Between the Lines: No sense in censorship (1994)

The Between the Lines column from the May 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

No sense in censorship

The government is currently proposing an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill which seeks to ban videos which present what is termed "an inappropriate model for children". This follows allegations that the behaviour patterns of children are being adversely affected by violent video films which are sometimes "cut" for TV or are shown at times that children aren't supposed to be watching.

The Liberal intelligentsia, ever-watchful of further moves towards censorship, is already on the attack, as well it might be. The idea that "video nasties" are a prime mover in causing psychological disturbance is being seriously questioned, particularly — as today seems to be the case — if it is being put forward as virtually the sole explanation of rising violent crime today, by the government. One letter-writer to the Guardian (7 April) repudiated the government’s analysis well enough:

"I eagerly await the archaeological and historical evidence that Caligula and Nero were regulars at the local XXX-rated "adults-only" cinema, that Torquemada was a closet Texas Chainsaw Massacre fan, that Genghis Khan's bloody rampage across Asia and Europe was a search for more horror movies, that the Waffen SS ’s idea of a good night in was a few cans and some video nasties, and the discovery of the VCR from Mr and Mrs Stalin '.v living room on which young Josef watched pirated copies of I Spit On Your Grave. How else can we explain the atrocities committed throughout the history of the human race?"

Clearly, violent and other anti-social behaviour did not begin with the advent of such external factors as television and video. But this still leaves another question unanswered — do TV and video on occasion exacerbate tendencies that are already extant in society? They may not be the cause of psychological disturbance and violent behaviour, but this doesn’t mean they play no part at all.

The warp factor

If videos and TV have little influence over children — and adults for that matter — why do the bosses spend billions every year in advertising? Their research shows that TV and video footage can have a major influence on the way people think and act. Other research backs this up. The British Medical Journal in February this year reported the (separate) cases of two teenage boys who were diagnosed as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after watching a spoof BBC1 horror documentary. Regular viewing of violent TV shows and so-called "video nasties" may, therefore, have more deleterious effects than some may wish to think.

This entire debate on the role of TV and video has been given another airing recently with the arrival of a new general of violent cartoon programmes from the United States. In the forefront of this new craze is a cartoon series about two delinquent American teenagers called Beavis and Butt-Head.

Kicking butt

Like a dog that has returned to lick its own vomit, Channel 4 puts out Beavis and Butt-Head late on Friday nights as a replacement for The Word, presumably under the false impression that this will stop children watching it. For those of you who don’t already know', Beavis and Butt-Head are quite an anti-social pair. Their only apparent skill is for starting fires, and in one episode, censored for British TV, they blow up a cat by placing a firework up its backside. They are violent, sexist and only have respect for teenage gangsters older and more daring than themselves.

The supposed intention of this programme’s makers has been to satirize the low-culture world of modern American youth, and by and large, they succeed. But as with other forms of satire, there is a danger. Many viewers, enveloped in the same sort of dire culture as Beavis and Butt-Head, may simply see it as glorification of their lifestyle, just like the Tory racists who thought all along that Alf Garnett was a really good bloke.

Attempts were made to ban Beavis and Butt-Head in the UK for precisely this reason. But banning and censoring programmes doesn’t work. Time and again it has just driven them underground - if the market is there that is all that matters. In any case, censorship — no matter how repellent the programme under consideration — is the reactionary’s way out. Who has the right to do the banning and censoring of things other people might want to watch?

The real problem is not so much that violent, horrific and anti-social programmes and films get made but that capitalism provides such a ready market for them. A society based on cut-throat competition, where everything is to be bought and sold, including humans, degrades and brutalizes us all.

The "no future" nihilism of Beavis and Butt-Head is a particularly worrying manifestation of this and it has to be countered by socialists in open debate. One thing is for sure — capitalism will not be able to tame the horrors it has so far unleashed. Only a socialist society dedicated to peace and co-operation can do that.

Dave Perrin

New act in the courts (1992)

Cartoon by George Meddemmen

From the October 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

As they happily go about their business of committing crimes, criminals may not be aware that this month the new Criminal Justice Act came into operation. Normally, it would not be worth mentioning the arrival of yet another piece of law in this field, but this is the most far-reaching such Act for a very long time and what is called the criminal justice system is threatened with chaos as the courts, the prisons and the police try to digest the changes brought in by the Act.

The very words criminal justice have an interest of their own for they imply that someone who is suspected of a crime has a legal right to be told about the charges against them and to have the truth of them assessed without bias or prejudice by a court which, if it decides the defendant is guilty, will sentence them in the same objective way. If something goes wrong and an innocent person is found guilty, the appeal machinery exists to put the matter to rights. So if you haven’t done anything wrong you have nothing to fear; and if you have done something you will be dealt with fair and square.

So that's alright, then. Except that that proposition has only to be stated to expose its fallacy. Every day, the courts and the prisons are full of people whose response, if they were told about the essential goodness of the criminal justice system, would be a bitter, hollow laugh. With damning regularity—as in the case of the West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad—evidence emerges which shows that this cynicism is completely justified.

Changes
In any case criminal justice is not something which is consistent. At one time it can mean harsher penalties from the courts, at others more lenient. It once meant that some prison sentences had to be suspended—until another Act decided that that was not just. A few years later it meant the substitution of Youth Custody for Borstal training; more recently it has meant a deliberate policy of keeping younger offenders out of custody. With the new Act, criminal justice means that imprisonment should be reserved for only the most serious offence.

The changes brought about by the latest Act are too numerous to mention here. Some will be welcomed by the more neurotically punitive sentencer, like the combination order (which in practice is not expected to be available as a magistrates court sentence) which combines a period on probation with a community service order. Others may not be so welcome—fixing the size of fines by units, the number of which depends on the seriousness of the offence, multiplied by the “disposable income" of the defendant. The Act is intended to abolish the halllowed custom which encouraged courts to dish out punishment for the offence before them, adjusted to take account of a defendant's previous offences. So no more shall we hear puffed-up magistrates and judges address the quivering prison-bound wretch in the dock in such terms as “You have an appalling record, which leaves me with no choice but to . . .”. Another part of the Act which is unlikely to be welcomed by the courts is the requirement that people should be sentenced for the offences they have committed—which means not to set an example to others. This should mean the end of that traditional preamble to a sentence which began “There is altogether too much of this going on at present. This court wants the message to go out that it will no longer be tolerated. So we are going to sentence you to . . .”.

There will also be big changes in how the time to be spent in prison is calculated, how much of a sentence is served behind bars and how much under the less obvious, but nevertheless powerful, restraints of licence in the community (of which more later). It is open to question whether in the long term these changes will have any real effect. Whatever parliament says, the courts have usually been able to ensure that the people they send to prison do roughly the time the courts think they should. It has been simply a matter of adjusting the length of sentence to take account of the possibility of early release on parole, or licence or whatever. Finally, there are two requirements of the new Act which will be as ineffective as they are welcome to the ever-hopeful penal reformers. One is the sharper distinction to be drawn between offences against property and those against the person.This is in response to the many recent cases in which property was clearly valued higher than human safety, which is perfectly in tune with the basis of capitalist society and its morality.

It remains to be seen whether courts actually do treat people who have stolen large amounts of money more leniently than those who have injured someone. Another reaction to fashionable outrage is the Act placing a statutory duty on everyone in the criminal justice system, including the police, lawyers and the courts, to avoid discrimination on any grounds such as race or sex. Like “criminal justice’’, that sounds very re-assuring until we remember, for example, the repeated declarations by successive Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police, that racism will not be tolerated in the force—and contrast this with how the police actually behave towards black people on the streets or in the fastness of their stations.

Economy
The reason for the new Act, with its sweeping changes in policy and application, are not difficult to see. Even under a government which time and time again has declared war on crime, the figures for recorded offences climb up and up. Since Thatcher's coming to power in 1979 there has been an increase from 2,536,700 to 5,276,700 in 1991.The traditional response to this is to impose harsher penalties, in particular more prison sentences and longer ones. There are, however, some drawbacks to this policy.

First of all, prison is a very expensive way of temporarily removing someone from the opportunity to commit crime—or at any rate from the kind of crime which goes on in the world outside the prison walls as distinct from what happens inside the prison. The cost of keeping someone locked up varies from prison to prison but for all of them it costs a lot more than it would to send a youngster to public school. On top of that, the evidence is that prison is not effective in the way it is supposed to be—it does not deter people from crime when they come out. Indeed, through their embitterment, brutalizing, or institutionalizing, or getting a criminal education, it often tends to make them recidivist rather than conformist.

The government's response to this, after years of Green Papers and White Papers, of “consultation” and “debate”, has been to form the policy of dealing with offenders in the “community” rather than in custody. The motive for this is to save money but it is presented as a policy partly inspired on humane grounds because the very word “community” suggests something warm and caring and supportive. That is why we have Community Psychiatric Nurses whose function now is to treat people in their homes when they should be in mental hospitals if the hospitals hadn’t been cut back or closed in order to save money. We have community centres where mentally bedraggled residents of some ghastly estate where alienation was designed into every pre-cast concrete slab are encouraged to tolerate their intolerable lives. We have Community Service under which people have to do unpaid work to “make restitution to society” for their offences. But if such a thing as “the community” exists it does so as a defensive organism against some of the worst of capitalism’s excesses, or to anaesthetize the systems effects in the delusion that a society based on dividing human beings can have refuges of unity.

But dealing with more offenders in “the community” causes political problems because there are few votes to be gained— and a lot to be lost—by a government seen to be soft on criminals. The Tory government's wily response to this, in the latest Criminal Justice Act, is to legislate to keep people out of prison except for the most serious offences but then to treat them in a harsher, more controlling, way in “the community”.This has the added advantage of allowing ministers to make kinky speeches about the innate lawlessness of human beings which can only be controlled by the threat of strict punishment. It is no coincidence that the drafting of the Act and piloting of it through parliament was largely the work of the militant Roman Catholic John Patten, who is now venting his vaunted theories about morality on the education system and its children.

In spite of the theories and claims of the politicians, there is no evidence that the level of crime is affected by Acts of parliament or criminological theories or the vote-catching neuroses of politicians. Crime is just another aspect of the society we live under, dominated by a minority class which lives by the parasitic process of stealing from the majority through the exploitation of our wage labour. This theft is perfectly legal—like much of capitalism's violence against the person—because the parasites have seen to it that there is a huge legal and penal system to make it so, to bring to account anyone who indulges in theft or violence outside the law.

The exploited majority must exist on a lower social and economic level than those who exploit them. Workers in factories and offices are aware of how their social betters enjoy the results of that exploitation, in their sumptuous and glamorous life-styles and their contempt for how the majority are condemned to live. It is not envy which makes workers want to have some of that life-style, but an inevitable struggle to even things up a little. That is what crime is mostly concerned with, for the overwhelming majority it is offences against property and property rights.

In most cases the workers accept their depressed place under capitalism with an apathetic docility, dreaming of ending their misery with a big pools win. In some cases the criminals view it rather differently; theft is a faster, more lucrative way of getting a living and there is always the possibility of the equivalent of scooping the pools—the big tickle. Between these two delusions there is really nothing to choose—and while they persist the ruling class gets on with the more secure and predictable method of legal theft.

Ivan

Letter: In Search of Nebulous Reforms (1994)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

I should like to draw your attention to — and perhaps spark some debate amongst your readers — what I see as a nihilistic attitude developing amongst some Socialists towards reformism.

An attitude appears to be developing that reforms don’t do any good, are irrelevant to the emergence of real socialism, and are therefore not worth bothering about.

This is obviously nonsense. Of course it's true that any reforms under capitalism are nebulous and could disappear at any moment — indeed in the last fifteen years many of the earlier gains have been eroded or diminished — but it's also true that in many areas, reforms over the last 100 years have alleviated distress and provided better working conditions for many. It is far too glib to suggest that these reforms have been granted to the working class by the ruling class in order to consolidate their own position and for no other reason. If it wasn’t for the work of the activists and reformers in the last 100 years, we would be living in a country not unlike South America in the seventies perhaps.

It's perfectly reasonable for someone like myself to support campaigns such as that against the Criminal Justice Bill whilst at the same time recognising that winning a victory in this battlefield is not an end in itself and that socialism is the only ultimate answer to our problems. I’m perfectly capable of holding both positions simultaneously and indeed using the struggle against the Criminal Justice Bill as a vehicle for the propagation of socialist ideas.

Indeed, it’s perfectly reasonable to suggest that some reforms such as free health care, education, housing and perhaps ultimately basic foodstuffs (now there would be a genuine common agricultural policy!) and clothing could be enough to give the average man-in-the-street a taste of what full socialism could be like in its entirety, and we might find ourselves flooded with enough supporters to build the common majority we need to bring about full socialism.

In short, my view is that we should stamp on this defeatist tendency to wash our hands of the real world, and start working to change it to a better one. Socialism won't come about by writing pamphlets and passing them amongst ourselves, it will come about through years of working-class struggle in every field and on every front.

Andy Stephenson, 

Newhaven, Sussex

Reply:
Yes, socialism will only come about through years of working-class struggle in every field and on every front — but for socialism not for reforms of capitalism.

You are quite right too that it is obviously nonsense to suggest that reforms haven’t done any good. Of course some have. Health and safety at work legislation (now being watered down, by the way) would be an obvious case in point. But then we have never taken up the position that reforms do not, or cannot, improve things for workers under capitalism.

Our position is that it is not the purpose of a Socialist Party to advocate reforms. Its purpose is to advocate Socialism. That’s why we were set up and that’s why people join us.

Nor would we deny that as a matter of historical fact struggles by workers have got the ruling class to bring in reforms. But we would make three points here.

First, you underestimate the extent to which reforms which lead to a more healthy and better educated working class do benefit the capitalist class and that this has been an equally, if not more important, factor in their introduction.

Second, if workers had struggled for Socialism instead of for these reforms, they would still have got them — and probably more as the capitalist class made concessions to try to ward off their coming expropriation.

Third, there are other ways of improving things under capitalism than reform legislation: trade unions, tenants associations and like organisations in which workers organise themselves collectively to bring direct pressure to bear on those making decisions that affect their lives. We have always said workers should get involved in such organisations and our members, as workers, get involved in them themselves (and are just as capable as you of recognising that winning a victory in these struggles “is not an end in itself and that socialism is the only ultimate answer to our problems"). But as a party we don’t. We stick to our specific role of campaigning for Socialism.

Where we would take serious issue with you is when you claim that some reforms are relevant to the emergence of real socialism. We recognise that you are not putting the classic gradualist position that a series of reform measures can lead to Socialism step by step (free housing one year, free transport the next, free heating the year after, till in the end everything is free).

But you are suggesting that we should campaign for what might be called “socialist leaning" reforms. Quite apart from the fact that some of these reforms have been enacted (free education, free libraries, etc. exist while free transport has existed in some places) without having the effect on people's ideas you predict, if we were to campaign for them this would inevitably be to the detriment of our campaigning for Socialism.

And, as we pointed out earlier, if we do struggle for Socialism we'll probably get them anyway as a by-product of that struggle. That’s why it is saying that we should struggle for reforms that is defeatist, not the other way round. This is to concede that Socialism is not an urgent necessity, is not the immediate agenda. If you want Socialism, the quickest way to get it is to campaign for it directly. So, if you want Socialism, join the Socialists in that campaign.

Editors

#    #    #    #

If Paddy Small, of Glasgow, would let us know his address (not necessarily for publication) we will gladly consider his letter for publication. We regret we do not publish anonymous letters.

Big Sister is watching you — official (1994)

From the August 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Stella Rimington, who is the Director-General of what is laughably called The Security Service (in short, the spying game) has spilt the beans regarding the dirty work of these government-funded low-lives who earn their salaries by spying on workers considered to be dangerous to the ruling class.

In her 1994 Dimbleby Lecture Rimington provides a definition of subversion which is most instructive: "activities intended to overthrow or undermine parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means". Now, socialists intend to overthrow so-called parliamentary democracy. Our aim is the democratic establishment of full economic democracy. And we intend to achieve this through democratic political means. This, according to Rimington’s definition, is subversive.

So, what do the spies have in mind for subversives? Rimington’s lecture was chillingly candid:

   "The Service set out to identify all the members of these subversive groups and to investigate their activities . . . With the proper legal authority, we may need to tap their telephones, open their letters or eavesdrop on their conversations to find out their intentions. We may have to observe their movements secretly, or recruit members of those organisation as agents to tell us from the inside what is being planned."

Feeling paranoid? Not as much as they are. According to BOSS agent, Robin Ramsay (in an interview cut from a 1981 Panorama programme, but printed verbatim elsewhere), "British intelligence has a saying that if there is a left-wing movement in Britain bigger than a football team our man is the captain or vice-captain, and if not, he is the referee and can send any man off the field and call our man on any time he likes" (Perspectives, issue 8). Who is to know how many of the leaders of the leftist sects are paid confusionists appointed by the state? We have often said that certain left-wing parties have done so much discredit to the cause of socialism that the ruling class could not have done a better job. Perhaps the ruling class have sometimes been doing the job.

Incidentally, these spies are not totally stupid. At one point Rimington mentions that it was "state capitalism" which many of the leftists were on about. And is it quite right that for most of this century many of those calling themselves "socialists" or "communists" (with the unqualified exception of the Socialist Party) were not actually opposing capitalism, but supporting a different version of capitalism, often identified with overseas dictatorships.

As far as this party is concerned. Big Sister and her spies are welcome to observe us. Indeed, we hope that they will learn something about the nature of society in the process. We are a party without leaders. So, they can infiltrate who they like into our ranks (as long as they convince us that they are socialists) and preferably send their spies out to sell this journal for us because somebody has to do it. Unlike the conspiratorial Leninist would-be vanguards, we have no secrets from the working class, so there is nothing worth bugging in the Socialist Party. In fact, in return for a generous donation, we can post our conference minutes and other fascinating documents directly to MI5, with free leaflets explaining the case for socialism to spies looking for a way out of a lousy job.

Down with justice!
The new Criminal Justice Bill is a piece of vicious legislation enacted by legalised criminals in the interest of injustice. The basis of property ownership is nothing less than the legally enforceable right of a small class of thieves (less than five percent of the population) to monopolise the earth and its resources at the expense of the wealth-producing majority. Any laws passed to solidify this freedom of thievery is deemed by them to be Justice; offenders against the holy law of property power are called Criminals. Hence the Criminal Justice Bill.

The Bill, which will give sweeping new powers to the police against workers in conflict with the rights of property, is another in a long line of attacks upon the ever-limited freedoms of the working- class majority in society. The powers given to uniformed boot-boys (themselves working-class mercenaries, of course) against homeless people who squat in unused properties or occupy available land will result in more misery and poverty for wage-slaves who have refused to knuckle under the conventional property code of the system. In truth, the idea of beating capitalism by squatting in empty houses (usually slums) or retreating into some ill-defined and rather uncomfortable "New Age" has always been a non-starter; but now the state is out to teach these workers just how unfree they are.

The new law contains fresh powers to control and suppress free assembly, including the rights of police to close down public gatherings of workers. Our rulers have never liked the idea of workers meeting together; our collective intelligence has always been a threat to them. In the last century they passed the infamous Gag Acts, laws forbidding more than six workers to meet in one place without the permission of a magistrate, and Sedition Acts which made it a conspiracy to advocate workers’ freedom. In 1819 they showed their democratic credentials when they massacred a peaceful crowd gathered to defend free speech in Manchester: the British Tiananmen Square. The new law being introduced now, which is partly the opportunist creation of a desperate Thatcherite Home Secretary who is anxious to keep his job by appealing to the class-spite of his party supporters, is no more than a continuation of the British state’s long-standing antagonism towards democratic freedoms for workers.

Capitalist democracy is something of a joke. Their justice is a sick joke. And when a class which has stolen the wealth of the world and spat on the liberties of the wealth-producing majority lectures us about threats to democracy and justice we are determined to be more openly subversive to their system than ever.

Steve Coleman

The Criminal Justice Bill (1994)

Editorial from the December 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Maybe next it’ll be curfews. The owning class are winning hands down at the moment, and we the working class are not doing much to stop them. Partly it’s this long recession that has so badly affected workers’ organisations. Poverty saps the will to fight back. Poverty sows disunity as much as discontent. The owning class use poverty against us the way a terrorist uses bombs — to frighten and weaken us. The audacity of the Criminal Justice Bill is a measure of what they think of us. Fearful, impotent, we look on as our hands are tied, our feet chained, and our pockets raided. And now they are surpassing themselves, with a frontal assault on our power to organise and defend ourselves.

This is happening because the ownership of the entire world is in the hands of a tiny minority of people. They use this ownership to subjugate the rest of us in almost every conceivable way. We resist, but we never think of questioning their property rights. We never think of abolishing the law of private property which gives them their enormous power in the first place. Instead we go on marches and grumble.

If you believe in human rights and in democracy, remember this: you will never be free until the Earth is free, and the Earth will never be free while it is held in private hands. Capitalism makes us trespassers in a world that should belong to us all in common, let’s organise to take it back.

The Criminal Justice Act: The Icing on the Cake (1995)

From the January 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Few issues in recent years have caused as much confusion as the Criminal Justice Bill (now the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994). The deranged hangers and floggers of the Tory right believe it will curb crime. The reformers of the left claim that it destroys "democratic rights" to picket, to assemble and to demonstrate. This is fantasy, no such legal rights existed in the first place.

Just look at some of the powers the police already had.

Police powers

In 1978 the Labour government's Criminal Law Act introduced the statuary offence of conspiracy, defined as an agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime. No crime need actually be committed for a conspiracy to have taken place, only an agreement to commit a crime. The Act does not define what constitutes an "agreement" and in practice evidence that the accused had a common aim is sufficient to imply that an agreement has been made. There need only be one accused, incidentally, as a single person can be charged with "conspiracy with persons unknown". Effectively, then, anyone can be arrested at any time if they are suspected of having agreed to commit a crime, even if the person(s) with whom the agreement is alleged to have been made are unidentified and the crime itself has not even been committed.

In addition to this, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984 gives police officers power to stop and search persons or vehicles if they have reasonable grounds for suspecting that they will find stolen or prohibited articles. The same Act bestows upon JPs the authority to grant a warrant to enter and search premises if they are satisfied that the officer who made the application has reasonable grounds for believing that a serious arrestable offence  has been committed and that there are materials relevant to the investigation and prosecution inside. What exactly constitute "reasonable grounds" is left unclear. "Serious arrestable offence", a central concept in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, is defined as one which has led, its intended to lead or is likely to lead to any of the following consequences: serious harm to the security of the State, public disorder, serious interference with the administration of justice, death, serious injury, or substantial financial loss/gain. Just as under the Criminal Law Act it is the police who can decide what constitutes an agreement to commit a crime, so under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act it is the police who decide the intention and likely consequences. These "discretionary powers" made police powers of arrest and entry virtually unlimited even where no crime has been committed, and this was before the Criminal Justice Act became law.

The Public Order Act of 1986 requires that written notice be given to the police of any proposed marches and demonstrations. If the senior police officer reasonably believes that a march or demonstration may result in serious public disorder, damage to property, disruption to the community, or that it has been organised for the purpose of intimidation, he may "give directions imposing on the persons organising or taking part in the procession such conditions as appear to him necessary to prevent such disorder, damage, disruption or intimidation" (S. 12. 1b); the wording of the Act suggests that conditions may be imposed even after the march as begun.

If the senior police officer reasonably believes that powers under section 12 are insufficient for the prevention of any of the above he apply to the district council, for an order banning the march which may be granted with the consent of the Secretary of State.

Section 14 grants similar powers to the senior police officer in relation to public assemblies (e.g. picket lines, rallies and outdoor meetings, etc), though not to the extent of outright bans. The "senior police officer", incidentally, is defined as "the most senior in rank present at the scene" (S. 14. 2a), the implication being that even a single police constable present at a public assembly (defined as 20 or more people in a public place), and who reasonably believes it to be causing a disruption, may impose on those taking part in it such conditions as appear to him or her necessary to prevent further disruption. In other words the police already had the power to break up a public meeting. It should be clear that even before the advent of the Criminal Justice Act the "democratic rights" the reformists speak of existed no more in law than they did in reality. Strikers at Orgreave and Wapping, travellers at the Beanfield and protesters at the anti-poll tax march in London, all found their "democratic rights" to picket, assemble and demonstrate instantly terminated on the arbitrary whim of police and bureaucracy without the Criminal Justice Act.

While it might be pointed out that the Act extends the power to impose banning orders on processions to cover public assemblies and introduces a new power to impose a five-mile exclusion zone on any place subject to a banning order, it is no less true that police and local authorities have already used bans and exclusion zones to prevent public gatherings on numerous occasions, even without the explicit statutory power to do so—at Summer Solstice gatherings at Stonehenge, for example—and exclusion zones have been used to prevent travellers reaching the Glastonbury festival.

Law and Order

It is with regard to travellers and their (alleged) freedoms that much of the concern about the Criminal Justice Act has arisen, but again existing legislation already makes these freedoms illusory. Under the Caravan Sites Act of 1968 designated local authorities have the power to order trespassers to leave land, while under section 39 of the 1986 Public Order Act the police may order those who trespass or damage property with vehicles to move on and arrest them if they fail to comply. The Criminal Justice Act extends the Public Order Act's reference to "damage" to include "damage to land", defined as widely as to include walking across a field, and extends the powers of the 1968 Caravan Sites Act to all local authorities but no longer requires that those concerned actually be trespassers in that there need not be any request from the landowner to leave; absence of consent is enough. Should the "trespassers" be there with the landowner's permission then the landowner can be charged with offences relating to unlicensed caravan sites under an earlier (1960) Caravan Sites Act.

The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act is an attempt by a weak and unpopular government to mobilise its supporters against what appears to be a resurgent Labour Party. We need hardly point out that much of the Tories' support comes from bigots whose tolerance level is akin to that of the Tonton Macoutes and who would more than welcome the restoration of public floggings and executions for the most trivial offences. They are, as ever, complaining that "crime"—basically anything they don't approve of—is on the increase, and so are demanding a good dose of "law and order" (i.e. state-managed persecution), which the Labour Party have promised to give them.

The Criminal Justice Act is intended to counter this by reasserting the Tories' traditional role as the "Party of Law and Order". It consists of a lot of tough talk but introduces little if anything that is new, merely tightening up existing legislation and legalising policing actions that were previously of a somewhat dubious legality. Nevertheless, the bait has been swallowed by all concerned; the right have rallied to the Act as the new symbol of law and order while the left have mobilised to oppose it, providing the right with an instant enemy to unite. Thus the Labour Party are outmanoeuvred; unable to oppose the Act for fear of being portrayed as "soft on crime", they are unable to support it either for fear of alienating their left camp-followers.

What democracy?

Just as the reactionaries of the right claim to be guardians of "law and order", so the reformists of the left pose as the defenders of "liberty and democracy". Despite all the left's radical rhetoric and militant posturing the campaign to prevent the Criminal Justice Bill becoming law was a pathetic failure and, in the extremely unlikely event that the second round of this crusade succeeds in getting the Criminal Justice Act repealed, then the same powers conferred by it can quite easily be brought back onto the statute book by a series of quiet backdoor amendments to the various Acts referred to above. And even if this doesn't happen it won't prevent such powers being used because, as noted, they were already being used anyway.

The reformists seem oblivious to the fact that for democracy to be defended it must exist in the first place. Democracy means literally "the people rule" (demoskratos). Unless qualified (and democracy qualified is no democracy at all) "the people" must be taken to mean every single living human being without distinction of age, sex, "race", etc; and what they rule is everything—every single aspect of their community existence. That no such state of affairs prevails within capitalism need hardly be emphasised. The political reality of capitalism is class conflict between those who work but do not own and those who own but do not work. For the most part it is the owning class who have the upper hand in this conflict by virtue of their control of the state apparatus, via their representatives in Parliament, by which they can physically force the working class to submit to their rule.

Actual physical force, however, is generally unnecessary; the owning class's representatives issue directives in the appropriate form and make known the punishments that await those who fail to comply (this is what is meant by "law and order"). As part of this process they present these directives as being in the interests of the whole of society, an illusion reinforced by the fact that the representatives if the owning class are elected to Parliament by universal suffrage. This is the extent of capitalism's claim to be democratic: that we may give our endorsement to one party of capitalism's hirelings over another and in so doing give our consent to whatever these people do while in office.

This is not real democracy. This can only exist where is no ruling class and no repressive state apparatus, where the whole community, rather than a parasitic clique, have control over society's productive and distributive resources enabling each individual to have free access to the goods and services they need to live. It will never be achieved by engaging in futile campaigns to repeal pieces of legislation that are nothing more than the legal expression of the state's already existing arbitrary powers, powers derived from the support given to corrupt capitalist politicians in elections, which, ironically, the reformists persistently urge us to do.

Ian Simpson