Whose law Whose order?

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SO WHO do thẹ hanging lobby want to hang?

Not the soldier whose plastic bullet murdered 11 year old Stephen McConomy; nor his army and RUC colleagues whose guns, boots and batons continue to kill, maim, and terrorise civilians in the six counties Not the policeman who murdered anti-fascist Blair Peach, nor his colleagues who accidentally failed to kill Stephen Waldorf: not the gun-toting, truncheon-wielding cops in whose-cells last year one person Not the prison screws who killed Barry Prosser; nor their colleagues, who daily brutalise the inmates of Thatcher's overflowing gaols.

Not the monetarists whose ruthless policies have brought a rising toll of unemployment and human misery - violence on the streets and in the home, wrecked lives, shattered hopes and suicides.

Not the ministers whose spending cuts mean poverty, suffering and Not the employers whose lust for profit makes them skimp health and safety precautions, killing or maiming thousands each year, destroying and polluting the environment with toxic wastes.

Not even the warmongers, slashing health spending, but ready to spend £8 billion on new, more lethal Trident missiles - weapons of mass murder on a scale never dreamed of by Crippen, Peter Sutcliffe or Certainly not! The hanging lobby, the self-styled 'law and order' lobby, includes the most strident supporters of the status quo, and opponents of those who would fight for democracy or social progress.

But even then their arguments for institutionalised murder of those * They claim hanging would 'protect' their soldiers on the streets of Belfast and Derry: yet as long as the brute heel of military rule and injustice remain, there will be forces from among the oppressed who will defy the odds and fight back. Hanging has not crushed the black And as Stephen McConomy tragically discovered, troops need neither evidence of terrorism nor the sanction of the courts to mete out * The hanging lobby saw it would 'protect' the police. Statistics from the USA disprove this claim. British figures show a mere handful of police murdered over the last decade: far more people have been directly killed by police, who are to be further reinforced by the Tory Thames Valley police chief Peter Imbert has strongly defended the wholesale detention of claimants in the Oxford 'Operation Major'; Manchester's Anderton has given vent to his reactionary views, while Sir Kenneth Newman of the Metropolitan police has issued his own political broadside against those who argue for democratic controls over the police: who will protect the rights of the majority against these extrem* The 'deterrent" of hanging is supposed to protect us against people who run berserk and against callous criminals ready to kill. Yet all evidence - comparative figures for different states in the USA which have or do not have the death penalty, crime trends for Britain before and after the abolition of hanging, and an international survey recently done by the UN - shows that this 'deterrent' doesn't work.

Particularly in the great majority of cases - where the victim is someone the killer already knows - fine calculations of possible penalties do not figure at all at the point where fury or despair boils over Hanging is not a way of fighting or limiting crime: it is a defence machanism to preserve Thatcher's hypocritical, decaying society that spawns, perpetuates and institutionalises crime. • Thatcher's Britain idealises material wealth and 'individual' achievement, freedoms, and rights; but it denies to millions of young and adult workers the slightest prospect of wealth or achievement.- by casting them onto ever-lengthening dole queues. And then it rubs salt in the wounds by branding claimants as 'scroungers' and handing lavish tax Thatcher's Britain ignores the theft of billions through tax evasion, yet waxes indignant over petty crime by those it has robbed of hope.

Thatcher's Britain ignores and perpetuates racial violence and discrimination, yet exploits racist stereotypes in peddling fear of black mugThatcher's Britain schools men from boyhood to regard women as subordinate servants, possessions and sexual objects, bombards the senses with sexist advertising, 'soft' and hard pornography: yet cynically exploits the rising tide of sexual violence to promote its reactionIn Thatcher's Britain the lust for profit turns inner cities into barren wastelands of despair; then Tories play on the fears and concerns of the old people they have abandoned there to support the There is no fear of the death penalty by rack-renting Tory landlords, asset-strippers, spivs, speculators and stockbrokers: it is their The Tory values and policies which got us into this vast unrelieved social and economic crisis can multiply the number of victims and even hand sacrificial corpses from gallows, but they can never get us out.

Only the fight for a new social order, a socialist society, can create conditions where the majority can live free from fear of crime or Sheffield last Friday to discuss their reaction to this new Tory offensive.

During the General Election, the Tories issued a list of local authorities who put up rates last of Northern Ireland.

wearse expenditure 8% more than 25% above Grant Related died every ten days from 'non-natural causes'. Expenditure.

This is a level of spending arbitrarily determined in order to penalise those deemed to 'overspend' - in other words to attempt to provide decent services. premature death to the elderly and the sick. This list includes seven inner Londón boroughs, the GLC, Inner London Education Authority, South Yorkshire Metropolitan Authority, Sheffield, Manchester, Newcastle and even Adolf Hitler. Merseyside. ' Virtually all of those affected were represented at the Sheffield Conference which covered - as Ken Livingstone who break their rules lack any logical force. pointed out - most of the main English urban areas and about 40% of the population.

Those present heard Scottish councillors describe how Lothian guerillas in South Africa. had been compelled to cut, and how Glasgow and three other Scottish authorities are currently the death penalty on the streets. faced with orders from the Tory Secretary of State for Scotland to cut their services.

As Maria Fyffe for Glasgow pointed out, the Tory Secretary Police Bill. of State was issuing dictates to a city which had no Tory MPs and precious few Tory councillors.

A lobby in London is planned later in July when the necessary ists?

(Chief Whip, Council)

regulations are placed before Parliament.

South of the border, similar enforced cutting is promised by the Tories and a White Paper is expected soon.

There can be no doubt that the Tories plan a ferocious attack on Labour-controlled local authorities not only because of their efforts to slash all public spending but also because of their political dislike of all that these authorities stand for and do.

The fact that the Sheffield

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By Alan Clinton