About to get a lot more miserable too

Yesterday up to 30,000 police officers from England and Wales marched through London in protest at job cuts and privatisation.

Rank-and-file cops were spared the beating dished out to most protests, and enjoyed favourable media coverage from all corners.

Police have been banned from taking strike action since the Police Strike of 1919, apparently because their job is “to protect the people”.

In return for their loyalty to the state they get excellent pay, excellent pensions, early retirement, a job for life and plenty of other perks. Not least of which is the protection of the state from any criminal charges resulting from the thousands of beating and deaths which take place in police custody.

The truth is that the police have traded their right to strike for the favour of the ruling government. Police don’t need the right to strike because they aren’t part of the working class.

They do not produce any value; their wages and jobs depend solely on their ability to act as the state’s monopoly on violence. This is the reason why there is a special law covering assaults on police officers, but no equivalent for the daily cases of police brutality in our communities.

Some say that police are just ‘workers in uniform’ and that we should try to win them to our side. This is a fantasy. From Wall Street to Tahrir Square the police are the brute force of the government, and as such they know where their interests lie – with those who pay them and protect them.

The 1984 Miners’ strike is a perfect example of the role of the police and why they can’t be won to working class struggles.

When Thatcher declared war on the unions as part of her drive to privatise vast swathes of the British economy, the police declared they would go on strike for a pay rise.

Thatcher knew that resistance to her unpopular policies could only be overcome if the police felt they had the unconditional support of the government.

So she gave them a pay rise, spent millions on new equipment and paid overtime to thousands of officers sent to occupy the mining villages of the North for more than a year.

The police have always been the iron fist of a state based on exploitation and division. They are a thin blue line, but they don’t stand between a fictional horde of rapists and murderers and ‘normal’ people.

Instead, when they are not harassing us on our streets, they are protecting scab workers to break strikes, and defending the wealth and property of the rich.

The police have a long and inglorious history of violently attacking workers’ movements and organisations.

Since the death penalty was abolished, there have been more than 3000 murders at the hands of the police – with not one conviction.

The officer in charge of the operation which ended with the execution of Jean Charles de Menezes was given a medal by the Queen, instead of being stripped of her pension and sacked.

Yesterday’s protest was not an example of police joining nurses, students and the unemployed to demand an end to austerity.

Those same police will be back on the streets tomorrow, pocketing bribes and swinging their batons. The protest reflected the police’s image of itself as a ‘public service’ exempt from the attacks launched against millions of public sector workers.

The whole campaign against police privatisation has been carefully orchestrated by a police force which has seen government come and go, inquiries launched and ditched, and remained almost entirely resistant to change.

From letting students ransack Tory HQ in 2010, to co-ordinating with the media to frame protesters, to standing aside during the August Riots, the police have been trying to pressure the government and people into thinking that they are all that stands between honest law-abiding subjects and a feral mob waiting to burn our homes.

The truth is somewhat less apocalyptic. The police are simply trying to defend their cosy number from any outside interference. The perks of the job are so good, that it’s no wonder thousands of police are demanding the right to strike to protect them.

But you won’t see coppers marching to defend anyone else’s right to strike.

It’s true that the government is trying to privatise large swathes of police work – including arrest and detention. With thousands of officers jobs lost already and some forces contracting out services to private providers, the end result is a police force made up of badly trained uniformed thugs (small difference) with a ‘professional’ force reserved for public order situations.

We are totally opposed to attempts to privatise the police. The police force as it stands is a violent, racist and unaccountable institution. A private service would be far worse.

Nevertheless we will not extend our support to a gang of liars and killers. The police must stand alone, and there is no doubt the government will avoid coming into open conflict with those who, after all, exist to protect their power and property.

We call for the disarming and abolition of the police, to be replaced by organised self-defence of our communities.

We don’t deny that poverty and unemployment ravages our communities, fuelling prostitution, theft and hundreds of other crimes. But the police don’t solve these problems – where they aren’t taking bribes from pimps and drugdealers, they are simply absent.

We believe that ordinary people have the power and the motive to organise our own collective protection from crime and violence – whether it comes with a badge or a balaclava.

Read more:

Police: just doing their job?

Why the police aren’t on our side