Shrewsbury in the course of picketing during last year's building strike.
These charges are farcical. Many of them, for instance, refer to picketing which took place on the site at Telford, yet the police detained nobody at the time and made no charges at all on that day. They even escorted. the pickets to two further sites after the action at Telford.
When the men were finally charged, the police found it necessary to use a device which is often used to force a confession from a detainee; the conspiracy makeweight. The usual procedure here is for the police to drop the conspiracy charge-which can mean anything that the courts want it to mean, and carries heavy penalties - in return for a confession. The building workers refused to do this.
They are now being tried, six months after the event, mainly on the basis of photographic evidence collected during the strike by Special Branch and police. Needless to say the police do not seem to be taking any action against the site agent who on one site threatened the pickets with a shotgun on that day in Shrewsbury last September:
INTIMIDATION The way the 24 men have been treated since so effective in the miners' strike. It therefore wants to test out the working class response to State intimidation before moving in in a really big way.
It was in this atmosphere that the building employers decided to offer the Government a test case with the Shrewsbury 24. This dovetailed neatly with their own need for striking a decisive blow at the rank and file of UCATT and the T&G in their counter-offensive to return the lump. Thus it is that the employers and police have cobbled up these charges many months after the case had been dropped by the Director of Public Prosecutions.
DEFENCE Of course, militants and revolutionaries must be defended against the State regardless of whether they are guilty of the charges or not. The working class has the right to take any action against capital that it feels is necessary to further its own interests.
But in a case with such "irregularities', one would also have expected the union bureaucracy to conduct some kind of campaign on the issue. But no. The T&G and UCATT leaderships have scabbed on the men. Originally the unions offered them lawyers, but a week before their first hearing on 15 March, when thousands of dockers, steelworkers and Shrewsbury - On the morning of Thursday, 15 March, motorists in the West Midlands had what for most of them must have been a new experience. Within a twenty mile radius of the small town of Shrewsbury they found themselves confronted by police road blocks. Anyone trying to escape to this tranquil haven from the big cities of the West Midlands, torn by bitter class conflict, could have found himself stopped as many as five or six times by police and then confronted by no less than a thousand cops surrounding the court house in the town centre. The reason for this massive show of strength was the trial of 24 building workers, brought to court by the Director of Public Prosecutions for carrying out union policy by organising flying pickets during the building workers' strike last year. The next day, one of the most authoritative journals of big capital, the Economist, appeared with a main editorial which made the following points: those who "have struck against the public", as the Economist put it, should lose very heavily in jobs and money and their union's status. This will be in addition to court action against any union committing an offence against the counter-inflation bill. Incomes policy will only succeed if the authorities pick the right moment and the right strike in which to make these very "provocative" move. It might well be wise to pick them early."
SERIES OF INCIDENTS The attack on the Shrewsbury building workers is just one of a series of incidents in which the repressive forces of the state have begun to bare their teeth. In recent weeks, a new name has begun to appear in press reports: the Special Patrol Group (SPG). Organised in 1965 this organisation is designed to fill a crucial gap in the bourgeoisie's repressive apparatus: between the regular police which would be unable to deal with an increasingly combative working class movement, and the army which has sufficient means of violence, but which could provoke a revolutionary response from the working class. The SPG is small, highly mobile, trained in all the necessary military techniques of the army, and at the same time able to appear as just another part of the police. It was introduced to the world with the gunning down of two Pakistani workers at the Indian High Commission a few weeks ago, and was given another publicity boost by being presented as the heroic discoverer of the bomb at Scotland Yard. Since then it has been seen in action against the pickets at St. Thomas's Hospital building site in London, Such attacks on picket lines have so far been carried out only in a selective way. At the same time, since the freeing of the five the Government has not used the enormous repressive powers written into the statute book with the passing of the Industrial Relations Act, On paper, the government could have intervened to use the Act against every strike so far against the pay laws. The fact that it has not done so demonstrates one crucial lesson which has been learnt over the last year: that the events in the class struggle decide the fate of Parliamentary legislation, and not the other way round. Unable to inflict any serious defeat upon the working class, the govern ment was forced to pull the Industrial Relations Act out of the limelight for fear of an escalation of the working class offensive to smash the Act.
But the Government's retreat from use of the Act does not mean it has abondoned repression. The legal system as a whole provides numerous legal formulas to justify any repressive measures that might be required to pursue the capitalist offensive against the working class. It did not require the Industrial Relations Act to find a legal pretext for charging the Shrewsbury building workers. The armies of government lawyers simply fished around in their libraries till they discovered something suitable dating from 1875 which they could throw at the building workers.
PRINCIPLES OF LAW?
The Government also has another enormous advantage in its efforts to defeat the working class. And this is the widespread belief that the police and the courts do operate according to some principles of law and that the forces of repression simply enforce these. principles in an impartial way. The conclusion that flows from such an argument is that provided you do Inspector Meynell (left) in charge of Numb to PC George Burrows (centre) and PC Star Hussein and Mohammed Hussein. (Photo:
not "provoke the law", all will be well and repression will not take place. This view has continually been expressed on some sections of the British Left in interpretations of what is happenning in the North of Ireland for example. People get the idea that if only the Catholic workers had stayed with the Law' instead of turning to violence they would not be facing military repression now.
Thus a paper called The Militant recently had a front page headline which read: "Terrorism Leads to Repression". This statement is nonsense, either as a description of what happened in Ireland or as a general statement about repression, In Ireland what led to repression, the brutalities of the RUC, the violence of the British army against the Irish masses, the torture and internment camps was not "terrorism'. It was a mass movement for civil rights and for Irish self-determination. The people who want to convince us that the army has stepped in to deal with terrorism are the British ruling class. LEGALISTIC CRETINISM Secondly, such statements breed precisely the kind of legalist cretinism which represents a key danger for the labour movement today. It suggests that repression comes from incorrect actions by the vanguard: that if "terrorist" actions were not made then there would be no 'excuse" for repression. The consequence of such middle class notions is for militants to respond to victimisations or repression by wondering whether the victims of repression might not after all have done something wrong or acted 'excessively', thus provoking the repression.
Such fumbling must be rooted out of the socialist movement. The facts of the class struggle provide the 'excuses for repression, and if necessary the capitalist class will manufacture the necessary embellishments to the facts to suit its purpose.
In the same way, it is necessary to combat the arguments of Feather and Co. that "militant AT As announced weekly and wi Target date fo