One-sided Scarman? Sca ?

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rs disgusted OUR REPORT on the Scarman Report (Andrew Hornung and Pyushi Kotecha) struck me as one-sided.

The main question which faces revolutionaries now with respect to the police is the relation between direct action and self-defence on the one hand, and public accountability on the other.

While the youth of Brixton this summer took to the streets, the overwhelming view of socialists in the official labour movement was to call for democratic controls over the police. We cannot - as the authors did - simply ignore this call.

One of the unfortunate features of socialist politics on the police has been a tendency to counterpose direct action to accountability. What this wholly arbitrary opposition does is to reflect the material division between Brixton youth and the official labour movement.

Workers' defence squads

can and should be fought for where appropriate; but so should control of the police. We cannot simply ditch the fight to oust racists from the police force, to get rid of murderous chief constables like Ken Oxford, to demonstrate to Oxford's successor that he too may receive the same treatment, to give local authorities the power to keep the SPG off their streets and parliament the power to disband the SPG and like units altogether, to protect the rights of defendants under interrogation, open up the police stations to public scrutiny, etc.

etc.

SWPe WE WERE disgusted to read Martin Thomas's article and also Tom Hart and John Mollroy's column on the Labour Party in Socialist Organiser no.65.

Firstly: Marxists are for Thomas proparliamentary democracy" claims, Since when? Surely there can be no clearer confirmation that Socialist Organiser is in reality a left reformist paper.

Didn't Lenin once say, 'We support the Labour Party like a rope supports a hanging man'. Yet Hart and Mellroy say, 'We support the Labour Party so we can get into Parliament' One can almost hear them straining at the leash to step into Woy and Shirl's shoes! The comrades would do well to read Tony Cliff's excellent four-volume work 'Lenin'. Indeed, imagine Under capitalism workers of course never fully control the police. But what is happening now is that the restrictions which our movement has won over police powers are rapidly being eroded as part of the present class onslaught.

It would be criminal to neglect the defence of existing forms of accountability - - with its implicit dynamic towards an aggressive programme for more radical forms of accountability - as to withhold our support from the I AM writing this letter in response to your feature on the Scarman Report.

Although the figures concerning racial attacks must be much larger than they appear to be, racial abuse is rarely taken into consideration. This not only includes the common use of 'nigger' and 'paki' by everyday racists, but involves refusals to be admitted into pubs and discos, partiality in shopping queues, and underestimation in educational establishments.

To the coloured immigrants of this country, myself included, Whitelaw, the NF and the BM are only the cisg if Lenin had succumbed to the same liquidationist temptations presently seducing Hart and Mellroy, to reabsorb for build a 'Broad Left') in the RSDLP in say 1914 - we woulą have had no Russian Revolution at all!

The comrades are fascinated with the machinations of a handful of pro-capitalist politicians (Benn, P.Tatchell) and union bureaucrats.

It does not matter what happens in the AUEW elections, power lies on the shop floor not in Terry Duffy's office. Ask the lads and lasses at Laurence Scotts - their support has come from other workers in factories Anot from obscure officials in London.

Iran shows this to be true as well. In the struggle against the Shah, the vast mass of workers didn't give