Saturday 6 August, and again over subsequent nights, spreading first to communities across London, and then to cities around the country, represent the spontaneous anger of broad sections of working people, particularly the poorest and most oppressed, at police violence, racism and the increasingly intolerable burden of the capitalist crisis that they are being forced to carry, not only through cuts but also through high unemployment and dead-end jobs.
Until now the British working class had been relatively quiescent in the face of increasing police repression and worsening living conditions and social provision, but the events of the past few days have changed all that and shown once more the fighting spirit of the British proletariat. Young working-class people in particular have shown that they are not prepared to lie down indefinitely while they are kicked like a dog by the lickspittles of the British ruling class.
The immediate catalyst for the riots was the police shooting of Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old father of three, who was killed by police in the early evening of Thursday 4 August in the Tottenham Hale area as he was on his way home to the nearby Broadwater Farm estate by minicab.
Mark’s killing was reportedly part of a planned police operation, forming part of Operation Trident, which is supposedly directed at ‘gun crime’ in the African Caribbean community, and was carried out by CO19, a specialist firearms unit.
As is generally the case in instances where a member of the public is killed by the police, initial reports emanating from the police are contradictory and untrustworthy. The police will naturally seek to cover their tracks and, in best mafia style, cover for one another. The bourgeois press can also be expected to play its part. The ongoing News International scandal has shone a light on the corrupt relationship between the police and the media, who are both, at the end of the day, servants of the same billionaire masters.
We have seen such police lies and cover-ups again and again, from Blair Peach through to more recent cases, such as those of Jean Charles de Menezes, Ian Tomlinson, Kingsley Burrel and Smiley Culture. As a result, families of the bereaved in particular, and working-class communities in general, know that they cannot rely on the police for truth or for justice. They are learning that they need to organise and fight back.
In the case of Mark Duggan, the police initially claimed that one of their officers only escaped serious injury because his radio got in the way of a bullet. However, on 8 August, the Guardian reported that initial ballistics tests have shown that this bullet was police issue. Far from there having been an exchange of fire, latest reports suggest that the only non-police issue firearm found anywhere near the scene was concealed in a sock and therefore not in any way ready for use.
Equally importantly, no non-police issue firearm has as yet actually been produced at all. Independent eyewitness accounts refer to Mark being pulled from his cab by police, held down and shot in the face more than once at point-blank range with a Heckler & Koch MP5 sub-machine gun.
In response, Mark’s family and friends called a peaceful vigil outside the local police station on Saturday 6 August. Whole families and young children joined the protest, with homemade placards, shouting, “No justice, no peace.”
Frustration mounted as police continued to refuse any dialogue with protestors or to provide Mark’s family with any explanation as to how he came to be killed. Stafford Scott, a long-time community organiser in the area, commented:
“If a senior police officer had come to speak to us, we would have left. We arrived at 5pm; we had planned a one-hour silent protest. We were there until 9pm. Police were absolutely culpable. Had they been more responsive when we arrived at the police station, asking for a senior officer to talk with the family, we would have left the vicinity before the unrest started. It is unforgivable [that] police refused dialogue.”
It further appears that the first night of rioting was sparked by the brutal police beating, with shields and batons, of a 16-year-old girl taking part in the protest. The Guardian reported:
“‘They beat her with a baton, and then the crowd started shouting ‘run, run’, and there was a hail of missiles,’ said Anthony Johnson, 39. ‘She had been saying: ‘We want answers, come and speak to us.’
“Laurence Bailey, who was in a nearby church, described see-ing the girl throw a leaflet and what may have been a stone at police.
“Bailey said the girl was then ‘pounded by 15 riot shields’. ‘She went down on the floor but once she managed to get up she was hit again before being half-dragged away by her friend,’ he said.”
It was following this vicious assault on a teenage girl that groups of young men reportedly started to attack police cars.
The Guardian described the composition of the rioters on the first night in Tottenham as follows:
“The make-up of the rioters was racially mixed. Most were men or boys, some apparently as young as 10.
“But families and other local residents, including some from Tottenham’s hasidic jewish community, also gathered to watch and jeer at police.”
A teenage woman who had been a friend of Mark Duggan’s told a reporter from Socialist Worker:
“When I saw jewish people out tonight too I was happy. I thought, ‘It’s not just us’. They gave bread out to us. It isn’t just kids out tonight. It’s everyone.”
Whilst the shooting of Mark Duggan provoked the initial protests in Tottenham, the subsequent riots reflect the hatred felt towards the police in black, working-class and poor communities throughout London and up and down the country, as well as the anger and despair engendered by grinding poverty.
They are a spontaneous protest against deaths at the hands of the police, stop and search, which is running at record levels, poor educational and health provision, poor and overcrowded housing, lack of amenities (in the borough of Haringey where Tottenham is located, eight out of a total of 13 youth clubs were closed just last week) and unemployment (Haringey has one vacancy for every 54 jobseekers).
Predictably, much is made of the acts of looting that are an inevitable feature of such spontaneous outbursts. However, they should not be allowed to detract from the main character of the events, namely a justified revolt against police killings and repression, racism and poverty.
Moreover, it is capitalist society itself that flaunts its luxury goods at the poor, sending out a message that you are scarcely human if you don’t possess a flatscreen plasma TV and the latest designer labels, while at the same time depriving masses of people of jobs, or paying wages too miserly to enable these goods to be bought.
Meanwhile, some ‘looters’ have been reported as making off with such essentials as toilet rolls and disposable nappies. Others have kept their focus clearly on symbols of state repression. The Guardianreported:
“A group of young men emerged from Haringey and Enfield magistrates court wielding hammers.
“They had shunned the temptation of the looted stores to break seven windows in the courthouse. It is a place some rioters presumably visited in the past; others are likely to be summoned in the near future.”
Of course, politicians from all the bourgeois parties have rushed to condemn the protestors as criminals and have promised nothing but increased and more brutal repression. Hundreds have already been arrested. Yet it is the worthies of the Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Labour parties who, in the service of the British capitalist class, are the real criminals, presiding over class war at home and imperialist war abroad.
It is important to note that the black Labour MPs have been no less vociferous than any others in branding their constituents as criminals and calling for increased police repression, including not only Tottenham MP David Lammy but also Hackney’s Diane Abbott, darling of much of the ‘left’ and erstwhile heroine of the opportunist ‘Black Section’ movement in the Labour party.
These parasitic scoundrels owe their petty positions and place precisely to the earlier struggles of the black communities they now openly despise. This is a salient reminder that what is at issue is not a race-based struggle that can in the end only benefit a thin layer of opportunists who seek to jump aboard the bandwagon, but a struggle against racism and capitalism in which all working people, whatever their skin colour, have a stake and should play their part.
Another darling of the left, Ken Livingstone, has made much of his own record of increasing police numbers while he was in office as Mayor of London, and has no doubt endeared himself greatly to senior Met officers by using the unrest in London as an excuse to demand that the government ditch its planned cuts to the police force.
Events of recent days have shown once again that poor working-class communities know fully well that the police are not a neutral or benign body dedicated to serving the community and helping old ladies across the street, but a ruthless gang of thugs dedicated to violently upholding the rule of the rich. To put it in Marxist terms, they are a special body of (increasingly) armed men, whose job is to enforce the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
The young people on the streets are also learning a lesson that the capitalist class would very much rather they quickly forget. Namely, that if enough people rise up simultaneously and in enough places, there is not much the ruling class can do to stop them, since the police and others who make up the forces of the state are actually very few in numbers compared to the masses of the working class.
The crucial lesson that the working class urgently needs to learn is that the real source of their misery and frustration is the capitalist system of production. This system is kept in place by the hirelings of a handful of billionaires, who grow richer by the hour while pressing down hard on those who work to create those riches. As economic crisis threatens the billionaires’ profits, they are pressing even harder, reducing to a minimum and below not only workers’ wages, but also the social benefits they need, while being quite unable to provide work for millions more people who need a decent job.
Communists support and defend the oppressed when they rise up, but we have seen massive uprisings before, generally in the same communities as current events, for example in 1981 and 1985. But so long as capitalism remains in place, it continues inexorably to impoverish the working class; and overthrowing capitalism is impossible without conscious organisation for that purpose, for which trustworthy proletarian leadership is required. So long as capitalism remains in place, the real gains of workers’ struggles, however magnificent, are transient and reversible – precisely why the events of previous years are being repeated today.
Communities certainly need to form themselves into self-defensive bodies to resist the police and other agents of bour-geois repression. But above all the working class needs its own general staff, which can lead not only in defensive struggles but also in the struggle to overthrow the increasingly criminal rule of the bourgeois class of heartless billionaires whose system treats the millions of working-class people as vermin.
This general staff can only be a communist party, guided by the science of Marxism Leninism: the accumulated wisdom of more than a century and a half of struggle by the working people of the whole world. The CPGB-ML is fighting to build such a party and welcomes class-conscious people to join its ranks. With your help, we can organise to enable the working class to seize power and build a new society where it is the interests of working-class people that will determine what we build and how we live, rather than the requirements of the rich to make profits.
Flowers and Famine – the latest famine in the horn of Africa, like the great Ethiopian famine of the 1980s (that gave rise to so much pity and contempt towards its victims in the homelands of imperialism, where its reasons were not reported or understood), is man made.
Grain was being exported while the people starved then; flowers are being exported while people are on the edge of famine now. Return the land to the people, and there is no more starvation. It’s that simple.
Ranjeet Brar of the CPGB-ML speaks at a meeting held to celebrate the 58th anniversary of the storming of Moncada and the defeat of US imperialism by our comrades of the DPRK at the end of the Korean War in 1953.
The decision of the TUC back in March to invite Labour leader Ed Miliband to speak on the platform was a slap in the face for the working class and should be condemned by all who are serious about building a real anti-cuts resistance movement. Even today when hundreds of thousands have gone on strike to oppose the cuts there are lackey’s within the labour movement who defend Miliband and the imperialist Labour Party! The same Miliband and the same Labour Party who have come out against the workers and bemoaned strike action!
Even before the well-deserved collapse of Labour at the last elections the labour aristocrats were busy painting Labour in pretty colours. Labour‘s cuts, they sighed, whilst regrettable, were largely unavoidable, and in any case preferable to Tory cuts. Ditto Labour’s union bashing, Labour’s privatisation rampage and Labour’s genocidal wars.
With Labour out of office, the leadership election was the next burning question of the day for the TUC, eclipsing the ‘minor’ question of mobilising against the austerity juggernaut rumbling over the horizon. Despite pressure from several unions calling for the TUC to coordinate resistance efforts, the accession of ‘Red Ed’ on a phony ‘left’ platform was greeted with a sigh of relief from the opportunists.
At last they could revert to the old formula: a few ritual protests against the ConDems to let off steam until such time as Labour crawls back. Meanwhile, keep pouring members’ subs into Labour party coffers and keep the seat warm for social democracy.
How the TUC ‘leads’ workers – by the nose
The TUC and many on the ‘left’ invite us to march for the ‘alternative’, but by this is meant not socialism, but a better regulated and managed capitalism. They invite us to fight against “unfair“, “unnecessary” cuts – giving a free hand to today’s Labour councillors and any future Labour government to implement cuts that can be dressed up as ‘fair’ and ‘necessary’.
We are told that the “ConDem” cuts are ideologically driven and not warranted by the actual depth of the crisis. Yet when Keynesian solutions all fail, as sooner or later they must, then it is indeed the crisis itself that dictates the cuts. The Tories may lean slightly harder on the accelerator than Labour would in their place, but they are all heading off the same cliff.
What the TUC can never admit is that behind the debt crisis lies a deep-seated overproduction crisis. More commodities are being produced than can be sold at a profit on the market. The problem is aggravated when capitalists, desperate to beat the competition, intensify the exploitation of workers, thereby further reducing their spending power.
There are two possible capitalist responses to this dilemma. Efforts can be made to revive demand by various methods, all of which are founded on increasing debt, storing up worse problems down the line.
The other capitalist response, in the end a necessary evil if the capitalist system is to survive, is to free the market of glut by closing down enterprises, laying off workers and slashing wages and welfare, initially through cut-throat competition between rival blocs of monopoly capital and ultimately through war.
The TUC wants us to believe that the only real problem is the over-privileged public schoolboys who are currently in charge. Get Labour back in minus the Blairites, it says, and we can all unite, swallow whatever cuts Labour deems ‘fair’ and ‘necessary’, and get on with ‘growing our way out of the recession’.
Just look how much we borrowed from America after the second world war, and we took ages to pay that back! Why, the current debt blip is really nothing to panic about. And in so far as there’s a problem, we can extricate ourselves from it with some moderate belt-tightening, the creation of some ‘green’ jobs and some mild restraints on bankers’ bonuses.
This whistling in the dark ignores the real character of the crisis and the real historical context. After World War Two capitalism was recovering from overproduction crisis. Right now, having already used every possible stratagem to evade the consequences of market glut, imperialism is entering the most acute phase of the crisis. The parallel is 1929, not 1945.
Massive surplus capacity stifles all markets, the US is too busy trying to rescue itself to throw anyone else a credit line, and on past performance only war, revolution or both will shift the logjam. Capitalism is in a hole and cannot stop digging.
Break the link with Labour
The only cure for the crisis ripping through Britain is socialism. Those who pretend it is possible to duck the consequences of a crisis more than 30 years in the making by tinkering with the existing capitalist system are practising a cruel deceit upon workers, blowing smoke in their eyes as capitalism prepares an all-out class war assault in defence of its profits.
Union militants have increasingly sought alternative ways of mobilising, notably within the National Shop Stewards Network. When the cuts announcement in October 2010 drew nothing more from the TUC than talk of a demo the following March, the NSSN mobilised its own protests, where Bob Crow and others denounced Labour’s record of treachery.
In January the NSSN announced its intention to put organised labour at the heart of the anti-cuts movement, on the basis of opposition to all cuts. This line, if consistently followed, will set the anti-cuts movement on a healthy and instructive collision course with Labour, hundreds of whose local councillors are currently implementing the so-called “ConDem cuts“.
There is no more divisive force in our movement than the Labour party. Every step towards breaking the link with Labour is a step closer to uniting workers in resistance to capitalism. This week, having listened to Miliband attack working class action the workers carried out strike action regardless! Today we began the fight against the cuts without the lead of the Labour Party traitors!
Remember that this Friday 24 June the CPGB-ML will have a report back from Libya (see post below). In the meantime, watch this message of support delivered by the CPGB-ML in Libya and keep updated at the Red Youth News Service .
Marchmont Centre, 62 Marchmont Street, London, WC1N 1AB [nearest tube Russell Square]
CPGB-ML Chairman Harpal Brar and Vice-Chair Ella Rule have this week returned from Libya. They were invited to visit by the Libyan government and come back with a first hand account of the imperialist terror that has been inflicted upon the people. Make sure you come along to hear what they have to say; and be prepared to take the fight into the anti-war movement which has disgraced itself since the Benghazi contras began their Mi5-backed coup attempt.
Thousands of children under the age of 16 in the UK are being detained in prison cells overnight.
Thousands of children under 16 are being held overnight in police cells every year, figures reveal.
At least 53,000 children under the age of 16 were held overnight in police cells in 2008 and 2009, including 13,000 children aged between nine and 13, according to figures obtained by the Howard League for Penal Reform from half the police forces in England and Wales. The charity called the practice “evil” and urged that it be stopped.
Channel 4 News, which will report on the research on Tuesday, discovered those detained overnight in cells included a 16-year-old girl arrested for stealing a can of lager and a girl of 13 who stole a make-up bag.
Nine of the children detained between 2008 and 2009 were under the age of criminal responsibility, which is 10 in England and Wales. There were 1,674 children aged 10 or 11; an age group covered by legal safeguards designed to limit the likelihood of them being detained overnight. Almost 11,500 were children under 14, the European average age of criminal responsibility.
“I was horrified to discover how prevalent the practice is across the country. Thousands of children are detained for at least one night in police cells ever year,” said Frances Crook, the director of the Howard League. “A police cell is not an appropriate place for children. This is an evil practice and must stop.”
Crook said she feared the actual numbers might be much higher. Although the charity asked all 43 police forces in England and Wales for figures under freedom of information rules, only half responded. The Metropolitan police were among the forces which refused to release data.
“We may actually be talking hundreds of thousands of children detained overnight each year,” said Crook.
The FoI requests reveal that the practice varies wildly across the country. Greater Manchester police held nearly 4,000 girls and nearly 13,000 boys for the night in its police cells in a year. Kent police held 2,700 boys and girls overnight. Nottinghamshire held 1,300. Norfolk, however, only held 122 children overnight in the same year.
Crook said most children detained are not serious offenders. “It appears children are being held in police cells for child protection reasons, for example when a child is found in the street drunk. This could be an increasing response to children in need as local authorities face cuts to children’s services,” she said. “We’re dealing with children who are in need.”
Anita Dockley, research director for the charity, blamed failures in the referral process from police custody to local authority accommodation. “This referral process is a vital safeguard for children who are charged and whose bail is refused by the police. But police admitted to us that requests by them for local authority accommodation are often not met.”
This is, she pointed out, contrary to international law, which states that “no child should be deprived of his or her liberty unless it is a measure of last resort”.
Some police forces admit concern over the numbers and are trying alternative approaches. In 2006, Hull was third in a national league table of local authorities sending children under the age of 18 to custody. But it had little impact on re-offending, said commander Keith Hunter of Hull police. He introduced full time youth justice workers into his police custody suite. Now in its third year, the scheme steers away from the criminal justice system through age-appropriate alternatives, including counselling, supported return to school, anger management and alcohol awareness training. The programme has halved the number of child detentions in Hull.
Other figures support Crook’s claim that children are being unnecessarily arrested and detained. At least a quarter of a million children were arrested last year – including 22,135 aged 10 to 13 – but only 81,500 were sentenced by a court and only 4,200 were sentenced to custody. This, said Crook, “suggests that for two thirds of children who are put through the trauma and indignity of an arrest and detention in a police station, it was unnecessary”.
Andy Adams, speaking for the Association of Chief Police Officers, said: “As with adults, detention of children in custody is authorised for a number of reasons, including to further a criminal investigation, to uncover the identity of any suspects or because the disappearance of that person would hinder any prosecution. The rules for the detention of suspects are set down in law and on every occasion must be authorised by a custody officer.
“Detentions of both children and adults in police custody are reviewed regularly to ensure that they are being held in accordance with the law and not for any longer than required for police investigations.”
