The socialist Party and the police

I am long since a member of the Socialist party which has if I like it or not formed a lot of my politics to date. Yes they did many good things and I can say I gained my class politics from them to understand things in Marxist terms if good for me or not. I do think the bits I learnt much of it off my own back too to be honest as the education the SP gave out was hugely patronising and really basic stuff meant for primary school kids I’d say rich bad poor good we need to change this, join our party etc etc. Well I don’t need anyone to tell me I found myself frequently at odes of what the party put out and said as time went on. If not visibly then certainly in my head. One of my first bones of contention was the party’s relationship and views towards the police and the state as a broader identity. I joined in 2011 after the student mass demonstrations of the year before maybe this formed a point of which I wished to join a revolutionary organisation after being a labour party member for a few months before and after the general election which on class lines was a really big one when it came to class. For me even as a very timid and partly non educated political thinker I could still tell that the general election of 2010 was a very political one and a deep sense of unjust that the ruling class were back in power via the Tories and their lackies the Lib Dems and this was not right. I somehow thought labour was for the people and they would be my natural ally in the coming months to years. How wrong I was…. So I joined the SP in hope of better answers. For a while they gave me that but in time I began to question things as I’d always been brought up to do. One of the things that did stand out for me was the Socialist party’s line on the police and whether we should stand in solidarity with them or not. For me the SP was firmly behind the police and many instances can back this up sadly. This for me while students were getting beaten back by the police and riots were happening sparked off by a policeman attacking and killing an innocent black man in Tottenham in 2011 sent me into wonder how the SP could square having solidarity with these people who clearly had it in for our class. In recent years when the police have gone on strike or protested about their pay and conditions we in the SP were urged to support them. This stuck in my throat and I could never bring myself to supporting these agents of the state and lend them solidarity from our class when only weeks before they had attacked students fighting for a better future. It never sat well with me. It is a scene workers are all too familiar with. In a bid for savings, the "gravy train" of rank-and-file pay and benefits is being slashed by the highest earners who remain unaffected. However, sympathy may be muted by the fact that the workers in question are the police. While at first it is understandable to many to have solidarity with the police after all don’t they work for a wage and need to work for their living?? Their role when it comes to the working class and when we fight back is very very telling for me. , "the idea that police neutrally uphold democratically-decided laws has been exposed as a fiction." In the words of Fitwatch; It’s time to wake up –these institutions do not exist to protect us but to subjugate us. They give us enough to believe we live in a free and democratic society whilst protecting capital and those who defend it. What is the use of having rights if the state determines when and where we can exercise them? We are given the right to protest when we’re no threat, but refused the right to even assemble when it’s most critical. If public anger over the government's attacks on the working class ever emerges as anything even remotely radical, the police are the ruling class's first line of defence. Their job is to act against their class interests and either keep us in line or lock us out of the way. Until they decide to spurn that role, they should expect no sympathy. Working class solidarity should not be reserved for those who exist to smash it The SP clearly think that supporting the police and helping them split the state will in some way help the workers movement. The fact workers decide to join the police is lost on them and that workers do not always fight for their own class instincts. The fact that some feel drawn towards the police and the wider state should make us ask questions of why and how this is so. As @piercepenniless from twitter once wrote at http://piercepenniless.tumblr.com/post/19795478930/on-police-strikes “ I’m happy for the police to strike, but the right to strike is taken and retained, not granted, and we should ask why police don’t strike, that is, what police think they do, what they actually do, and so on. ) Extending an abstract defence of the power to withdraw labour into an argument that activists should defend police against funding cuts is logically questionable. It relies on a notion of police as a subsection of a greater set of ‘public servants’ that elides some fundamental differences. If they are so, we should ask, which public, and served how? We defend against cuts because they involve dismantling things like the NHS and welfare services, not because the organs of the state are inviolable goods. Hence this tautologous argument that anti-cuts activists ought to oppose cuts because they are anti-cuts activists elides the reasons that people oppose cuts. This elision is significant. The arguments put by serving police officers as to why they shouldn’t be cut largely involve their subsequent inability to afford water cannon, tasers, routine arming, &c. They also often extend to their need to exist to keep scum (etc) ‘off the street’. This is not benign civil work: it is racist, it victimises the poor, the inconvenient and the vulnerable. Any argument that we attain a moral victory by defending their working conditions and thus enable them to further fulfill their structural role seems to me rather weak. ) Should we not consider the work the police do as obviously and qualitatively different from the work of other portions of the public sector, and should they really fall under this rubric at all — in other words, what kind of work is this work?” Every time there is talk of police marching, striking or in any way protesting, liberals and leftists have put out calls for solidarity and support. This makes me feel very uneasy and now more than ever with events in Ferguson in America and lots and lots of attacks on black people by the police who we are told are there to serve us this is clearly not the case but a illusion to keep the mass’s where they are and in order. There some in the anti cuts movement who have written that "those of us in the anti-cuts movement should be protesting alongside them." Their reasoning is that although there are "the few nasty police," who "we want out," at the moment "our fight is elsewhere." The police who will take place in any march "are ordinary people with families and rents and mortgages," and we should "do for them what they wouldn’t do for us." My train of thought goes off in a somewhat different direction. Unlike these leftists , I don't see the behaviour of the police as an abberation. The fact that they are more aggressive in handling protests now, and are actively seeking to clamp down on dissenters by releasing footage and seeking "suspects," is not just something that happened. You can see it every time there is a serious threat to the established order, from events like Bloody Sunday back in 1911, through the Miners' Strike, Hillsborough and the Poll Tax Riots, to the G20 and, of course, the more recent student protests. In between, there are a myriad of other incidents, such as the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes. Not to mention the Forward Intelligence Teams, DNA databases, arresting people simply to be able to take their details, and other "illiberal" tactics Sumpter cites. As an article in The Commune points out; “Fair-minded people are against “disproportionate”, “provocative”, or “brutal” policing; and presumably in favour of a polite push and shove. This is an appealing message (and it may make sense to accentuate it to the cameras), but is more or less a fiction. Of course, there are incidents here and there where we can say that particular police could have been less brutal. But if the direct action we defend has any content at all, it must mean we supported, and support, concrete attempts to stop the law being passed, up to, including, and beyond the invasion of parliament – and we are in support of people trying as hard as possible to do that. And it is a fiction that the police could have tolerated that, or that preventing it could ever have been done gently. If it could have been, we wouldn’t have really been trying. If the police hadn’t been at parliament square during the student demonstrations of 2010, and if they hadn’t been prepared to act brutally, parliament would have been stormed, and legislation to triple top-up fees and abolish EMA would not have been passed. The brutality of the police is not incidental to the nature of the state, it is essential to it. So you have to pick: the state, and horse charges against children who object to having their pockets robbed; or against the state (which means: against capitalism, for social revolution); and against the police too; brutal or otherwise. Polite fudges are polite – but more or less part of the continuous stream of liquid nonsense which constitutes the news media. This is not a matter of a "few nasty police." If we support the police against cuts to their numbers and their services, then we actively support the institution of the police. That cannot mean anything except the state's monopoly of violence and the cracked skulls of working class activists and their repression. The Police Federation's own propaganda underlines this. The image before us is a line of riot police blocking a road, presumably less able to do their job because their numbers are cut. If you choose to support or join their march, that is what you are standing in solidarity with. Remember that. Every baton swung at the head of a protester just for being in the way. Every horse charge to keep the crowds in line. Every kettle because people wanted to cover their faces. Every taser that kills or paralyses somebody. Every stop and search of youth simply for being youth. Every Ian Tomlinson, Jean Charles de Menezes, Smiley Culture or Mark Duggan. It's on your head as well as theirs. Because you marched to defend it. Yes, the police are working class. They have to sell their labour for a living in order to feed their families this is not the end of the matter though . Nobody made them choose, or stay, in a job which exists to subjugate the same class that they come from - to smash picket lines, choke off dissent, and maintain the dominance of the ruling class. I was once told of a police officer who refused to attack picket lines - and was shuffled around the country until he ended up the constable of a quiet and inoffensive area. He is no doubt not the only one. So, if police can be persuaded to side with the workers and against capitalism, then it is clearly a choice that sees their career either go down the toilet or end altogether. Those still on active service, in the big cities, and marching to preserve their jobs, will be those with no qualms being on the other side of the class war. Thus, I still have no sympathy for the devil. I maintain that "working class solidarity should not be reserved for those who exist to smash it. so lets be clear, the police and their hangers on are not our comrades or on the same side as us and should be treated as such

Ferguson, no justice, no peace

Overnight we heard the news that the police officer who shot Michael Brown 12 times was let off all charges. The cop named Darren Wilson, has gotten away with murder – and the American injustice system sent the message once again that black lives don't matter. It was long after dark on 24 November when St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch marched to the microphone and announced that a grand jury had refused to indict the Ferguson, Missouri, police officer on any charge at all for killing 18-year-old Mike Brown on 9 August. This was the result that millions of people expected, but it was shocking anyway: a white cop who shot more than a dozen bullets at an unarmed African American teenager, killing him, was not only off the hook, but was being portrayed as a victim. After days of rising tensions as the long-awaited grand jury decision didn't come, people in Ferguson and around the country erupted in bitter protest. Even while Barack Obama followed McCulloch onto the airwaves to make his own statement urging peace, police fired their first volleys of tear gas and smoke grenades in Ferguson. The media bemoaned the "violence" in Ferguson when a police car was wrecked and local businesses set on fire – without the slightest recognition of the violence that African Americans living in a city like Ferguson endure on a daily basis, directly at the hands of racist police and indirectly as a result of endemic poverty and unemployment. Many liberals will cry disgrace for the level of violence but i dont think we can fully understand the situation being outside of the situation and us not going through what black people in Ferguson go through on a daily basis as white people. We can offer black voices a platform wherever we can and fight to help them have their voices heard as a small step . The media vultures had their cameras trained on Ferguson, but there were angry demonstrations around the country after the grand jury decision was announced. In Chicago, hundreds of protesters took over Lake Shore Drive. In Oakland, California, in the largest protest in the Bay Area, the hastily organized solidarity demonstration drew more than 1,000 people who marched through downtown and later blockaded Interstate 580, one of the major routes through the city. Nearly a thousand turned out to Times Square. There will be more protests today and in the days to come. We need to make sure everyone who was outraged by Mike Brown's murder and inspired by the rebellion in Ferguson against racism and police violence raises their voices and sends a message: We won't forget Mike Brown – and our struggle for justice will continue. just finally you can Donate to the Legal Support Fund for Justice for Mike Brow at n' https://secure.piryx.com/donate/mS25KFCe/MORE/mikebrown Also there is to be a vigil outside the US embasy tommorrow evening for all those who wish to protest and voice their feelings against the non justice of this decision here Ferguson solidarity vigil called by London Black Revs, UFFC, DTRTP outside US embassy in London tomorrow, 7pm. FB: https://www.facebook.com/events/312433102293366/?ref=3&ref_newsfeed_story_type=regular one last thing to finnish on for us if we were to wrongly think this is not a issue which happens in this country Between 2004-2014 over 800 ppl died after contact with the police in the UK. Last successful prosecution was in 1969 https://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/deaths-in-british-police-custody-no-convicted-officers-since-1969

Cops off campus

Last week, London’s village-like Bloomsbury area became a battleground between students and police. In two days, 43 arrests were made, and several videos appearing to show police brutality are now circling the internet. It was the latest, most violent episode in a crackdown on student protest in the city which began in the summer. Amid the chaos of last week, the University of London – the capital's biggest, which includes Goldsmiths, SOAS and UCL – got itself a High Court injunction forbidding protest on its site until next June. Those who disobey it, the order warns, might find themselves in contempt of court. “The university started filming demonstrations from the balconies of Senate House, with few missing the irony that the building inspired the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four" It goes back to Wednesday evening when University of London security forcefully evicted 30 demonstrators staging an occupation of its premises at Senate House. Some 50 police were on hand, but only, the university said, “to prevent a breach of the peace”. However, footage appears to show them doing a lot more than that. One officer can be seen punching a man in the face. In another clip, two police slam a woman, screaming, to the pavement and then walk off. There were seven arrests that night but, the police were keen to point out, no formal complaints were made against them. Still, both people at the demonstration and those who had seen it reported online were furious, appalled by what they considered police violence and intimidation. That anger could be felt at a Cops Off Campus protest, promoted anonymously on Tumblr, which took place the next day. Some protesters brought homemade shields (not a bad idea, since the police definitely made use of their batons), while others let off red smoke bombs amid clashes between officers and students. This time, 36 people were arrested, including a man with a crutch. An eyewitness said he “was walking near the police when they pushed him, and as he fell backwards the police kicked away his crutch before jumping on him”. After officers moved away from where his arrest took place, a red blood stain could be seen on the pavement. Oscar Webb, the editor at the London Student newspaper, was one of those arrested. He was there covering the protest and can be seen in a video holding up his press card just before being handcuffed. He spent the night in isolation in a cell in south London, and although he wasn’t charged with any offence, he now has bail conditions that prohibit him from going in Senate House. If police were already clamping down on student protests, they now appear to be getting heavy-handed with those who report them too. As far as the students were concerned, these were two especially brutal days. But the crackdown goes back months, when in July a 24-year-old philosophy student was arrested for writing in chalk on a University of London foundation stone. It’s alleged she caused £600 of criminal damage, even though, as one person was quick to point out: “Chalk can be washed off. That’s the whole point of chalk.” Student occupiers barricade the doors in Senate House in an attempt to keep out police Oscar Webb The list of ten demands issued by the those who occupied Senate House gives a pretty good idea of why the students are feeling the need to do so much protesting. They want to see outsourced staff and lecturers, who they consider the backbone of universities, given fair working terms and pay. They don’t want their halls of residence run by private companies who will charge extortionate rents. And they’re fed up of having the police, who unsurprisingly they don’t trust, allowed onto their campuses. They’re also angry at the planned closure of ULU next year, which the university wants to take over. It’s a flawed body, but also considered an outlet for some of the grievances of London’s students. The National Union of Students, according to most of the activists, is useless. They see its leadership as careerists using their roles as a step on the way to a safe Labour seat, not an institution that can help them effect the change they want. On Friday, a day after the mass arrests, a second Cops Off Campus demonstration took place. Again, there were hundreds of students and police. But it mostly just consisted of running around in the streets, getting in the way of motorists, with a police helicopter hovering above. A small group of anarchists, waving red and black flags, climbed a fire escape and were keen to find a way into University of London’s campus, which had been sealed off. But the demonstrators decided to call it a day and hold a sort of debrief meeting in the students’ union. That wasn’t, I think, because their anger at the police had subsided. All around, you could hear protesters urging each other to “save it for next week” (this Wednesday, a national Cops Off Campus protest is planned). In other words, in Bloomsbury’s battle between students and police, things look likely to intensify further. With thanks to James Burley for the article above Follow James Burley on Twitter here @JWJBurley http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/18110/1/cops-off-campus-university-of-london-protest-ban