It can only be an accident of history
that last month’s Royal wedding took place on the anniversary of the
marriage of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. That the Metropolitan police
carried out a number of raids, charging several students with criminal
offences in the same week, is no coincidence. Cover for the police was
provided by the media circus surrounding the wedding. On the other hand
it is clear that the state had been biding its time, waiting for the
distraction of the exam period. The most prominent and outrageous act on
the part of the police was the charging of Alfie Meadows with violent
disorder.
It can only be an accident of history
that last month’s Royal wedding took place on the anniversary of the
marriage of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. That the Metropolitan police
carried out a number of raids, charging several students with criminal
offences in the same week, is no coincidence. Cover for the police was
provided by the media circus surrounding the wedding. On the other hand
it is clear that the state had been biding its time, waiting for the
distraction of the exam period. The most prominent and outrageous act on
the part of the police was the charging of Alfie Meadows with violent
disorder. This is the student who was left comatose and requiring
emergency brain surgery after a police officer assaulted him with a
baton.
The sheer audacity and bravery of last year’s student movement –
thundering in the face of the NUS leadership – shocked, inspired and
left the police completely flatfooted. Our so-called “lazy” and
“apathetic” generation, whose only supposed aspiration was to play
Playstation all day, became a movement burning with resentment and
injustice. What else could be the case in a world which offers at best a
lifetime of waiting tables and answering phones for a pittance? Or
worse still, the misery and humiliation of the job centre which awaits tens of thousands of us.
With the student movement having now entered a period of relative
calm the police evidently feel at ease with slapping charges of
criminality on the victims of police violence. They have carried out
raids across London and crippled of a number of websites and Facebook
pages -including those of UKUncut, Bootle Labour, Save the NHS and
Manchester Roscoe Occupation.
Arrests are politically motivated
The police actions on the week of the Royal Wedding, while in no
small part a morale boosting retaliation for the embarrassment doled out
to more than a few Police officers during last year’s student demos,
serve broader political ends – not least the charges brought against
Alfie Meadows. With Meadows the most immediate problem facing the Police
would be explaining – either in court, inquiry or parliament – why one
of it’s officers was called upon to batter a young man to within an inch
of his life if they were not going to bring any charges against the
same man whatsoever! This is the most immediate reason behind the
charge. Meadows is pursuing legal action, but he should not expect
justice from the Courts of the crown.
There are those officers who join the police force for honest reasons
who are disgusted with the corrupt and bent coppers, and have no time
for those natural “thugs in uniform” who sign up for a taste of power.
These men and women see the programme of austerity taking aim at them
and they want only to stand full square with the workers as a whole. We
need only look at the reception the workers in Madison, Wisconsin gave
the police who joined their occupation under the banner “cops for
labour.”
However, there are more than a few officers of the law who will lie,
squirm and cheat to protect themselves and their colleagues should their
actions be questioned – including to a jury.It is only because of the
obvious nature of the crime and the cack-handed manner in which the Met
attempted to cover it up, that anything approaching the admission that
PC Simon Harwood is responsible for the death of Ian Tomlinson has
emerged from the string of inquiries and attempts at white-wash.
Reform or revolution
What the bosses are certainly aware of is that the British working
class has no intention of sitting idly by while the bankers and
businessmen try to cut their pound of flesh! In the past, the
capitalists could offer some reforms, brushing a few crumbs off their
table to try and calm the masses –alternating this with the baton should
the need arise. The crisis of capitalism has the capitalists backed
into a corner. There are no more reforms to give – only under the white
heat of open class struggle can new ones be won.
More than this the hard won reforms of the past cannot be tolerated
by the capitalists any more – only harsh programs of counter reform,
hacking back healthcare, unemployment benefits and education, with the
cost of supporting the mega-rich spivs in their lifestyles dumped onto
the shoulders of the masses. With no more carrot all that is left for
the state is the stick. In this situation the last thing the bosses want
is a copper pulling his punches for fear he’ll be held to account!
What’s more, the raids and arrests of the same week had excellent
cover from the Royal Wedding, in the same manner that the Romans used
“Bread and Circuses” to distract the masses. The news of the charges
against Meadows were swiftly brushed under the carpet – bumped to the
bottom (and off the end) of web pages to make way for white dresses and
military uniforms. On the day a raft of cuts to the NHS were announced –
50% higher cuts putting the total now at £30 billion out of an annual
budget of around £110-120 billion. These were hardly mentioned for fear
of pinching airtime from pretty faces hidden by veils.
As well as a little window dressing to cover the Royal Family’s
immense wealth and big business links (such as the recent Wikileaks
revelations as to Prince Andrew’s backroom deals in Kyrgyzstan – see WikiLeaks: imperialist backroom deals revealed – free Bradley Manning, abolish secret diplomacy! By Isa al-Jaza’iri)
– the Royal Wedding is intended as a distraction from the immediate
problems facing the working class as a whole: the minor things in life
such as rampant unemployment, credit card bills demanding payments,
inflation squeezing wages at one end and bosses squeezing them from the
other, homes being repossessed, fuel costs soaring and the first estate
riots under Cameron.
On the day itself the Met raided a whole number of squats and
occupied buildings with the notoriously violent “Territorial Support
Group” leading the way. Activists and small groups of protestors were
arrested simply for gathering together, others for heading to a planned
demo. In Bristol the police carried out a further provocation in the
Stokes Croft area; in Glasgow Strathclyde Police on horseback tried to
forcibly break up an anti-monarchy party attended by thousands. All this
was conveniently ignored by the national “free press.”
Hypocrisy
It is not without good reason that an entire family is allowed to
live in absolute luxury, suckling off the bourgeois state, despite
possessing an absolutely massive fortune. The family possesses an art
collection estimated by some at £10
billion. The Sunday Times rich list in the mid-nineties made what they
admitted themselves was a “cowardly” estimate of the Queen’s fortune at
almost half a billion. What with the array of methods for screening
wealth (usually to avoid tax) it is safe to assume that this figure was
far more and there is no reason to think this has changed. On top of
this the Queen is up
to her eyeballs in servants – servants who have no legal right to
enforce any labour law against their employer; as their employer, being
the monarch, is constitutionally above the law.
It comes as no surprise that such a family wouldn’t think twice about
sending invites out to the great and the good of the world – people
like the Crown prince of Bahrain, who politely declined, his time being
consumed with the murdering and torture of Bahraini workers – using
shock troops from Saudi Arabia and mercenaries from Pakistan to do the
dirty work.
Such concerns did not prevent ambassador, torturer and former
Bahraini National Security Agency head, Sheikh Khalifa Bin Ali
al-Khalifa from attending – the agency under his command gained a
reputation for brutality using electro-shock devices, beating the hands,
head and feet of those arrested – as well as making threats of murder
and rape against both the victims and their families. With such
delightful people in attendance it seems only prudent to have a range of
measures in place, perhaps even to show them how it is done – from a
crackdown on protest to rooftop snipers with orders to “shoot to kill” –
the UK Police certainly do not shy away from offering training courses
to this type of scum, the Bangladeshi death squads being a recent
example. One would think with so many criminals in one place the Met
would be only too happy to arrest many of those attending the wedding!
But no, god forbid that anything – not even justice – should disrupt
the happiest day in the life of common-as-muck Katie!
The state and the masses
Lenin, who defended the right to education his whole life, told us
that “life teaches”. If there’s one thing that last years student
movement taught, it has to be that while though you may not believe in
the state, the state certainly believes in you: the baton which struck
Alfie Meadows, amongst many others, was all too real. No matter when in
history, the state can ultimately be boiled to down to one thing: in the
words of Engels, special bodies of armed men. On the student demos of
last year those men came armed with batons and shields, armoured vans
and horses. As with all human beings the men and women of the state,
whether wearing military or police uniforms, come under the same
material pressures as the rest of humanity. The example of Wisconsin is
sufficient to show where, when it comes down to it, the sympathies of
many officers lie. Under the blows of a determined movement the state
will split along class lines, sometimes this can appear to happen
dramatically, sometimes gradually.
The strength of the state can be corroded and undermined by the
workers, over a longer period, in the course of the struggle. During the
Miners Strike of 1984 to 1985, the Police and the Miners would often
fraternize with each other when on the picket line – many of the
officers involved, apart from being working class themselves, often had
family and friends directly involved in the fight to save the pits and
sympathized entirely with the struggle of the miners. Such was the
effect that these officers were judged not reliable enough when the time
came to use the baton, so they would be taken off the picket and
replaced by units of the Metropolitan Police – who coming from London
had no such connections with the miners. In Cairo’s Tahrir Square the
army was deployed with rifles and tanks – but no bullets. The Egyptian
Vice President at the time, Omar Suleiman, was terrified that the
soldiers, having come in to direct contact with and infected by the
revolutionary people, would use the same bullets against the state they
were employed by!
What is more, under the blows of a determined mass movement, the
state can shatter entirely in a very short space of time. This is
demonstrated graphically today by the revolutionary movement in the Arab
world. In Tunisia the Police and Army disintegrated in some places
whilst in others it refused to carry out the order to fire on
demonstrators given by officers, some officers were executed on the spot
for such criminal commands whilst other soldiers going over to the
revolution fought off units which did try and attack demonstrators.
Where the state does not collapse it can be swept aside by the masses –
in Egypt the workers simply charged through police lines, their speed
and power making them a juggernaut in comparison to the wavering police
conscripts grasping at shields.
Defend student protestors!
After the massive confrontation between striking miners and police at
what became known as the Battle of Orgreave ninety-five of the striking
miners were charged with riot, unlawful assembly and other similar
offences, with many of these going to trial in 1987. Every single trial
collapsed. Claims of unlawful arrest led to South Yorkshire Police
making an out-of- court settlement worth £425,000 in compensation and
£100,000 in legal costs to 39 miners. There is no guarantee the charges
against Meadows will be dropped as easily – what is certain is that the
process will be expensive and deeply stressful for Meadows and his
family. Those miners taken to court had the backing of the National
Union of Miners in their case as well as the now legendary Michael
Mansfield QC to fight their corner. There does not appear to be any such
support coming forward for Meadows. Furthermore, Meadows is also
victim of what some hailed as the strength of the student movement – its
“spontaneous” and “leaderless” nature, one that does not need
organisations – organisations like the NUS “leaders” which called the 10th November demo in the first place, only to abandon it to its’ fate like cowards.
To Marxists the student movement did not simply drop out of the sky
but was born out of the deep contradictions building up in the bowels of
society – it was simply a matter of time before there was a spark to
ignite an explosive situation. But the complete lack of any democratic
organisation and structure meant the movement eventually dissipated,
like steam from a burst boiler eventually it cools and stops. What is
needed is a piston to capture the steam and drive the movement forward!
Even at a time of ebb, such an organisation can set out by organising
a campaign to defend protestors, like Meadows, who become targets of
the courts – raising legal funds and campaigns to defend our comrades.
Inevitably, with such a weapon in their arsenal, the body of students
can step up to take more militant action, hand in hand with the members
of the National Union of Teachers and University and College lecturers
Unions, organising mass walkouts, demonstrations, occupations, students
and teacher strikes. All of this remains a daydream, useless to our
comrades who face court today, unless we set about the task of building such an organisation now!
Defend student protestors! No to victimisation!
Transform the National Union of Students into a fighting organisation!
Link the struggle of the workers and the students!
For a National School Student Union!
