tion of using it to injure ... I do not therefore propose to take any action in the matter." Police 'Conspiracy' and 'intimidation" are sinister words, The ruling class hope that workers will be confused into making a distinction, for the purpose of deciding their response, between peaceful and "Violent picketing. So, as we have seen above, does the TUC.
But the ruling class is not so scrupulous when it comes to employing its own particular weapons - and the weapons it uses are precisely those servants of the state which are supposed to be so neutral in the struggle, the police. At the St. Thomas's Hospital site in London, a squad of police waded into a picket line to let through a specially reinforced van loaded with scab labour, Unfortunately, the pickets were unable to distinguish between the 'violent" policemen and the "sonviolent" policemen as they were being hurled across the street. Neither did they have any courts in which they could put the offending policemen on trial, achieving a national impact on this issue. HowThe hypocrisy of ruling class spokesmen is shown dearly when we come to look at the physical preparations being made, Earlier this year, the Tories strengthened the Special Patrol Groups (originally set up by Wilson). The regular police are in creasingly unable to deal with the trade union movement, but use of the army is politically premature. The SPG is therefore trained in the military techniques of the army, but at the same time appears as just another part of the conventional police force, Small, highly mobile and armed, it has been used in the shooting of two Pakistani workers in the Indian High Commission and has attacked picket lines in London and Hull. The release of the Shrewsbury 24, though vital, will not solve those problems. Consequently, the campaign must also address itself to these questions. It is not just a matter of defending pickets over the summer, when the form of struggle is likely to be local, or of madiness for the bigstruggles of the winter. Centralisation Any future general strike, il taken seriously, involves maximum use, centralisation and defence of pickets. And any successful socialist revolution involves the ability to deal with deep rooted prejudices about the State which will stand in the way if not confronted in advance Programme Today we must begin with a programme for the effective defence of picketing. The police rely on creating the impression of greater strength than they actually possess. Numbers can easily overcome this. At Saltley last year, police were able to break and intimidate picket lines until thousands of workers joined the line, calling the police bluff. But the police are also highly mobile and centralised. This means that local orginisations, such as trades councils, should create action committees to co-ordinate the defence of pickets at a moment's notice -committees based on delegates from the workplaces in the area, not just branch officials. As the cass struggle intensifies, the ruling class will not rest content with police, aven armed police. In any general strike situation, for exampie, the ruling class, as at St. Thomas's, will not apply moral criteria or dra wing room distinctions, but carefully weigh the balance of forces. In all capitalist countries, and Britain has proved in the past to be no exception, police and troops have shot down strikers, pickets and demonstraters without scruple.
We have to base ourselves on the situation as it is, not as we would like it to be. The right to picket will never be defended by appealing to standards of democracy or legality for which the ruting class no longer have any use. must learn the lesson of the past that the only way the right to picket can be defended is by depriving the class enemy of its monopoly over the means of intimidation and its ntonopoly of arted force. Wherever the relationship of forces permits, militunts must now begn to take up whatever physical means are neceasary to defeat the enemy on the picket lines. It is in these clashes with the bourg ois state that the working class will be steeled to carry out an indispensable task if socialism is ever to be catablished: the crushing of the capitalist judiciary, its police and the armed forces once and Ed Wyatt
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