[NATIONAL DEMONSTRATION AGAINST POLICE HARASSMENT AND FOR THE…]

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NATIONAL DEMONSTRATION AGAINST POLICE HARASSMENT

AND FOR THE SACKING OF

CHIEF CONSTABLE OXFORD

3pm, Saturday 15th August, from

Sefton Park Obelisk, Liverpool.

alled by the Liverpool 8 Defence Committee

Liverpool Black Organisation, and Charles Wootton Centre. Supported by North West TUC and Liverpool District Labour Party.

NO. 47 AUGUST 6th 1981 (CLAIMANTS AND STRIKERS, 10p) 20p It was shown to he the hroken Anather VOOr The driver of the noli on the streets of the big plastic bullets, tear gas, cities - whether they are batons, boots and highthere to protest or simply speed vehicles to intimidate walking home from visiting and repress people in the relatives - is now fair nationalist ghetto areas.

LICENCE TO KILL! TORY H-BLOCK SLAUGHTER CONTINUES -p.8-9 game game for savage police savage attack.

This has been true for years in Ireland, where GO OUT at your peril. In British troops and RUC Thatcher's Britain anyone thugs daily use rubber and It was shown to be the case in Britain in 1979, when the brutal goons of the Special Patrol Group murdered anti-fascist militant Blair Peach on the streets of Southall, only to be shielded from prosecution by a brazen police cover-up.

London's police chief McNee made no bones about it: stay off the streets if you want to stay out of trouble, he declared.

Since then, the tactics of the SPG have become standard police tactics.

In Bristol, Brixton, Southall and a whole series of deprived inner-city areas of slump-hit Britain, these same tactics have provoked an angry and militant response from youth pushed beyond the limits of endurance by continual harassment.

Lethal

Merseyside police chief Kenneth Oxford echoed McNee's arrogant warning to workers not to exercise their democratic right to march or walk the streets. Anyone out and about on the streets must be a lawbreaker, he declared.

Putting Oxford's words into horrific practice, police vans in Toxteth last week adopted the lethal Northern Ireland tactic of mounting the pavement at high speed to break up crowds.

Almost at once one youth was pinned against a wall by a van - his back broken. Another, 22 year old David Moore, a disabled youth on his way home from visiting his sister, was dragged along an alley at high speed by a police van before it drove over him and sped off without stopping.

Moore was left and dead.

Meanwhile, Oxford's foot police were also on the rampage. Men and women were beaten up - and then left bleeding on the pavements, with police making no attempt to arrest them.

One man was slashed by a policeman armed with a machete. A young woman who witnessed the murder of David Moore was clubbed by a gang of police with truncheons.

The Toxteth police action was brutal. And it was calculated as a revenge action. Like the savage raids in the aftermath of the Brixton riots, it had nothing to do with arrests - but was designed as a bloody retaliation for the blows inflicted by an angry community.

In Thatcher's Britain the police know that they stand now in the front line of repression, forced to combat struggles of workers infuriated by mass unemployment, chronic poverty, homelessness and racial oppression. No wonder their pay has increased by nearly 60% since Thatcher came to office.

They know that they can only hold the line through the intimidation of whole communities.

The driver of the police van that killed David Moore may face charges; or he may be protected in the same way as the police killers of Blair Peach.

But no worker in Toxteth or anywhere else should be in doubt now that the police are ready and willing to kill, with the full backing of the State.

To deal with this brazen violence, some dreamers in the labour movement have begun to plead for democratic control of the police.

McNee, Anderton, and Oxford should certainly be removed; but we must recognise that they would only be replaced by anoth er, smilarly brutal In reality, there is no way that the police, these hired defenders of the capitalist class can be made accountable to the workers" movement.

The demand must be for the withdrawal of the police from riot-torn working-class areas, and their replacement by workers defence patrols, which alone can carry out community self-policing.

The TUC and Labour Party have already called for the disbanding of the SPG: but the spread of SPG tactics shows that the demand must be widened The defeat of the Tories must be coupled with demands for a workers government that will disband the present police force as a crucial part of the struggle for a socialist society.

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"NO FEELING" • wrote the conservative journalist Walter Bagehot in 1867, "could seem more childish than the enthusiasm of the English at the marriage of the Prince of Wales"

It would be a mistake for socialists a century or more later to be misled by the banality and vulgarity of the multi-media extravaganza inflicted upon us into underrating the importance of the institution of monarchy.

It remains to this day a vital link in the continually forged and re-forged chains that bind up the capitalist order.

It is quite obvious that the chords of regimented communal ecstasy which were struck by the events of last week could just as easily have formed by some other circus, perhaps orgPage The Royal pram anised as a major football match - or a Nuremberg rally.

The forms of the monarchy are designed to appeal to all the most sentimentalised and primitive reactionary impulses.

They put together the most outdated of all political institutions with all the trappings of the most conventional and oppressive petty-bourgeois sexual mores.

The whole package is deliberately and cynically used to lend a touch of glamour and stability to a political and social system that is otherwise seen as vicious, violent, never quite free from the stench of corruption and hypocrisy.

The origins of the modern monarchy in the British system of government derive from the political settlements which followed the bourgeois revolution of 1640 and the executive of Charles I in 1649.

The acceptance of Charles II in 1660 and still more of William III in 1688 and George I in 1714 stripped the monarchy of all the pretensions of hereditary succession and 'divine right' The 'constitutional monarchy' survived because the bourgeoisie needed both a focus of loyalty to their state and an institution which could arbitrate between their various contending factions.

Thus the monarchy has not simply a symbol of the power of government but an instrument for ensuring its continuity.

This power remains of crucial importance, but it has not always been exercised in exactly the same way.

During the reign of George I in the 18th century, it was established that the King could not decide by his own political preferences who the members of the government should be.

However, could Court Correspondent part of the process of transition, and ensure in cases of doubt that an acceptable alternative was agreed.

Thus the ceremony of new Prime Ministers going to see the monarch for 'kissing hands' is no empty gesture.

The political uncertainty in the days that followed the General Election of 1974 is only the most recent example of the value of the monarchy in such situation.

. King George V in 1931 played a crucial role. in smoothing over the difficulties and making the contacts between the Tory, Liberal and Labour leaders to set up the so-called 'National Government' , which was at the time the only hope of the crisis-wracked political and economic system.

The recent bally-hoo around the monarchy aims at preparing the majority of the population for accepting this political function.

The political proclivities of Edward VIII, dropped in 1936 for offending against the narrowest canons of petty bourgeois morality, are well known.

His sympathies for Mussolini and Hitler were scarcely concealed, and his possible use as a means of surrendering to the fascist powers in 1940 was actively canvassed.

It is of some interest that the next step in the political career of the Prince of Wales most frequently proposed is that he should become governorgeneral of Australia.

The last notable action by an Australian governorgeneral was the 'coup' of 1975, when John Kerr "sacked' an elected Labour government which had lost the confidence of the capitalist class.