Curbing the Police

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the police in Britain in 1980 are different from the police. in 1960. Tbey have become less accountable to any democratic body and they have become an increasingly aggressive class force.

Socialists must relate to these distinctions, and not bury them under the general truth that the police are merely capital's mercenaries.

While the working class cannot control the police, it can impose - and has imposed - curbs on the power of the police. The labour movement does not of course control the state, but it does - as a result of its struggles wield influence.

The struggle for that influence is, as Marx and Lenin constantly reiterated, crucial. In part our influence over the police has been mediated by the law (e.g. by winning and defending rights of defendants not to be arbitrarily detained, rights of trade unionists to picket, etc.); in part mediated by official political channels (local police authorities, parliamentary scrutiny of the Homse Office, etc.); and in part wielded directly through our resistance on the streets and in the factories.

Now the ruling class has launched an attack on these avenues of democratic accountability. It has strengthened and centralised the police itself and assailed the legal rights of defendants, pickets, etc. It has neutered the powers of local police authorities and is now pondering their abolition, as part of a wider attack on democratic forms of local government.

Local authority is being transferred to Chief Constables, while at the game time the force is being centralised under the shadow of the Home Office.

Whether we like it or not. Whether we like it the state has taken up the state has taken question of accountability with a vengeance. If we ignore it, it is we who are the dreamers.

It is true that there are those who just 'plead' for accountability, declaring that it is in the state's best interest, and that their only goal is to 'improve police-community relations' But their pleas are becoming increasingly hollowsounding. The smallest grumbling from the Merseyside police committee or from the GLC is met by denunciation and counter-attack by the police and the government.

In the name of 'serving the public" the police can bear less and less actual public intervention. Criticism itself appears in police eyes as a sin against the holy.

I he reality is not, as the leaders would have It, that accountability will soften the contradictions between the police and society. Quite the reverse. It will, as we should appreciate and clearly argue, sharpen these contradictions under the present circumstances.

And the struggle has moved on. The politics of pressure groups have moved to the background, and the Liverpool demonstration for Oxford's sacking can hardly be called pleading.

Even the detensive struggle to maintain the very restricted democratic accountability over the police which previously existed contains the potential, already visible, to move onto the offensive: that is, for the 'community' to demand new powers over the police - to hire and fire chief constables, to disband special forces like the SPG, the PSUs, the Special Branch etc; to disarm the police: to refuse entry to the police into sensitive areas; to scrutinise the hidden world of police stations; to have access to police files; and so forth.

This momentum will not automatically be maintained. should appreciate and clearly argue, sharpen these contradictions under the present circumstances.

Our task as socialists is not to sit on the sidelines of the fight for accountability, but to engage in the fight, to seek constantly to break through the narrow horizons of the reformists, and to use any concessions the workers win to extend the struggle further.

BOB HINE, London. TORIES AT WORK :TION member, so 1 made it my duty to find out. When I did finally find out I was absolutely dumbfounded for it was a member of my own Militant group who had deliberately tried to stop my Labour Party membership, and the Militant didn't do a thing about it, (apart from telling him what a naughty boy he was and not to do it I have now seen the error of my ways and have disowned the Militant, for they are not revolutionaries (or at least not as I see it). My Grandma was more of a revolutionary and she knew nothing about politics.

Yours fraternally, Ex-Militant P.CAIN