Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! no.7 November/December 1980
The new Imprisonment – Temporary Provisions Act has the most dangerous implications for prisoners and for the working class as a whole.
The new legislation allows any building to be used as a prison, by decision of the Home Secretary. It allows for the Army to be used to staff prisons. It allows for the suspension of habeas corpus, which means that a remand prisoner no longer has to appear weekly before a magistrate.
Nobody should be fooled by the fact that the new legislation is entitled ‘Temporary Provisions’. The PTA was also entitled ‘Temporary Provisions’ and now, six years and thousands of arrests later, it is still entitled ‘Temporary Provisions’.
Whether or not this legislation ends with the current prison officers’ dispute, the British government will have achieved its end – to use soldiers in prisons, to use ‘camps’ as prisons, to suspend habeas corpus and, most importantly, to make people in Britain accustomed to such measures. They will also have managed to test the response to such measures. There has been virtually no protest and, indeed, Labour MPs supported it.
This testing of the waters is proving very useful for the British ruling class. For while the pretext for these measures is the current prison officers’ dispute over meal allowances, the actual causes are quite different.
British prisons are so harsh and brutal that more and more prisoners are protesting and fighting back. The response of the British government has been to turn increasingly openly to repressive measures in the prisons. The Labour Government brought the MUFTI squad into being. It was the MUFTI squad, a squad of prison officers in riot gear, who bludgeoned and beat the Wormwood Scrubs prison protestors in August 1979, injuring 53 prisoners. Yet despite the MUFTI squad, despite the use of long stretches of solitary, despite the massive use of ‘zombifying’ drugs – the prisoners continue to fight back. The ruling class therefore wishes to prepare for the day when it will have to use British troops against protesting prisoners.
But the ruling class is also prepared for another and even more threatening development: for the day when workers in Britain undertake widespread struggles against the system which is driving larger sections into poverty. Prisons will then, as they have been in Ireland, come more and more to be used against those who have taken up the struggle against British imperialism. Already we are seeing revolutionary fightbacks such as those led by black people in St Pauls and Southall. From such struggles political prisoners are entering jails here in Britain.
The ruling class wants to be prepared for dealing with both the increasing number of political prisoners and the massive protests which are bound to break out inside the prisons. Hence all the talk in the British press about the need to ‘empty’ the prisons of those who ‘should not be there’ so that the prisons may be reserved for those who have ‘seriously’ threatened the ruling class – either with large crimes against property or with political crimes.
The past 15 years have seen the development of an openly repressive regime, in fact a murderous regime in the prisons. The latest ‘Temporary Provisions’ show that repression reaching greater proportions.
