The recent ballot by members of the Police Federation who
voted overwhelmingly to press for full industrial rights including, ultimately,
the right to strike is evidence of the understandable anger and disillusionment
currently felt by rank and file police officers at the derisory pay increase
they have been offered, at a time when the price of many of life’s essentials
is rising so sharply.
The outcome of the ballot has provoked convulsions of
seismic proportions in the press and elsewhere. Along with indignant
fulminations from well-heeled backwoodsmen about how the police could dare to
vote in the way they did, there have been more measured comments ruefully
pondering on the prospects of police setting up picket lines instead of going
about their duties safeguarding law and order.
We’ve been in this place before! There is nothing new about
anger in the police concerning low pay and poor conditions. In 1872 a
substantial number of officers were dismissed by the Metropolitan Police for
refusing duty, but their action led to improved pay and conditions. The lesson
was learned that collective action could successfully win concessions. In July
1890 another stoppage took place among Metropolitan officers, this time over
pensions. The speed with which the government addressed the officers’
grievances strongly suggests considerable official concern about the need to
propitiate the ‘thin blue line.’
At this stage the idea of forming a union would probably
have been rejected by virtually all the officers. It is evident however that
issues over pay, benefits and working conditions continued simmering away
beneath the surface because in 1913 concrete moves began to establish a union. Surreptitious
recruitment started taking place, despite official statements that any men
found to have joined would be instantly dismissed. The National Union of Police
and Prison Officers clearly met a perceived need and grew with great speed, in
spite of the loss of income and pension rights that dismissal incurred.
The sacking of PC Tommy Theil of the Metropolitan force
sparked off a strike in 1918. He was an activist and union organiser greatly
respected by his fellow officers for his integrity and hard work. His summary
dismissal brought the whole festering mass of long-term grievances to a head,
but the central issue in the strike was official recognition for NUPPO.
The date of the strike, 28 August 1918, was well-chosen
because the government was already confronting high levels of militancy in many
of the major industrial areas, a general public tired of the shortages and
extra hardships of wartime and rumbles of mutiny among the workers-in-uniform
impatiently waiting to be demobbed. The Russian Revolution of February 1917 had
overthrown arguably the most decadent monarchy in Europe. The action of the
Bolsheviks, with mass support from workers, peasants and soldiers, had repelled
and terrified the forces of reaction everywhere. Likewise it had inspired
ordinary people with the idea that, collectively, they could overthrow the
capitalist system and the wars, the injustices, the deprivation and despair
that went with it.
Within 24 hours 12,000 officers, all but a handful of the
rank-and-file Metropolitan force, had gone on strike. Caught wrong-footed, the
government moved to end the strike as quickly as possible. Prime Minister Lloyd
George met the NUPPO executive and the strike ended on 31 August. Theil was
reinstated and all the other demands were met fully. Rumours of possible
strikes elsewhere and NUPPO’s success in London led to the implementation of
improved conditions in various other forces. NUPPO membership rocketed.
Although official recognition of NUPPO was withheld, the fact that Lloyd George
had negotiated with the union was taken by many members as evidence that
recognition was only a matter of time.
The government was determined not to be caught out again.
General Macready, a notably blimpish army brass hat, was brought in as
Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police for the sole purpose of destroying the
influence of NUPPO, a task he greatly relished. He lifted the ban on officers
joining the union but banned union members from actions which urged strikes or
interfered in any way with discipline. Meanwhile the government had established
the Desborough Committee to investigate every aspect of policing in mainland
Britain. The Committee recognised that officers had genuine grievances. Low pay
was identified as a major problem, as also were varying levels of pay between
different forces.
Late 1918 and much of 1919 saw industrial disputes
throughout Britain, not only in engineering, the docks and railways where they
were common, but more unusually in the baking industry, where there was a
national strike. There was even a rent strike in Glasgow. In such a volatile
situation, the government could not risk the police being drawn into
sympathising with strikers or being involved in actual strike action itself. It
was time to excise NUPPO for once and for all.
The Police Act of 1919 set up the Police Federation, in
effect a company union. NUPPO was proscribed and it was made illegal for police
officers to belong to a trade union. The granting of so many of the men’s
demands the previous year had clearly been designed to draw the sting from the
mood of militancy among police officers, especially in London and the big
industrial towns. Although NUPPO called a strike for the August Bank Holiday
weekend of 1919, only a small number of officers responded in London and few
elsewhere.
The one exception was Merseyside. The Liverpool force in
particular was notorious for poor pay and conditions and harsh discipline.
Morale was particularly low in Liverpool, as it also was in the neighbouring
forces of Bootle and Birkenhead. The call to strike evoked a massive withdrawal
of labour and required the use of troops to ensure that the riots and lootings
that took place did not spread out of working class areas like those around
Scotland Road, London Road and Islington. In a show of force, a naval
battleship and two destroyers were anchored in the Mersey with searchlights and
guns focussed on working class ‘trouble spots’ on both sides of the river.
The isolation of the strikers on Merseyside and the small
numbers involved in London meant that the action was defeated. Disciplinary
measures were taken against strikers, and in Liverpool 955 officers were
instantly dismissed without appeal. Men in the Metropolitan force were
similarly made an example of. Vindictive though these measures were, it is
clear that the government had experienced a nasty fright, and substantial
improvements in officers’ pay followed quickly.
The police were hated by much of the working class community
on Merseyside. This was because of the role they so often played during strikes,
in effect acting as stooges for the bosses by defending scabs and strike
breakers under the guise of safeguarding law and order. To their credit, some
local trade union leaders urged their members to show solidarity with the
striking police, but they had decades of accumulated bad memories to overcome.
Karl Marx pointed out the living reality of the class
struggle in the mid-nineteenth century. It was every bit as much a reality in
1918-19 and it remains so today. The police are among other groups of workers
in the public sector who are being insulted and whose pay and conditions are
being eroded as the result of New Labour’s spending priorities. These are
designed to please corporate capitalism rather than to address the needs of the
working class. More and more groups of working people are being
‘proletarianised’, that is any relative income and status differentials they
may have enjoyed in the past are being undermined.
The
police are one of the arms of the state. This, Marxists have long explained,
can ultimately be reduced to bodies of armed men who use force when required to
defend the power and privileges of the capitalist class and its hangers-on.
However the police cannot possibly avoid the class struggle, and the results of
the recent ballot are evidence of that. The Labour and TUC leadership should
support the basic democratic right of the police to join a genuine trade union
and to use their collective strength to defend and develop their pay and
working conditions.
See also:
Police get angry with New Labour
By our Industrial Correspondent,
Friday, 30 May 2008
Bolshevik Bobbies
By Rob Sewell,
Monday, 28 January 2008
Police and prison officers – no strike ban!
By Socialist Appeal,
Tuesday, 22 January 2008
