While the British ruling class were clearly caught off guard by the explosion of anger which followed the police killing of Mark Duggan in Tottenham on 4 August, they should hardly have been surprised. It has been on the cards for years that increasing inequality and the destruction of state welfare would result in such an outpouring of frustration, and in fact the state has been preparing for just such an eventuality since 1981. Nicki Jameson reports.
Following the revolt that swept through London, Birmingham, Manchester and other cities between 6 and 9 August, state revenge began swiftly and is set to continue for a considerable time and to affect the lives of tens of thousands of people. There have already been up to 5,000 arrests nationwide. In London alone, as of 20 September, 2,590 people, a quarter of whom are children, had been arrested and 1,507 charged. There have been over 620 arrests in Birmingham, 335 in Manchester, 125 in Nottingham and 200 in Merseyside. More arrests remain on the cards, as police continue to trawl through CCTV, upload ‘rogues’ galleries’ on the internet and conduct raids on the homes of suspects.
Magistrates’ courts in London have been sitting around the clock. FRFI comrades visited Highbury Magistrates Court and reported on the proceedings:
‘We sat in the crowded visitors’ gallery of the court, where 25 people were crammed into seating for 18, with relatives, friends and supporters, who were seeing the defendants for the first time after a week in custody. The defendants, young men aged 16 to 21 years, appeared in groups in the dock – they were not connected with each other – did not know each other and had been arrested in different areas on separate charges. Each had a solicitor, but it was clear that lawyers had minimum information about their clients. No pleas of guilty or not guilty were taken but the court’s presumption of guilt was very clear. Everyone with a previous conviction, anyone the judge considered a threat, and anyone who was said to have run away from the police, whether carrying stolen goods or not, was remanded in custody…
‘There is a youth court at Highbury but it was decided that the juveniles be treated as adults. These young people were dealt with four at a time, with some implication that they were associated and therefore a ‘group’ – but relatives told us that they had never met one another. In future hearings younger prisoners will give evidence via video link instead of being brought to court. Youth prisoners even seem to have been remanded in adult prisons, which in some circumstances is unlawful. One young boy of 16 was told that as he had been fined for another offence during the custody period, the judge had no hesitation in sending him to an adult prison.’
Those people who pleaded guilty have either been sentenced immediately or remanded for sentencing by the crown court, which has the power to hand out longer sentences. Those who pleaded not guilty were remanded in custody to await trial. A few of the sentences already meted out include:
• Nicholas Robinson (23) from south London – six months for stealing a case of water from a shop
• Michael Fitzpatrick (18) from Manchester – two years and four months for entering looted shops, picking up but dropping some trainers and drinking stolen champagne
• Thomas Downey (48) from Manchester – 16 months for taking looted doughnuts
• Ursula Nevin (24) from Manchester – five months for receiving a pair of looted shorts – reduced to a community penalty on appeal
An 11-year-old boy from Romford, Essex was given an 18-month youth rehabilitation order for stealing a waste-bin, worth £50, from Debenhams and an 11-year-old girl from Nottingham, who had been remanded in custody prior to appearing in court, was given a nine-month referral order for throwing stones at shop windows.
Behind bars
62% of defendants awaiting trial are being remanded in custody, in comparison to a general figure of 10% of people appearing in magistrates’ courts on similar offences. Even prior to what the chair of the Prison Governors Association described as a ‘feeding frenzy’ of imprisonment, the prison population was already staggeringly high, having doubled during the course of the Labour government’s time in office. On 5 August 2011 prisons in England and Wales (not counting immigration detention centres) held 84,884 prisoners. State vengeance on ‘rioters and looters’ ensured that by 12 August it had risen to 85,324, by 19 August to 86,054 and by 26 August to 86,233.
Repression – Labour paved the way
Following the night of most widespread rioting in London on Monday 8 August, police were drafted in from all over England, Wales and Scotland. On Tuesday 9 August vast areas of the city were occupied by a paramilitary force and subjected to what was effectively a curfew. Heavy policing continues across many areas of London, with many external police forces remaining in the capital. Young black men, who are already disproportionately targeted for stop and search, are being subjected to continuous harassment. In just one typical incident, on 29 August an FRFI comrade witnessed officers from Strathclyde police searching groups of black youths in north London, using the pretext of a weapons search under Section 60 of the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act.
On 15 August Prime Minister David Cameron made a speech in which, alongside the predictable strong attack on anyone who had participated in ‘rioting’ or ‘looting’, he lined up a long list of other ‘culprits’ – single mothers, liberal teachers, human rights lawyers, bureaucrats who have policemen filling in forms instead of cracking skulls – and announced more repression to come:
‘Already we’ve given backing to measures like dispersal orders, we’re toughening curfew powers, we’re giving police officers the power to remove face coverings from rioters, we’re looking at giving them more powers to confiscate offenders’ property – and over the coming months you’re going to see even more.’
All the measures which Cameron refers to are in fact already law, having been introduced by the 1997-2010 Labour government. Labour Prime Ministers and Home Secretaries understood well that the increasing social inequality they were presiding over would lead to simmering discontent that could explode at any time and they systematically tooled up the state with every conceivable repressive measure in preparation.
In addition to a staggering 4,200 new criminal offences and a punitive new sentence structure based on indeterminate sentencing, Labour brought in a whole secondary apparatus to police the alienated working class, under the name of fighting ‘anti-social behaviour’. ASBOs were first introduced in 1998 and by 2007 nearly 15,000 had been issued. The 2003 Anti-Social Behaviour Act added further powers to issue injunctions and parenting orders, close premises, evict ‘problem’ tenants and set up dispersal zones, whereby any group of two or more people (who do not need to be breaking any law) can be compelled to leave by the police or face arrest.
Colonial policing
All this has taken place against a backdrop of yet more repression in the context of ‘fighting terrorism’. The Labour government introduced five anti-terror laws, each more draconian than the last. These wide-ranging powers have been used predominantly as a form of harassment – so far of the Muslim community, but potentially against anyone the British state perceives as an ‘enemy within’.
In the 1980s, the British state began to use against striking miners and black people in the inner cities the same kind of paramilitary policing techniques and heavily weighted ‘criminal justice’ powers it had practised for years on colonised peoples in Ireland, Hong Kong and Kenya. In much the same vein, we are now witnessing the same type of repression that has, for the past ten years, been directed exclusively at the Muslim community, being aimed at much wider sections of the working class.
For example, so far four people who posted riot-related messages on Facebook have been convicted of ‘encouraging disorder’ under the Communications Act 2003. Jordan Blackshaw (21) and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan (22) were sentenced to four years’ imprisonment for creating a Facebook event called ‘Let’s Have a Riot in Latchford’. Their prosecution is reminiscent of numerous cases over the past ten years of Muslims being arrested for uploading, downloading or possessing material alleged to encourage or glorify terrorism.
More punishment to come – build resistance and self-defence!
Despite support from many, such as north London Labour MP Glenda Jackson, for the use of the army and water cannon against the rioters, on this occasion the government stopped short of such action. This appears to be to a large extent due to fear of alienating tourists, especially in the run-up to the Olympics. Further, an admission that they had lost control in the capital and other major cities would not help the credibility of either government or police.
However, the state certainly has the power to impose a military solution, should it wish to in future. In 2004, under Labour, Parliament passed the Civil Contingencies Act, whereby, in response to ‘serious threats to the nation’, the government has unprecedented power to prevent people from leaving or entering any area, to deploy troops, ban gatherings, requisition property, disregard existing legislation and hand complete rule of areas to ‘resilience bodies’ made up of regional co-ordinators, military commanders, police chief constables and council controllers.
The Labour government has provided the ConDem Coalition with an armoury of laws and a massive prison estate, which will continue to be used to exact vengeance on the working class population for daring to challenge the power structure. But repression will not solve the problem for the ruling class. Further resistance is inevitable. It is now vital that activists become involved in support for those who are being tried and imprisoned, that the tasks of informing people about their legal rights and defending communities under attack are prioritised, that police harassment is monitored and challenged, and that a strong working class self-defence movement is built to resist the onslaught to come.
Super-cop takes on the gangs
In his 15 August speech Cameron announced: ‘A concerted, all-out war on gangs and gang culture…a major criminal disease that has infected streets and estates across our country.’ Cue US ‘super-cop’ William Bratton, Cameron’s new adviser on gangs. As well as having been chief of police in Los Angeles, a city widely associated with ‘gang warfare’, Bratton was instrumental in working with New York Mayor Rudi Giuliani to introduce Quality of Life (QOL) and Zero Tolerance (ZT) policing. The ‘Quality of Life’ is that of the mainly white middle class, which is perceived as threatened by the mere existence of poor working class people on the same streets as them; ‘Zero Tolerance’ is for the others.
Bratton and Giuliani adopted the ‘broken windows theory’ of right-wing criminologists James Q Wilson and George Kelling: the doctrine that preventing ‘disorder’ prevents crime and violence. Police were advised to control ‘panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers, prostitutes, loiterers, and the mentally disturbed’ and enforce laws against public urination, graffiti and drunkenness, thereby creating an atmosphere of regulation which would somehow help prevent brutal crimes like rape and murder. British fans of this approach include Cameron, Tony Blair and Jack Straw.
ZT/QOL policing appeared to be a success – between 1994 and 1998 overall crime in New York dropped 43%. However, during the same period complaints of police brutality increased by 62% and the New York City administration paid out over $100m in damages for police violence. Bratton’s response was ‘That’s too damn bad’. (Quoted in Lockdown America – Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis by Christian Parenti)
Bratton is not popular with the British police and Home Secretary Theresa May vetoed the suggestion he take over as Metropolitan Police Commissioner. The focus on ‘gangs’ is also clearly a red herring and even according to the government’s own estimates, less than a fifth of those arrested are involved with any gang.
FRFI 223 October/November 2011
