Britain

The Tories are on the rampage. Their response to the worst riots in
living memory is more state repression. The blame for the riots,
according to David Cameron, lies with the “criminal disease” sweeping
our neighbourhoods.Cameron also attacked the “moral collapse,” the breakdown of “family
values,” poor standards in schools, and a welfare system that rewards
the idle.The Tories’ answer, as always, is tougher rules on benefits claims, the
introduction of National Service, more discipline in schools, ending the
human rights culture, and the introduction of “family tests.”

As Britain prepares for the possibility of new outbreaks of rioting this
weekend, the courts have been hard at work dispensing bosses’ justice
to those unfortunates picked up by the police in the wake of the
disturbances over the last few days.

As expected the state is warming to the task of cracking down hard, as they like to put it, on looters/rioters past, present and future. Cameron and May have been strutting around talking tough about what they are going to do.

As the day moves on a strange mood has hit the streets and estates of London. Traffic has started to die down and shops are being boarded up. Yet families are walking around as if nothing is happening. Stories of likely flash points are being banded around. Indeed police have just advised people in the building where our print offices are based to lock up and stay indoors as a riot is "expected shortly" in the street outside.

The riots in Britain are only a symptom of a general crisis of capitalism.  The Marxists will not join with the bourgeoisie and its agents in their hypocritical chorus of denunciation. Our duty is to find a road to the youth, to help them to find the right road – the revolutionary road, the road to the socialist reconstruction of society.

Burning cars, broken glass, looting and an entire community enraged at the violent actions of those who are supposed to protect them. This describes the situation not in Greece or 80s Liverpool, but Tottenham, London on 6th August  2011. In this article we look at the background to these events demonstrate the underlying cause lies in the crisis of capitalism.

The riots which started in the Tottenham area of North London on
Saturday night and which have since spread to many others parts of the
capital have exposed the social decay within the city as we enter the
final year before the start of the prestige Olympics.

Saturday the 9th of July saw the arrival of the EDL (English Defence
League) to the centre of Cambridge to protest against the proposal to
build a new mosque on Mill Road, a vibrant and multi-cultural part of
the city. The events in Cambridge were part of a national day of action
by the EDL that saw around 150 members of the EDL march through Plymouth
only to find them met by around 300 anti-fascist demonstrators,
alongside a demonstration in Middlesbrough that saw around 200 EDL
protestors met by 400 anti-fascists and a demonstration in Halifax that
numbered around 450 EDL demonstrators and 200 anti-fascists. Various
other EDL divisions were also planning on marching through Liverpool,
Dagenham and Derby however these marches were cancelled due to the high
level of opposition by the local community.

The phone-hacking scandal that has led to the closure of the News of the
World newspaper has brought to the surface the real state of things
within the British         establishment. The rottenness of a regime,
that prides  itself at being a model of “democracy,” is now out in the
open for all to see. What has now been revealed is that a powerful media
empire that for years has played a key role in British politics, making
and unmaking political leaders, has been buying police officers, using
influence with politicians, and all this peppered with out and out
criminal activity.

For all of us working at Lloyds, the announcement that the bosses would
be throwing 15,000 (or 14% of the 104,000 strong work force) people onto
the street came not from our employer but from the press release that
was made to appease the stock markets – they were only too happy to hear
we’d be bearing the brunt of the effort, as ever, to drag Lloyds out of
the mess the bosses got it into in the first place.

The phone-hacking scandal that has rocked the British establishment in the past week is not only bad news for Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World and its parents NewsCorp and News International,
who have now had to sacrifice their main paper, it is bad news for the
politicians, the police and the capitalist class as a whole.