Running Commentary: Strike Lessons (1984)

The Running Commentary column from the May 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Strike lessons

In the tactics they have followed in the clashes with the flying pickets, the police have shown a willingness and an ability to learn from experience. Can this also be said for the miners? There are in fact some very important things which have been overlooked by the men speeding from one coalfield to another.

The first is that the police will not unfailingly do their best to ensure that everyone who wants to work will be free to do so. They are fighting the pickets for reasons other than to protect a “right to work". Redundant workers who don’t want to be sacked will not find any sympathetic boys in blue to case their way through the entrance of their old workplace.

The second is that a police force cannot by nature be a tolerant or credulous organisation. Policemen have the function of being suspicious — they often get commended for it — and they must cast a wide net in their suspicions. So if they suspect a car load of men looking like anything but bank clerks or insurance salesmen of being flying pickets they are bound to harass them with impertinent questions about their political opinions and private lives. It may not be quite the Dixon of Dock Green image but in real life it is all part of a day’s unpleasant work for them.

The third is that the police concept of public order, which they apply to the pickets, is not invariable in its principles. Some types of public disorder are permissible and get their protection — for example the parading of cruise missiles along country lanes.

The link between all these points, the matter which is overlooked by the people who fall foul of the police, is the fact that the police have a role in capitalist society. They are in being to protect an order and to assert a law which is based on the rights of private property. That means the police protect the privilege of a tiny minority of social parasites against the interests of the majority who are useful, productive people like miners. To put it another way. the police are part of a coercive state force which props up the dominance of the capitalist class and so helps to ensure the exploitation of the workers.

And workers, of course, is what the flying pickets are. So what do they do about this coercive, privilege-protecting machinery when they have the chance? What happens in the coalfields of Britain, when the miners can choose between coercion and freedom? At every election they vote for one or other of the parties of capitalism — Labour. Tory, Alliance, Communist . . . They spurn the case for a different society of common ownership and freedom preferring, on the most specious of arguments, to fasten the chains about themselves anew.

If the pickets are angry and bewildered by the police tactics, they should remember that the remedy to it is in their own hands — and the failure to apply it rests on their own heads.

Panic in the streets

Florid, well-fed Roy Jenkins had made a name for himself as a liberal before he became Wilson’s Home Secretary. This meant that he was associated with a few minor reforms which went well with the clink of sherry glasses in Hampstead but which, compared to the real problems of capitalism and the vast burden of human suffering which the system inflicts, are of absolutely no consequence.

But even at that there were plenty of flaws in that urbane image. This reforming, liberal Home Secretary was responsible for rushing through parliament the Prevention of Terrorism Act, which gave the police some disturbingly wide powers of arrest, detention and questioning. Labour MPs who indignantly demand that the Act not be renewed always seem to forget that the odious thing originated under their own party.

It was in Jenkins’ time too that the Special Patrol Group was formed. The stormtrooping tactics of the SPG were so successful and spectacular that the force was imitated in many other areas. Police operations are especially suited to the technique of ruthless and decisive intervention; only those on the receiving end — as was Blair Peach — are expected to have any serious doubts on the score.

Now we have learned that, in another triumph of liberal reformism, it was Jenkins who authorised the equipment of the Metropolitan Police with sub-machine guns. He did this in response to the London sieges at the Spaghetti House and Balcombe Street, although in each case these incidents were brought to a casualty-free end through tactics the very opposite of spraying the streets with machine-gun bill lets. Perhaps, behind that comfortable exterior, Jenkins was really a panicky liberal?

He would not be the only politician to have his pretensions reduced to scale by the exigencies of office. The Labour Party has always campaigned for power over capitalism to run the system in the only way possible in the interests of the owning capitalist class. This means taking action which is all too clearly against the interests of the people who elected them. A truly reforming Home Secretary might consider abolishing the police, or at least reducing their status to that of lollipop ladies, rather than widening their powers and arming them more ferociously.

But that of course would be nonsense. Capitalism needs its coercive forces to guard the position of the ruling class and to assert its property-protecting law and order. Whatever his reputation — and whatever his reality — Jenkins went along with that requirement. Experience of him emphasises the fact that workers who put their trust in leaders to improve things for them had better think again — before another liberal in Whitehall decides that the police could coerce us more effectively with tanks, artillery, nuclear weapons . . .

Tackling apartheid

An English Rugby Union team will after all be playing in South Africa this summer — always supposing that, after their disjointed and lack-lustre performance in this season’s internationals, anyone will still want to go to watch them play.

The announcement was greeted with predictable outrage by anti-apartheid campaigners, who have long argued that severing sporting links with South Africa would be an effective way of persuading them to drop their racist policies. In fact the campaigners have a point, for sport is popular enough in South Africa to make a loss of contact at the highest level of competition a powerful pressure for reform.

The South African government claim to have responded to the boycott which has so far operated in games like cricket and to have made formal gestures towards integration. These are obviously more cosmetic than basic; some rugby players who have toured South Africa, in the belief that they were "bridge building", have been sickened by the discrimination which they saw still to operate there.

By a remarkable, if typical, twist of logic the supporters of the tour have criticised its opponents for the deadly sin of “bringing politics into sport". The argument, once stated by the execrable Denis Thatcher at a rugby referees’ dinner, is that sportspeople should be free to play whoever they want, without interference. Thatcher, and those who agree with him, conveniently overlook the fact that it is the South African government, by forcing apartheid onto sportspeople, who breach their sacred principle and it is the protesters who campaign for the freedom to play against or with anyone.

Whatever pleasure and well-being may be derived from sport (which is in any case not free of the demands and the distortions of capitalism — it will be very different when we have a socialist society) they should not be inflated into an obsession. Compared to this society’s mountain of repression, suffering and fear, the matter of which side wins a game of football or cricket is of no account.

There are larger, more enduring issues at stake. One thing the demonstrators might ponder is that sport is about the only boycott which is being clamped onto South Africa. Trade, travel, military support, diplomacy — the very stuff of capitalist existence — merrily continue regardless of apartheid. And that is what the protesters are up against. Racism is illogical, unscientific and divisive of the world working class. But there is a remedy for it which is fundamental and permanent, in contrast to the ephemera of an integrated sporting tour.

Brixton explodes (1981)

From the June 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

After the riots, the deluge. As the fires died in Brixton, the smouldering passions there were doused in words hosed out from all kinds of social and political analysts. Most of them claimed dolefully that they had been expecting just such a thing to happen for a long time; all of them were alert with theories about the causes, and thereby with suggestions to stop it happening again.

One who did not offer any analysis was the very man in the whole of Britain who might be expected to know more about civil disorder than anyone else—Home Secretary William Whitelaw. But apparently he had so little idea about what happened and why that he had to set up an enquiry to tell him. In charge of the enquiry is Lord Justice Scarman, who did similar jobs on the Red Lion Square confrontation in 1974 and Grunwick in 1977 and who, if he doesn't get a rest from it soon, may come to think that open air life in London is about as peaceful as the North Bank at Highbury when Spurs are playing there.

The analysis of the Brixton riots covered a pretty wide field. On the one hand there was the Labour leader of Lambeth Council, Ted Knight, whose role in the affairs of London becomes daily more obscure as people begin to wonder whether he is a councillor or a comedian. Knight declared (Guardian, 16/4/81):

We went to see the commander of the police tonight to demand that he withdraw his men. He won't do it.

And he then went on to advise:

... a future Labour government must dismantle the Metropolitan Police and replace it with a new force "responsible and answerable to the working class people".

Knight is one of those "practical socialists" who, while not actually being delirious, suffer from these dreams in which the police don't have to be a coercive, property protective force but can assert the minority privileges of capitalism in the interests of the unprivileged majority , This is a common sort of delusion among "practical socialists", who deceive themselves that capitalism doesn't have to be capitalism—and Knight's problem is that when he talks like this he is not joking.

On the other hand there was the reaction of Margaret Thatcher—and nobody is in any doubt by now about her role in capitalism's affairs. There was no surprise when Thatcher resisted the invitation to agree that pressures like racial discrimination and unemployment could have influenced the riots. And in between Knight and Thatcher there were the senseless trendies and liberals, like the teachers who tried to get the NUT Annual Conference to debate an emergency motion which called for the restoration of government grants for housing, education and social services.

One thing all these analyses hold in common is the notion that basically there is nothing wrong with capitalism. They all agree that the priority is not to abolish the system but to patch it up; any conflict between them is over how much patching up is needed, and where, and whether it can be afforded right now. The most visionary among them misconstrue Brixton as the result of malignant government policies and harsh police methods; the least visionary misinterpret the riots as .the malignant response to a benevolent, natural order of things.

From this it is clear that capitalism is OK; Whitelaw would hardly have chosen anyone who was likely to say differently. The Home Secretary is a tirelessly courteous man who resembles a friendly sea lion but that should deceive nobody. His plump, fatherly demeanour hides an iron determination to do as capitalism requires, at whatever cost to an undoubtedly kindly disposition.

How then should an enquiry into Brixton proceed? Well first there is the character of the place and the question of whether this is unique or even unusual. Brixton is not one of the world's beauty spots. Arterial roads suck in heavy traffic; there is the prison of grim infamy and, near the Town Hall, there is Rushcroft Road, where the fascists once jammed the streets with their malignant prejudices. The area was largely an Edwardian development and it has streets of substantial villas of that period, now run down and multi-occupied by the more depressed strata of workers. A study of the southern part of Lambeth in 1976 found 18 per cent of the housing in poor condition and 42 per cent of the people there in shared accommodation. These statistics represent workers whose deprivation is such that they must concentrate where the rents are lowest, even if that also means where the walls are damp, where the rats run and the floors are rotten. For these workers, survival takes a desperate toll; they are capitalism's social misfits or its unemployable—single parent families, weary pensioners and, inevitably, immigrants.

Like many parts of London, Brixton has immigration written into its history and by no means all the immigrants have come from what is evasively called the New Commonwealth. But it did receive the first imported workers from the West Indies in the early fifties, and they have stayed, raised families and are easily identified by other, similarly desperate workers venting their frustrations on the most accessible scapegoat. 

So, Brixton has become famous for tension as well as for its seedy buildings and its street crime. The Metropolitan Police say that Lambeth ranks second in their entire area for violent crime: in 1980 they recorded 2859 cases. In 1975 a police report stated that 80 percent of muggings—quick, violent, usually small scale street robberies—were committed by young blacks and that 85 per of the victims were whites. These figures were triumphantly used by racist organisations like the National Front, would not be anxious to emphasise inherently subjective element involved in any criminal statistics. Workers who were already in a panic at the decline in the fabric of the area might have concluded that they were surrounded by black thugs, that 80 per cent of the black youngsters were muggers. But the same report said that only 4 per cent of youngsters were involved in street crime, suggesting that the overwhelming majority of them keep to the law. 

Brixton's street crime gave it a deserved reputation for being about the most intensively policed part of London. It regularly returned the highest figures, outside the West End; for arrests for Sus, the offence which ropes people in not for actually committing a crime but for a couple of policemen think that they are contemplating one. Brixton has also had unusually frequent attention from the Special Patrol Group, which stopped thousands of people in the streets for spot checks and arrested hundreds of them. The police justified these tactics by a sharp fall in reported street but in the process, to some extent, they replaced the muggers' violence with their own. Contact with the SPG is not a tranquilising experience. Brixton bubbled like a volcano; the police tried even harder to hold the top down but in the end it had to blow up.

The riots were seen by many workers as authentication of the doom laden prophecies which have emanated from Enoch Powell, beginning with his infamous 1968 Birmingham speech in which he foresaw "the River Tiber foaming with much blood". Perhaps Powell feels that his reputation for rigourously logical thinking has been sustained. But there were others who also foretold the trouble which can be expected from crowding a specially depressed population into a decayed area and subjecting it to pressures such as racial discrimination, chronic poverty and state violence. Powell's contribution—if it can be described as such—is to blame the riots, and indeed much of the conditions in which the riots happened, onto the skin colour of the rioters. The famous logician Powell is here indulging in the fallacy of a self-fulfilling prophecy, which may be comfortable for him and which may appeal to the more ignorant and prejudiced among the working class but which is not logical or reasonable .

Even Scarman will probably be aware that Brixton is not unique, either now or in the past. In 19th century Britain, for example, the appetite for labour stimulated by the Industrial Revolution drew masses of Irish workers to this country. They came mainly to escape from the appalling famines in Ireland; with only their working abilities to sell for their living they came looking for employment, cramming into towns like Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow. By 1851 they made up nearly 3 per cent of the population and, doing mainly unskilled work in textiles and building, they were in competition with equally desperate English workers for jobs and housing.

These were the roots of the discrimination which was practised against the immigrants, with "No Irish" signs up at .the windows and 'employers keeping English and Irish workers apart to avoid trouble at work. Even so there were riots and battles over many years, as one group of degraded workers fought with another over who should be exploited and repressed at one particular place and time. By the end of the century the Irish had become largely absorbed but they had been replaced as the butt of popular prejudice by the Jews, with an Enoch Powell—Tory MP Major Evans-Gordon—rousing mob ignorance for his own political advantage.

Then, as now, deluded workers were avoiding the reality that problems like slums, unemployment, poverty and competition for jobs cannot be laid at the door of an immigrant work force. Capitalism both creates the demand for that work force to be mobile and the urban concentrations in which it must try to survive. For capitalism works by the production of profit, which means by the exploitation of the majority of its people. For capitalism, profitable is beautiful: cheap is beautiful; so often slums are beautiful; conflict is beautiful; ugliness is beautiful. Brixton is beautiful.

And all of this, in 1981, can come into focus on the streets of some urban desert, when a black youngster is stopped by a policeman whose uniform gleams with the authority of one whose job is to protect the minority rights and privileges of the capitalist class which is responsible for the desert. If that same policeman also represents working class prejudices he may treat the youngster to some racist insults. If the focus becomes sharper, like the rays of the sun, there can be a conflagration in which those youngsters might feel that in some undefined way they are getting some of their own back as they riot and burn and loot.

And in that too there was an irony, in Brixton, because as a working class area, the shops specialise in the tawdry rubbish which is all that impoverished workers can afford. The looters were not getting their own back; in what they thought of as their freedom to take what they liked they were in fact affirming their own degradation. .

The conclusion of this enquiry then is that Brixton is not unique in either time or place. There have been many other, similar, riots in many parts of the world and there will be many more for as long as capitalism continues to exploit and repress the majority in the sordid interests of the minority. Here are the roots of Brixton's agony; they will not be approached by any official enquiry no matter how rigorous. The workers of Lambeth, of London and of the world are in a crisis which it is in their own power to end and they should need no judge to tell them what is wrong with society.

Ivan