By Harry Hutchinson, Labour Party Northern Ireland.
The British Government is forcing though parliament the most oppressive anti-civil rights legislation in modern times. The Policing Bill will empower the Home Secretary and the police to brutally crackdown on protests that are deemed illegal under the new law.
The Tories are using the Covid regulations as a platform to enact draconian legislation that compares Britain to dictatorial countries. The expansion of stop and search, dictating the time of when marches start and end, deeming it illegal to “intentionally or recklessly causing public nuisances”, (which includes noise) mean that the British state, though their use of brutal riot police, can suppress any protests they desire. [See earlier article on more details of the bill].
There will be a huge impact on the travelling community, and the tactics used by environmental groups like Extinction Rebellion, and protests outside Parliament will be outlawed. Pulling down the statues of former slave-owners can land you a draconian 10-year prison sentence.
Bristol protests battered by police
Not surprisingly, ‘Kill the Bill’ protests have spread right across Britain in recent weeks. In Bristol, a week-long series of protests has met a violent police response. Protesters were congregated outside the city police station in a sit-down vigil. According to the official line of the Avon and Somerset Police, a ‘violent mob’ attacked officers, leaving 20 with injuries, including broken bones and one officer with a punctured lung. These claims were reported unreservedly by the British media, particularly the BBC.
However, footage later emerged of the actual events in Bristol and it then went viral, showing mounted police and riot officers with dogs moving in quite unnecessarily and assaulting peaceful protesters and journalists with batons and shields. The Guardian (March 27) described how journalists who identified themselves as such were still beaten by police. A reporter from the Daily Mirror tweeted, “Police assaulted me at the Bristol protest even though I told them I was from the press. I was respectfully observing what was happening and posed no threat to any of the officers.”
On woman told The Guardian, “A policewoman barged me with her shield and I tripped. I fell to the floor and I went on to my back. My phone went and my keys went [out of my pocket]. I had my knees up to my chest and my arms over my head. I had two policewomen on my left using their shields to batter me, and two men on my right and they were hitting me with batons…The irony was that they kept asking me to get up.”
‘Battle of Orgreave’ deliberately distorted by media
It was only after these later revelations that the Avon and Somerset Police were forced to retract their false account of events, not that there were any such corrections in the mass media or on the BBC. We still remember the so-called ‘Battle of Orgreave’ during the miners’ strike, when unarmed miners in T-shirts were brutally attacked by hundreds of riot police and dozens of mounted police. The miners, naturally enough, fought back.
That evening, on peak TV News time, the BBC deliberately swapped over the video footage to make it appear that the police action was a response to the miners’ ‘violence’. It was a calculated and deliberate distortion of the truth for which they have never apologised. When it comes to Bristol, therefore, we should not trust the media or the BBC any more than for Orgreave.
Police lies have been exposed by videos gone viral
In Bristol, the police claim that their intervention was necessary to deal with a ‘violent mob’, but the overwhelming majority of the protesters were peaceful and sitting down. Now, the police lie has been exposed. However, ten of those peaceful protesters were arrested and will still face charges.
It has even been suggested that there may have been agents-provocateur among the protesters. Infiltrating protest movements to initiate violence is a known tactic of the police. The idea of agents provocateurs is believable, because we know – and there is even an official enquiry into it going on – that the police deploy officers in under-cover roles.
These police spies infiltrate all kinds of quite legal political and trade union organisations, sometimes for years at a time, even fathering children with women completely taken in by their fake identities. Now, thanks to a new bill recently gone through parliament, such spies, as well as their informers, are immune from prosecution.
All the equipment of a police-state
Well-equipped riot police are now a feature of all police forces throughout the whole capitalist world. They have not been established to protect people, but to protect the capitalist state from the people.
Britain has increased its police force by six thousand in the last year, but the number of riot officers and ‘special’ patrol groups are unknown, as is the number of police deployed to spy on legal protest groups. Riot police are heavily armed with helmets, shields, clubs and body armour, as well as tear gas and pepper spray, which they use liberally even at close quarters. This is not a ‘community’ police force in any sense. It is a political force established to protect the status quo.
Environmental and human and civil rights groups have universally condemned the new Policing Bill as an infringement of civil rights. And with the Tories having an in-built majority, it is now only by taking to the streets that the bill can be defeated as it goes through its final stages in Parliament.
Policing is a class question
The question of the police and policing is, like other political issues, a class question. Workers justifiably grumble that they have little community ‘protection’ from crime. Threatened with physical violence or being the victim of a burglary or a car theft, workers are lucky to get a crime number. But if the same workers were involved in an industrial dispute or a political protest movement, the police will think nothing of deploying officers to spy on them and preventing them from exercising their democratic rights.
Even the leader of the leader of Britain’s police chiefs, in an interview in The Guardian, frankly admitted the police have no ‘legitimacy’ in many working-class areas. That is not a result of the actions of the local community, but due entirely to institutionalised racism and the approach the police adopt.
“Official figures” The Guardian writes, “show black people are nine times more likely to be stopped and searched, according to the latest official data. There were six stop and searches for every 1,000 white people, compared with 54 for every 1,000 black people”. More than twenty years after the McPherson Inquiry found that there was “institutionalised racism” in the police, nothing has changed.
Police still riddled with racism and misogyny
The labour movement must develop policies that distinguish clearly between the political functions the police carry out in the services of the capitalist state and their purported ‘community’ functions.
That means Labour should demand the disbanding of special riot police. It means the dismantling of the networks of spies sent into the trade union and labour movement and legitimate political organisations. It means the elimination of racism and misogyny, which are endemic in the force.
It means that in pursuit of ‘community’ functions, the police should be fully accountable – including all so-called ‘operational’ issues – to elected community bodies. Democratic accountability has to mean, not remote Police and Crime Commissioners, whose remit covers a vast area and whose functions are hedged around by police chiefs, civil servants and bureaucratic obstacles, but smaller and more local elected bodies, to which local working-class communities can relate and in which they can be confident. At present there are 14 ‘Labour’ Police and Crime Commissioners and to our knowledge not one has spoken up on the new bill going through parliament.
The Labour Party has to oppose by every means possible the new Police, Crime and Sentencing Bill and put forward a socialist alternative that addresses the needs of working-class people.
