Niall Mulholland, East London Socialist Party
The book launch of ‘Charged: How the Police Try to Suppress Protest’ drew a big audience. Authors Matt Foot, a barrister specialising in defending protesters, and journalist Morag Livingstone, have forensically revealed how the increase in coercive state powers has seen police apply more aggressive tactics towards protests, provoking violence, and with police officers breaking the law.
In 1983, a Tory home secretary secretly sanctioned police paramilitary powers. Through undisclosed documents and eyewitness accounts, Charged reveals planned police violence against miners at Orgreave, print workers at Warrington, anti-poll tax campaigners, student protesters and Black Lives Matter activists. The suppression of dissent continues, with the current Tory government seeking to extinguish any effective protest.
Michael Mansfield spoke about his work as a defence barrister for miners arrested at Orgreave in 1984. Jeremy Corbyn spoke about violent police tactics used against protests over the Criminal Justice Bill in 1994.
Ben Smoke was one of fifteen protesters charged for blocking a deportation flight at Stansted. They were eventually acquitted of ludicrous terrorism charges in 2021.
Socialist Party member Lois Austin is a former chair of Youth Against Racism in Europe. That campaign was successful against the far-right British National Party (BNP), getting its headquarters in Welling, south east London, closed during the 1990s.
Lois and other activists were spied upon by Metropolitan Police officers for years. While we should resist oppressive laws with mass mobilisations of working people and campaigners, Lois said at the book launch, experience shows that the ‘capitalist courts’ cannot be relied upon to give us real and lasting justice. For that, we need to get rid of the entire rotten profit system.
