The State

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Britain's former top police chief Sir Robert Mark last week crashed his way to the centre of the union-busters' election platform.

In an article published in "Security' magazine, Mark-who, as Metropolitan Police Commissioner supervised the brutal SPG attacks on Grunwick pickets and the police violence which led to the death of anti-fascist Kevin Gately in Red Lion Square-likened the trade unions to the emerging Nazis of 1930s Germany:

"In any critical situation in which the law does not support them, the Government of the day-their partner or their puppet according to their view-declares its intention to change the law in their favour.

"This is not unlike the way in which the National Socialist German. Workers Party achieved unrestricted control of the German State between 1930 and 1938.' "

Lest there was any doubt that Mark intended an explicit analogy between the unions and the fascists, he went on to extend it, in condemning what he regards as the excessively concilatory stance of Tory spokesman James Prior:

"Neville Chamberlain's references to Herr Hitler and Signar Mussolini caused as much dismay then as the Shadow Employment Minister's respectful touching of his forelock to the trade unions on television causes now."

It is no coincidence that in the same weok as Mark's: open endorsement of the Tories' main union busting strategy Britain's top judge, Lord Denning also let fly a major attack on the unions, which he described as the "greatest threat to the rule of law"

By "'the law" Denning means the kind of anti-union ruling that he handed down recently against the National Graphical Association barring the union from carrying out blacking to force recognition at the Nottingham Evening Post.

That judgement, an important precedent on which a Tory government would build, amounts to a challenge to the right of any union to carry