Who Should Pay For The Capitalist Police?

The Tories are again trying to close down democracy by banning the right to protest, just as they have closed down the right to strike for large numbers of workers, and imposed conditions on all other workers that make it very hard, conditions that are not applied to any other sphere of life.  The Tories claim that these new proposals are required because of "mob rule", by which they mean the fact that hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets to protest at the fact that the Tories and their Blue Labour shadow have given full support to the genocide being undertaken by the Zionist state against Palestinians, and have been helping to arm and facilitate their genocide.

This amounts to a repeat of the "anti-Jacobin" wars conducted by reactionaries at the end of the 18th, beginning of the 19th century, that introduced the Combination Acts, against trades unions, and lambasted all liberal, progressive thinkers of the time, such as Tom Paine, Wordsworth, Shelley et al.  Ironically, it was those radical ideas coming out of the French Revolution, and promoted by the likes of Paine that were the basis of the American Revolution, as it freed itself from the oppression of Britain, and George III.  It is an indication of just how reactionary, today are the likes of Sunak and Starmer.

Yet, the demonstration including hundreds of thousands of people on the streets of London have been remarkably peaceful.  Proportionally, far fewer people have been arrested than with the average football match.  Some months ago, when Tory Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, warned about the likelihood of such violence, as she called on the police to ban the march, it was, in fact, the fascists that came out, responding in support of Braverman who were the ones who ended up drunk and causing violence, and attacking the police!

All of the hysterical nonsense, again whipped up by the sensationalist capitalist media, followed on from the claims by Speaker Lindsay Hoyle that he had broken parliamentary procedure, and prevented a vote on the SNP motion calling for a ceasefire, and condemning the genocide in Gaza, because of a threat to MP's if they were not seen to be supporting such a motion.  Well, in fact, the reality as exposed both before and after that happened was that it was not threats from "the mob" that led Hoyle to that decision, but threats from Starmer and the Blue Labour PLP, who intimated that his job lay in their hands, after the next election.

The Tories have pointed to the fact that the cost of policing the demonstrations has run into tens of millions of pounds.  Well, there is a simple answer to that, don't use the capitalist police to police those demonstrations.  Indeed, don't use the capitalist police to police workers' picket lines, workers' communities and so on.  The police are there to protect the interests of the ruling class, not workers.  Workers defence Squads can protect workers' picket lines from attack by fascists, and goons employed by employers to break them, and the same is true about policing demonstrations.  Keep the capitalist police out of our affairs.

This came in the same few days that Harry Windsor had spent several million in legal expenses to try to argue that when he comes here from the US, he should get special police protection.  The Tories and he media who currently have a bit of a downer on Harry, were only too keen to quote the court decision that he was not that special, and should pay himself for any special protection.  Well, if MP's and so on feel they need protecting - and given their very vocal support for genocide in Gaza, you can see why they might think that - then let them pay for it, too.