DRIVE OUT THE TORIES WITH MASS DEMOS - not reliance on judges!

Anyone worth their salt will rejoice at the humiliating denunciation of Boris Johnson's illegal suspension of the Westminster parliament by the unanimous decision of all eleven judges in the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court.   


Johnson is an unelected Prime Minister, chosen by 90,000 Tory party members. He used arcane powers resting within the entirely appointed, unelected Privy Council to enlist the powers of the unelected, medieval monarchy to prorogue parliament - to bypass any limited checks and accountability imposed upon him by MPs. 

So, the unprecedented and excoriating verdict of the Supreme Court judges against this marauding would-be dictator, with his Eton-educated sense of upper-class entitlement, is to be celebrated. 

But reliance on the unelected, upper-class judiciary to win justice for the working-class majority against the rampaging Tories is a dangerous delusion, which far too many mainstream (i.e. pro-capitalist) politicians are only far too eager to feed to the population. 

Instead of relying on judges for protection, we need to agitate and organise for action led by the single biggest civic organisation in society, the trade union movement. Which has been all too lacking so far in these tumultuous times.  

Johnson's Classic Trumpism 

Johnson has consciously cultivated the image of a lovable, bumbling buffoon. Far from it. He's a vicious, calculating, dangerous enemy of working-class people, prepared to go to any lengths to maintain the rule of the grotesquely privileged elite that he is an integral part of.

Just one of many illustrative examples: he was the first prominent Tory to publicly call for a ban on the right to strike for public sector workers, while he was Mayor of London. Thus setting the pace and the foundations for the Tory government's subsequent 2016 Trade Union Act - which has erected more and higher hurdles to a democratic majority for trade union action than the average horse encounters at Aintree. 

Now, amidst all the dizzying twists and turns, all the bizarre and archaic parliamentary manouevres, one thing is clear: Johnson is trying to paint himself as ‘the people's champion’, the hero without a cape who is determined to deliver 'the will of the people', only obstructed by the rotten, corrupt politicians. Classic Trumpism. 

Right wing populism designed to fool the people 

The idea of BoJo (or Trump) being the people's champion against the establishment is a vomit-inducing joke. Millionaires standing up for the millions? Aye, right! 

The real and present danger is that by these manoeuvres, posing as the Brexit hardman, Johnson could mop up most of the Brexit Party voters, and with the treachery of his own parliamentary Blairites splitting Corbyn's Labour asunder, win an outright majority in a general election.  

Which would usher in a period of class-war savagery not witnessed since the dark days of Thatcher's dictatorial regime in the 1980s. For Johnson is hell-bent on winning a mandate - through demagogic, populist lies about representing the people against the widely unpopular parliament - to be an uncontrolled semi-dictator, shorn of the checks and balances of parliament. 

Johnson Wants a Trump Deal

Then he would unleash his preferences for ripping up even the limited protections of workplace rights enshrined in some of the more progressive EU Directives (there are many utterly regressive ones too!) - such as on paid holidays, breaks, the Working Time Directives, and "ripping up red tape" on health and safety regulations. Not to mention proposals by the same Tory think tank that initiated Universal Credit which recently recommended retirement at 75.

And his vision of a post-Brexit Britain is based on a Trump Deal, where whole swathes of the NHS would be handed over to US multinationals for profiteering at the expense of public health. 

As an aside, dewy-eyed EU fanatics (SNP and Scottish Green leaders included) should also be reminded that the same plans were afoot under Britain's EU membership, through the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership – TTIP – between the EU and United States. 
In or out of the EU, capitalism means ruthless exploitation for profit, and threats to the single greatest achievement of the post-War workers' movement, the NHS. 

 

Capitalist justice being handed out at Orgreave, 1984

Don't Rely on Unelected Judges for Justice!

It's right to rejoice at the Supreme Court ruling against Johnson's proroguing of parliament, and to use that judgement as an extra argument for his immediate resignation. But when even Labour left-wingers praise the neutrality and righteousness of the judiciary - or fall over themselves with concern at the Queen being lied to by Johnson - they are sowing extremely dangerous illusions, and dodging the central task of helping to build a mass movement of the working class to protect ourselves from the rampages of Johnson and the Tories.

An extra-parliamentary movement, rather than total reliance on parliamentary manoeuvres alone, let alone reliance on the judges for justice (or the monarchy for some mythical neutrality that rises above the murky world of politics).

For starters, the judiciary are divided on this whole issue, with different Court bodies declaring Johnson's actions legal in some, illegal in others. So not a solid defence of democracy there, then!

But far more to the point, justice - like most things in life - is class based.

The Courts have frequently been used to mete out brutal injustice to workers who dare defy the rule and ruin of the rich. 

A Dirty History of Repression 

In the 1970s, Ricky Tomlinson, Des Warren and the Shrewsbury pickets were jailed - and tortured - for their role in a building workers' strike, on trumped up charges, under an obscure law that was exhumed as a weapon against these workers in struggle - the 1875 Conspiracy Act.

In the 1980s, miners and their communities were hammered with the help of the Courts - and the millionaires' media, the police, secret services, undercover use of army personnel, jail sentences and legislation on benefits to starve them into submission. Thatcher and her parasitic, financial wing of the capitalist class were aided by the judiciary as they laid waste to industry and sought to smash the key obstacle to their mission, the organised trade union movement.

Numerous groups of workers and their unions have been denied the right to fight back and resist assaults by the government and employers in Court rulings against democratic majorities in strike ballots.

And that's not to even elaborate on the dirty, inglorious history of the British capitalist judiciary in brutal miscarriages of justice against the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four, the Maguire family, the Hillsborough 96, and countless more.

Speaking at USDAW Annual Delegate Meeting 

Call Trade Union-led Demos

No, we urgently need those in authoritative, leading positions in the trade union and labour movement to stop peddling illusions in the judges and start organising and agitating for rallies and demonstrations to defend the working class against the rampaging attacks planned by Johnson and his upper-class crew. 

At the national Executive Council of my own union, Usdaw - which I was elected onto by the Scottish members last year - I've argued for such action to be fought for in the structures of the TUC and STUC. At the May, June, July and September Usdaw EC meetings I've repeatedly put forward the proposal for the TUC and STUC (plus their equivalents in Wales and N Ireland) to call and mobilise for demos around the theme 'We won't pay for Boris's Brexit'. For putting forward concrete demands in defence of our jobs, wages, workplace' rights, migrant workers' rights, the NHS... with the aim of uniting workers who voted Remain and Leave.  

Nobody disagreed each time I proposed this. All agreed the toxic division in the working class over Brexit must be fought with action and arguments based on the common class interests of workers who voted differently in the 2016 Referendum - introduced by Cameron to fend off Farage and the Tories' own right flank. 

No Call for Action at TUC Congress

As a delegate at the more recent TUC Congress, we heard many excellent speeches on the very same theme of wanting to heal the division in the working class arising from Brexit - including one that particularly chimed with me from Unite's Howard Beckett, about growing up in a country where people were defined by their attitudes to a Border, which he (and I) chose to reject in favour of trade unionism and socialism.

But I sat (and tried to get in to speak!) awaiting a clear call for unifying union-led rallies and demonstrations to defend working class interests - and topple the Tories - in vain! 

Yet even now, at this eleventh hour, that's what is urgently needed, if we are not to sleep walk into a majority Johnson government that feels emboldened to decimate our rights, jobs and services, confident in the belief that the leadership of the TUC won't match fire with fire. 

Posties gear up for huge conflict with cowboy millionaires

Unite the Many Separate Struggles

The heroic fight put up by the united workers of Belfast's Harland and Wolff shipyard - occupying the yard since the end of July, demanding renationalisation to save the yard, jobs and skills, and for a plan based on green energy production - was rightly and roundly applauded at the TUC Congress.

So were the fighting speeches of CWU leaders Dave Ward and Terry Pullinger, as they won the unanimous backing of delegates from all 48 unions present for the planned strikes by 100,000 Royal Mail workers, against the vicious assaults on the workforce and postal service by the latest millionaire cowboy to take over the privatised Royal Mail.

Similar warmth and solidarity was given to other groups of workers waging their own strikes and struggles, including librarians, NHS staff and cleaners in the civil service. 

All of which points to the potential for pulling workers together in action in our common, class interests - regardless of how people voted in 2016 on Brexit.

New generation take action 

Furthermore, a whole new generation could be enlisted to such anti-Tory demonstrations, if calls for defence of workers’ rights, jobs and public services is married to concrete demands for a Green New Deal to combat the climate crisis, creating at least 1.5 million new, quality, unionised jobs and apprenticeships. 

#StopTheCoup Rallies

Substantial demonstrations have been staged against Johnson's brazen trampling on even the vestiges of democracy that capitalism has conceded, in the form of parliamentary elections, under the banner #StopTheCoup. But these have been mostly called - and dominated in terms of platform speakers - by groups wishing to block or reverse the Brexit vote, advocating Remain and claiming undiluted virtues for the EU. By definition, that alienates workers who voted Leave - vast numbers of whom are not racists, but were lashing out their disgust at the establishment's decades of neglect, whether at EU or UK levels. 

No Such Thing as 'The National Interest'

During all the current parliamentary shenanigans, we are subjected to calls for 'a government of national unity' to steer us through the Brexit crisis. 
Loud amongst these voices is that of new LibDem leader, Jo Swinson, who of course draws the line at the notion of Jeremy Corbyn being a caretaker Prime Minister - proffering instead the option of somebody like Tory grandee, Kenneth Clark. 
Hardly a surprise from someone who was instrumental in assaulting sickness and disability benefits; imposing student tuition fees; cutting funding for youth training; preventing caps on fees charged by landlords; and blocking a tax on bankers' bonuses...  in her tenure as a Coalition partner in crimes with Cameron's Tories. 
The same Jo Swinson famously advocated a monument to Maggie Thatcher - something I suspect she didn't highlight in her election manifesto in former mining villages around East Dunbartonshire!

There's no such thing as one national interest 

Two Nations - Us and Them

Instead of peddling the dangerous nonsense of needing SNP, Labour, LibDem and rebel Tory politicians to “come together in the national interest”, we need to recognise there is no such thing as ‘the national interest’.

Which ‘nation’ does this refer to? The 0.01% of the population whose income has tripled, or the millions of workers whose wages have suffered the longest, harshest fall since the time of the Peterloo Massacre, 200 years ago?

The Big Six energy companies piling up mountains of profit, or the million Scottish families shivering through winters due to fuel poverty?

The giant agribusinesses and supermarkets, or the workers turning in desperation to food banks?

It’s the interests of the working class we need to act in defence of; the vast majority of the population.

Instead of perpetuating and exacerbating the Remain/Leave divide, we need action based on the common class interests of working-class people, regardless of how they voted in the false, binary choice offered them in 2016. 

The power of united workers in action needs to be called up 

TUC and STUC - Call Demos to Unite Against the Tories!

The TUC,  Scottish TUC and individual unions should urgently step into the breech and give such a lead, naming the day for mass rallies, then linking together solidarity for those in struggle (like Royal Mail workers, RMT members, etc) with youth climate strikers and working class communities facing the axe of escalating cuts and deprivation. 

The crisis in the Tory party is historically unprecedented. The oldest capitalist party in Europe is ripped asunder. Their appointed Prime Minister now has a parliamentary 'majority' of about MINUS 43! 

They shouldn't be let off the ropes. More than any other single organisation, the trade unions have the potential to give a decisive lead, winning the support of other sections like climate strikers, by calling rallies and demonstrations that could heal the wounds and divisions over the false choices of a capitalist EU or a capitalist Britain.

The time is rotten ripe for trade union and labour movement leaderships to step up to the plate, rather than sit back and rely on judges and parliamentary shenanigans to save us from the savagery planned by the people's enemy, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.

THE STATE IS ROTTEN: Hillsborough, Orgreave, Shrewsbury, blacklisting...

There is something rotten at the heart of capitalism.

Not just a few bad apples, but a whole stinking barrel of cover-ups, collusion in lies, corruption and cruel, class injustice that goes to the very top of society.

But the priceless courage and tenacity of a group of mostly working class people has exposed the corrupt state, and put the Establishment perpetrators on the run.

The jury's verdicts on the Hillsborough Disaster provide devastating confirmation of the cruel deceits, shameless lies and corruption at the tops of the police, the media and successive governments. 

The revelations of details and footage of 96 fans being crushed to death - at the inquests and subsequent TV documentaries - are heartbreaking. Try to imagine what it was like for friends and relatives of the 96, as they sat in the hearings for two long years, listening to police chiefs still trying to blame the fans for this slaughter of the innocents, 27 years on, right up until the jury's verdicts, as they dragged out proceedings in a callous attempt to cover up their own culpability.

Weep in Anger and Admiration

I am far from being alone in weeping every time the issue is mentioned on TV, for the unimaginable suffering of the 96 innocent victims and their families, and survivors (some of whom I knew) whose lives were irreparably damaged after being on the brink of death. Tragedies caused by negligence by police chiefs, owners of the clapped out Sheffield Wednesday stadium, the FA, and a Tory government that vilified working class football fans as sub-human hooligans, herding them into pens like cattle, surrounded by high fences that turned these prisons into a death trap at Hillsborough. 

But grief merges with anger at the systematic campaign to smear and frame the dead, and all Liverpool fans. At the collusion in the Establishment's cover-up between South Yorkshire Police chiefs and the heartless, vindictive Maggie Thatcher and her Tory government. At the disgusting, unforvigeable lies of Rupert Murdoch's gutter press. 

And tears flood too in admiration for the superhuman tenacity of the Hillsborough families and their allies, as they refused to be defeated over 27 years' pursuit of Justice for the 96, their persistence vindicated by the jury's 14 decisions - including that the fans bore no responsibility for the worst sporting disaster in UK history, and that the 96 were "unlawfully killed". 

The detailed sequence of events - the real truth, known to most of us since that fateful day in April 1989, but now officially confirmed by the longest legal hearings in UK history - have been spelt out elsewhere (including in my 2012 blog article). 

From Orgreave to Hillsborough 

To fully grasp the explanation for police attitudes and actions at Hillsborough, and the enormity of the subsequent collusion between police chiefs, government figures, members of the judiciary and a major part of the capitalist media, we have to look back at 1984, and especially to the Battle of Orgreave on 18 June 1984. 

Secret Cabinet papers, released in January 2014 under the 30-year rule, confirmed what trade unionists and socialists knew and argued 30 years earlier. They exposed how the Tories consciously planned to shut 75 pits, wipe out over 75,000 miners jobs, smash the NUM union, and impose destitution on entire communities. They targeted Yorkshire for their opening salvo in a class-based civil war without bullets. And they prepared well, beefing up police pay, police powers and national coordination of police actions - stripping away elements of local control, effectively turning the police into a paramilitary wing of the government and Coal Board bosses. And nowhere more so than in South Yorkshire.

Police trap laid

Three months into the 1984-5 miners' strike to defend jobs, communities and the future, the NUM got word of the British Steel coking plant at Orgreave, near Rotherham (8 miles from Hillsborough) being on the brink of running out of supplies. Temporary closure would have been a mighty boost to the strike, so they called a mass picket to stop lorries carrying coke supplies. 

Up to 10,000 pickets came from far and wide, in magnificent solidarity. To their amazement, buses and cars full of pickets didn't face the usual police roadblocks that had turned Britain's coalfields into a diluted version of apartheid South Africa's pass laws. Instead, police politely invited and ushered them onto the piece of land near the coking plant. Too late, the pickets found themselves surrounded on three sides by massed ranks of about 5,000 police, drafted in from all over the country. 

Police carnage 

As pickets in tee-shirts and trainers - some of them stripped to the waist in the glorious sunshine - peacefully milled around on the hill, unable to get near the lorries, the police unleashed an unprovoked assault. 

Riot police, with helmets, shields and batons, smashed into the front lines of pickets. With military precision, they periodically opened up to let through heavily-clad cavalrymen, mounted police, who charged with long truncheons flying, their horses trampling people underfoot, whacking fleeing pickets' heads as they tried to escape. 

The cavalry charged through the village. An eyewitness recalled seeing a Derbyshire lad sitting on a bridge eating an ice cream, only to have a police truncheon smash through the cone and into his face. Others saw two coppers pin down a Nottinghamshire picket while a third battered him senseless, until an inspector said 'That's enough, you're going to kill him', whereupon they dragged him off and wiped away the blood before photographing the half-dead picket. 

This was unprovoked carnage, a pre-planned display of naked state violence by overpaid thugs in uniform, hired by a frightened ruling class who were out to teach the miners and wider working class a lesson in who rules whom. 

Decades of lies

The physical violence was rapidly followed by shameless violence against the truth. The BBC was as brazen in pumping out lies as the Sun and most of the press. Footage of the police carnage against defenceless pickets was literally reversed, to make millions watching TV bulletins think South Yorkshire Police were acting in self defence from picket violence. Many of the victims of police attacks were arrested and 95 charged with riotous assembly, which at the time potentially carried a sentence of life imprisonment. 

Here's the link with the police action at Hillsborough, five years later: the charges were dropped when documents showed police statements were fabricated, often identical, dictated to junior officers by detectives who weren't even at Orgreave. 

Quietly, in 1991, when pickets sued them for assault, unlawful arrest and false imprisonment, South Yorkshire Police settled out of court, awarding 39 pickets £500,000, which also gagged the miners from exposing the truth. 

Fabrication by police chiefs 

Documents from the Hillsborough case have now exposed not only that the same fabrication of police evidence occurred at Orgreave as at Hillsborough, but that several of the same senior police officers and the same SYP solicitor (identified as 'Mr H') were involved at both! Junior police officers testified that at Orgreave they were told not to write up their reports in their notebooks [which are like sacred documents and are used as gospel by the Courts] - just as happened at Hillsborough. Their statements were often written up months afterwards. 

The Snowman was here!

One of the police top brass active at both events was John Nesbitt, former Chief Superintendent of SYP. He was the stuff of legend during the miners' strike, having ordered coppers in a Range Rover to ram a snowman built by pickets as a petty show of power, only to discover the miners had built the snowman round a concrete bollard, which wrecked the police vehicle, and earned Nesbitt the nickname 'Snowman'! 

He was the one who arrested miners' leader Arthur Scargill at Orgreave, and then tried to claim his head injuries were the result of Arthur falling over before the events that day! But in January this year, at the Hillsborough inquest, a policemen (David Frost) who was there when the 96 died, testified how Snowman Nesbitt - a Chief Superintendent of SYP by then - had met a group of junior officers and told them to alter their initial statements, stating: 

"We have all got to get our stories straight or a lot of senior officers' heads will roll."

Acting with Impunity

The top brass in SYP orchestrated the state thuggery on behalf of Thatcher's thuggish Tory government at Orgreave, to cow miners - dubbed 'the enemy within' by Thatcher - and the wider working class. They unleashed state terrorism that day, and were then encouraged and aided by the Thatcher regime in covering up the truth, slandering and trying to jail their victims. No police officer was ever charged or even reprimanded for assault, let alone perjury and perversion of the course of justice.

Orgreave taught them to think they could act with impunity, an outlook that seeped down the police ranks. And that outlook towards working class people, and arrogant assurance they could get away with lies and fabrications, was sustained by the very same SYP and some of the very same top brass and solicitor five years later. If the state - up to and including Thatcher's Cabinet - hadn't got away with these monstrously corrupt practices at Orgreave, some or all of the 96 might never have died at Hillsborough. 

Orgreave Inquiry 

Top civil servants briefed Tory Home Office Ministers admitting 'mistakes or worse' in the Orgreave policing, but arguing against a public Inquiry for political reasons, and Tory Home Secretary Kenneth Baker publicly declared he was "glad to express my sincere admiration for the work of the police". 

Successive governments - Tory AND Labour! - denied demands for an inquiry into the role of the police and government at Orgreave, to cover up who gave the orders for this display of unbridled state terrorism against its own working class. 

It was only after a BBC documentary in October 2012 that South Yorkshire Police referred themselves to the (ludicrously misnamed) Independent Police Complaints Commission. At one stage, in 2014, the IPCC had to threaten legal action to force SYP to hand over five boxes of documents, which SYP had refused to relinquish for five months, subsequently claiming they were in the hands of their insurers!

The IPCC proceeded to delay and prevaricate over whether a scoping exercise on the evidence merited a public investigation - only to declare 2.5 years later, in June 2015, that "due to the length of time that has elapsed" an Inquiry into Orgreave wasn't appropriate! You couldn't make it up - but they did.

It was also the cataclysmic revelations of the Hillsborough Independent Panel in 2012 that encouraged the birth of the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign, which was further boosted in its demands for a full-blown public inquiry by the recent victory of the Hillsborough Justice campaigners. 

Breaking down the barriers 

Now the barriers erected for over 40 years by a venal ruling class - their police chiefs, judiciary, press and governments included - have begun to crumble and collapse in the face of relentless campaigns by ordinary working class people with extraordinary dedication, based on burning anger at injustice. A public Inquiry into Orgreave is about to be granted. 

The new Chief Constable of SYP, Dave Jones, last week tried to distance himself from the stinking corruption of his predecessors by declaring his support for an Orgreave Inquiry. 

In a very telling declaration from an incredible source - former Manchester Police chief Sir Peter Fahey - the wider guilt of the entire system was hinted at. Describing Orgreave accurately as "a police army of occupation", Fahey went on to call for an Inquiry...

"...into policing of the miners' strike, not just Orgreave, and the role of the police, but also the role of politicians. We need to look at the wider context of the way the police were used and the agenda set for them by government. Clearly it was about national control of the police in pursuit of a political agenda."

Prosecute ALL the Perpetrators!

The truth confirmed about Hillsborough should now lead to prosecution of those who caused the cruel carnage at a football match, at a day's entertainment, but also those up to their necks in decades of systematic lies and fabrications designed to shift the blame from the perpetrators to the victims, in an exercise dripping with class hatred. 

And not just David Duckenfield, but other SYP bosses; the West Midlands Police chiefs who staged a bogus inquiry in full knowledge of the cover-up; the football bosses who ignored safety for short-term profit; the media who smeared and demonized the dead and the city of Liverpool; and indeed the government figures who colluded in the decades of corrupt cover-ups. 

Labour's shame 

And whilst Labour's Andy Burnham is currently basking in the praise heaped on him for ordering, in 2009, the Hillsborough Independent Panel, whose revelations in 2012 blew this tower of lies asunder, there are some stubborn facts we shouldn't forget. In common with the rest of his Labour Cabinet of the time, he'd done nothing to challenge the lie machine until he met a torrent of angry chants from the terraces of "Justice for the 96", when he spoke at Anfield at the 20th anniversary event in April 2009. Worse still, his predecessor Jack Straw cynically deceived the Hillsborough families when Labour won office in 1997, promising them a full-blown Inquiry, then setting up a one-man legal 'investigation' that was stage-managed to conclude there was no justification in holding any Public Inquiry [see my 2012 blog for detailed documentary evidence of this episode].

Systemic corruption 

The Orgreave and Hillsborough scandals are interwoven by a thousand threads, but they are also part of a bigger fabric of state corruption and class injustice. Back in 1972 the Shrewsbury pickets were framed for daring to strike in defence of pay and jobs, with six of them jailed under obscure laws like the 1875 Conspiracy Act, and then drugged and tortured in jail. 

Nor did these practices stop at Orgreave or Hillsborough. Decades of blacklisting in the construction and other industries has ruined thousands of families' livelihoods and lives. Undercover secret service infiltration of protest groups - stooping to sexual relationships and having children with protestors as a cover for spying - are not just the stuff of the excellent recent TV drama, Undercover, but frightenly common in real-life Britain. Recent Tory legislation makes such methods, and state snooping on people's communications, all the easier - and legal!  

System change 

Capitalism is a system of rule and exploitation of the 99% by the 1%. It wouldn't succeed in holding onto power for the ultra-privileged few without a complex web of propaganda, deceit, lies, anti-working class laws, an upper-class judiciary steeped in the same class ideology and interests as the owners of economic wealth - and ultimately the naked brute force of state forces like the police, deployed in times of conflict between working people and those exploiting them.

So we need to press on with demands for full exposure of the methods of all these forces - including their hired politicians - demanding justice for Hillsborough, Orgreave, the miners as a whole, the Shrewsbury pickets, blacklisted workers... 

But to prevent constant repetition of these crimes against the majority working class population by those with power, we need to strive for a socialist democracy, a society where the wealth producers own and control the wealth, and where forces like the police are democratically controlled citizens' forces, not weapons in the hands of a tiny minority class of exploiters and their corrupt politicians.