[Once again the Sun is in a rage…]

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Once again the Sun is in a rage with the BBC. A TV interview with a member of Mudiad Amdiffyn Cymru (the organisation which sets fire to Welsh holiday homes) brought renewed calls from the paper for a purge of BBC journalists and producers.

The Telegraph meanwhile has been full of irate letters from viewers of Philip Donnellan's BBC 2 programme, Gone for a Soldier, which is said to have depicted the army as louts and thugs.

In both cases the papers react against any 'image' being built in the public mind harmful: to the structure of the state.

This is nowhere more apparent than in the image of the police. In a bourgeois democracy the press does not ignore stories of police corruption, but chooses to portray a 'bad apple' theory in which no-one is more pleased than the police therselves to have the few "Bad 'Uns' weeded out.

This theory has taken a bit of a pasting in recent years with police corruption stories becoming as common a feature of the news pages in the serious press, as are sex scandal vicars in the gutter pre-s.

Sir David McNee, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police wrote a lengthy article in the Sunday Telegraph bluntly headed The Case for the Police.

He covered familiar grourd (Grunwick, Notting Carnival, anti-fascist mobilisations, etc) and used his usual stock of police regulation platitudes. He reserved his sharpest criticism for "those with a particular responsibility for roducing harmony in the com'munity (who) have failed to use their position to counter outrageous and damaging smears -many of which, although aimed at the police, have a profoundly damaging effect, particularly on some of the young."

"I cannot guarantee that no officer of mine will succumb to temptation and commit a corrupt act. I can guarantee that such malpractice will receive swift and full retribution."

McNee writes that cant in full knowledge that Operation Countryman is grinding to a halt in its corruption inquiries because of police obstruction.

Rut it was an accident of timing that McNee's article coincided with Sunday Times publication of the internal Scotland Yard inquiry into Blair Peach's murder last year.

That report, (which McNee has of course supressed), shows that one of five named SPG constables killed Peach and that they had obstructed the inquiry aided and abetted by senior officers.

The story is a good example of the fact that capitalist papers do not always supress the truth when it is harmful to the state. But a debate has being going on among the editors about how far they ought to go.

In an effort to set the record straight (and to calm any feelings of self doubt) the Sunday Times commissioned a poll on what the public thought oi the • According to the MORI poll the police were held in high esteem by 51% of the surveylower than doctors but higher than solicitors in the public mind and a good deal higher than businessmen, MPs, councillors and union leaders (who came bottom).

The Sunday Times, in folksy mood, sald: "Our policemen are still wonderful. Despite the battering that the police have taken over the past few years from allegations of corruption, of violence, of lack of accountability and the like, the overwhelming majority of people remain unswerving in their admiration of them."

But who are 'the people"? A close reading of the text shows that some cracks begin Experience to appear in this assessment.

Experience of the police is said to be widespread, based on statistics of those who have reported something to the police or asked them for information.

The paper admits that "the middle classes are significantly more likely than working class people to have reported something to the police, to have gone into a police station or to have asked for information or assistance." It then adds (without evidence) "Just as the middle classes more readily use other services-the health service for instance-so they appear to avail themselves more of those police functions."

Of those working class men, women and youth who "avail themselves" of some of the more basic police fun-tions (being arrested, questioned or stopped in the street) only one in three think police honesty high.

Approral tor he potiz "despire corruptia) by ibose whose interests they defend is scarcely surprising o reassuring to the Sunday Times. Amongst the working class-and particularly its militant sections-no amount of "image building' by the press can cover the stench of the police, which arises not from corruption, but from its anti-working class nature.

Students at Leicester Polytechnic voted on March 13 to back the Turkey Solidarity Campaign's fight to arouse the labour movement's awareness of the danger of a fascist military coup in Turkey.

The motion, which was seconded by a leading Communist Party member in the college, denounced the attacks on trade unionists and students by the fascists and military under Demirel's reactionary Fourteen students of Warwick Universitv face disciplinary action by the University as a result of their involvement in a recent wave of direct action over the proposed fee increases • for overseas students.

True to the democratic tradition of the University; the hearings will be heard in secret, and, in order to make things really difficult, will take place Tory backbenchers and their supporters are the regime; and declared its unequivocal support for the right of trade unionists and the labour movement to organise independently of the state.

At the same time, in a second part of the motion, the students endorsed the condemnation of the reactionary Ba'athist regime in Iraq for its attacks on trade union rights and its open oppression of political opponents.

The motion also deplored the consistent support given to the bloody Ba'athist, dictatorship by Newsline, the. paper of nd during the Easter vacation.

This will mean that several vital defence witnesses will be unable to attend. It also tends to isolate the fourteen from the mass of the students who will not be on campus at this time.

Students at Warwick recently convened a national meeting of University and Polytechnic students to discuss the whole issue of student fees and education cuts.

The high level of action at. Warwick has got the authorities worried - therefore the the "Trotskyist" Workers utionary Party.

The motion was overwhelmingly carried despite organised opposition from carefully drilled Iraqi students and it won particular support from Iranian and other overseas students.

TURKEY SOLIDARITY

CAMPAIGN Public meeting "The crisis in Turkey Wednesday 26 March, 8.00pn Central Library, Fieldway Cres off Holloway Road, London possible expulsions of these fourteen students in intended as a warning to the rest.

Despite the lack of time students are rallying round the The disciplinary hearings are due to be held on March 26, 27 and 28.

It is vital that support for the picket of these hearings is mobilised as widely as possible..

Further details from Warwick University Students Union.