'Just keep off the

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Every year thousands of working class men, women and youth take a decision to join an organisation dedicated to the smashing of workers' organisations.

They are trained to harass youth, blacks, strikers, demonstrators and anyone who is considered a potential threat to the smooth administration of capitalism.

They are those most backward and brainwashed layers of the working class who form the bulk of the police force.

They are the most valuable layers to capitalism because they are needed to physically beat, arrest and punish those class-conscious militants who are prepared to challenge the rule of the state.

But as capitalism lurches from international crisis to international crisis the state needs its increasingly well-paid muscle to be directed by a fully conscious leadership.

Thus the last decade has seen the emergence of a band of police commissioners and chief constables who are among the most politically shrewd and powerful of all the elite groups in society.

Through their astute manipulation of their own forces, their contact with the rest of the legal apparatus, their links with politicians and their access to the media, these men are able to exert a strong and consistent right wing pressure on society.

rascist In many cases the nature of this influence is actually fascist in both application and conception.

The spectacle of Greater Manchester's Chief Constable, Anderton, mobilising thousands of police to escort NF thug Martin Webster on a lone march in 1977 sums up quite succinctly the role the police play in nurturing capitalism's final solution.

Last week's press conference held by Metropolitan police chief Sir David McNee to launch his annual report showed clearly that police leaders feel increasingly able to be brazen about their political views:

"If you keep off the streets of London and behave yourselves, you won't have to worry about the SPG"

Not that the SPG has any qualms about whether people are behaving themselves or whether they are on the streets or at home! On the same day James Anderton (McNee's equivalent in Manchester) burst into print with a carefully timed call for "work camps" for "marauding gangs of youth and men"

Anderton, who since his days with Thames Valley Police has always had a reputation for anti-trade union and anti-youth views, went on:

«Wretched offenders like these, who take the fullest advantage of every meek response to their abominable conduct, should be placed in penal work camps where through hard labour and unrelenting discipline they should be made to sweat as they have never sweated before and remain until their violence has been vanquished by penitent humiliation and unqualified Anderion repentence", Anderton clearly owes his rhetoric to both the Old Testament and Mein Kampf!

Further evidence of the conscious manoeuvrings of such men emerged in a little reported conference last May which drew together all Chiet Police Officers, the Association of Municipal Authorities and the Association of County Councils.

A key speaker was Albert Longharne, Chief Constable of Lancashire.

He voiced the opinions of the police chiefs when he called for "a fully national police force" to. give "cohesive command" in times of widespread unrest:

"I accept the term 'police state' is an expresEnglish. of Pot entire, so i- sion ever, the term is usually a technical one"

Most . of the conference was spent in detailed discussion of the effects on public order of increased unemployment and industrial unrest.

Each chief constable singled out SO called "political violence" as the new threat to "ordinary decent citizens".

The pin-up boy for these ambitious and ruthless men is of course Sir Robert Mark, the Metropolitan Police Chief from 1972 to 1977.

Mark worked his way up from mortuary guard in Manchester to Chief Constable of Leicester in 1957.

After ten years he went to London as Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and spent the next ten years building a previously. unparallelled record of union-bashing, immigrant-harassing and political intervention.

Smokescreen

All this was cloaked in a smokescreen of police reform, busting his most blatantly corrupt officers and generally philosophising on all aspects of life as if Plato and Superman had merged in one smart blue uniform.

Having, resigned over a lukewarm attempt by the government to introduce Tory law order boss Whitelaw token civilian representation on police complaints boards Mark has since used his position to do everything from advertise tyres on television and set up dubious charities to pontificate on law and order in the capitalist media.

His autobiography In the Office of Constable, published last winter is a very revealing document, it you can put up with the nauseating self-inflation and bitterly anti-working class He describes the young copper's life, concentrating on getting plenty of arrests ("usually from the ranks of the unemployed") breaking a man's legs to get him in the police van.

He tells of beating a suspect unconscious so that they had to swathe the man in bandages when he went to court the next day so that the judge wouldn't see he was still unconscious.

But these are just the trimmings, anecdotes that anyone who has been on a picket line or a march or an anti-fascist demonstration would be able to top.