On Sunday 27th April, the Glasgow Defence Campaign were proud to host a meeting in Maryhill, Glasgow discussing the role of justice and the law. Here we reproduce the text of the talk which introduced the meeting.
Justice and the law – which side are you on?
Any serious consideration of current events cannot
but notice the contradictions of our times. As these contradictions become more
and more acute they will give rise to challenges to the present social order.
Working class living standards are facing their
biggest decline in a generation, yet we are told ‘the economy’ is recovering.
Hundreds of thousands of people in Britain are forced to attend food banks for
basic sustenance, while our television screens are stuffed full of programmes
dedicated to gourmet food and the promotion of self-indulgence as our
neighbours go hungry. Whereas previous food crises have been characterised by
scarcity, today supermarket shelves are overstocked with an abundance of food –
much of it increasingly priced out of the reach of working class people blamed
for their ‘unhealthy lifestyle choices.’
Increasing numbers of working class people are being
pushed into the margins of existence as a new wave of benefit sanctions leads
people into destitution and despair. Every two
minutes a young person somewhere in the UK has their benefits stopped by a
Jobcentre. Despite making up only 27% of jobseeker's allowance claimants, young
people are the recipients of 43% of the sanctions issued. This violence
is being played out against a background of a united political class and
complicit media telling us that the economy is recovering – that economic
prosperity is returning. This is one of the major contradictions of our times. Anyone
who switches on the media will hear the manta repeated ad nauseam. Perverse and meaningless statistics are used to justify
the new vogue. Those who disagree with this analysis are marginalised and
dismissed. Despite this narrative ordinary people in their daily existence know
the truth; many here will know someone who is either out of work – or facing
punitive benefit sanctions, others will be aware of the vicious attacks on the
disabled being waged by ATOS on behalf of the DWP and the widespread deployment
of Workfare – modern slavery. You may even be going through this process
yourselves. Others will be aware of the increasing phenomenon young people face
– called internships – free labour given in hope of a job in the future. For the
mass of those in work, job insecurity is now increasing and widespread; the use
zero hour contracts are escalating.
But there is another contradiction we need to
address: while many of us anticipated these attacks as part of the economic
crisis, we did not expect the absence of resistance. The ruling class, sensing
this, are widening and deepening the attacks to ever increasing sections of the
working class and wider population. Those on the receiving end are told there
is no alternative but to accept defeat and isolation; poor people are being
blamed for being poor, or else told to blame other poor people for their
poverty as racism and bigotry stalks. In response, feelings of hopelessness and
depression become all the more common; alcohol misuse and drug abuse are
increasing as alienation takes hold.
We need to confront this reality and begin to
understand why this is happening, we need to understand clearly the role of the
law in this country and begin to work out how we can fight for social justice.
One important point I want to make is that all of
these attacks are part of conscious political decision making. It has recently
dropped out of the vocabulary of the ruling class and its media, but what we
are experiencing is the realisation of the Tory party vision of what they
termed the ‘Big Society’. That is the role back of the state, the systematic
destruction of state welfare provision for the poor and the vulnerable and the
promotion of charity as the solution. What we are seeing is a return to the
nineteenth century poor laws – people should read the lead article in the
current edition of Fight Racism! Fight
Imperialism! where we discuss the social crisis in more detail.
In these times, however, where there is so much injustice
and so little resistance it falls on us to understand and explain to people
what is happening and begin to work out a solution. We must understand that
others before us have faced far worse social conditions and found solutions. We
cannot afford to lose inspiration and hope – we need to maintain belief in
ourselves and understand that it is working class people organising together who
hold the key.
The discerning among the ruling class understands
all too well the enormity of the crisis facing British imperialism. They know that
the economic crisis is producing a social crisis; they also know that a
political crisis is inevitable. They may be many things but they are not
foolish. Just look at how skilled they are at dividing and ruling people; they
have been doing it for generations. This is why they have erected an array of
legislation to criminalise increasing swathes of the population; the last
Labour government created criminal legislation at a rate of more than one a day
– over 6,000 new pieces of legislation! It was the most heavily legislated parliament
since parliament was created and more than twice the rate of the previous Tory
regime under Thatcher and Major. A recent academic study of the legislative
programme of the Scottish Parliament noted how it had created criminal offenses
at a far greater rate than its English counterpart; in the course of a twelve
month period between 2010 to 2011 twice as many criminal offences applying to
Scotland were created compared to those applying to England. Why, we are
entitled to ask, is all of this necessary?
As we wrote previously in Fight Racism! Fight Imerialism!, the economic counterpart to the
social disciplining of the working class is a flexible labour market: freedom
for the market is matched by social control for the working class. Or as Larry
Elliot wrote of the Blair’s Labour government: having decided it will not
regulate the markets, Labour will ‘regulate the people instead, imposing a
panoply of social controls to ensure that problems caused by uncontrollable
unregulated economy…don’t threaten the lifestyles of its new middle class
constituency.’
This increasing
criminalisation of our communities has gone hand in hand with attacks on our
legal rights. I want to discuss two of the major ones, the attacks on legal aid
and the moves by the Scottish Parliament to abolish evidential corroboration in
criminal trials.
To fully understand these measures we need to view
them as part of the overall war on the working class. Let us be clear; the rich
will always be able to buy the best lawyers. For the working class however
justice is increasingly being denied with all of the consequences which follow
from inadequate legal representation when faced against a state intent on widespread
criminalisation. That the increasing attacks on legal aid are occurring at a
time of increasing criminal legislation is no accident. The challenge before
those who oppose cuts in legal aid is to go beyond immediate self interest and
show how these issues of justice affect us all. As political activists who are
subject to police harassment and criminalisation we declare a special interest.
To save legal aid it may be pertinent to examine how legal aid came about in
the first instance; I know of no serious study which has examined this issue –
either north or south of the border. It is perfectly conceivable that its
author awaits.
We need to also understand the recent moves to
abolish corroboration in Scots law. Corroboration – the requirement in criminal
trails that for a conviction to be safe there must be two independent pieces of
evidence of the crucial fact. The emotive issue of Scotland’s poor conviction
rate for rape is often at the fore of the corroboration debate. It is
misleading and it is intended to mislead and confuse. We are rarely told that
in fact this is the political response to Scots law being brought into line
with the rest of Europe following the important 2010 Supreme Court Cadder ruling which upheld the right of
an accused person to have consultation with a solicitor – a right long held in
other jurisdictions. The ruling means that Scottish police can no longer
question suspects without offering the suspect a private consultation with a
lawyer; not only before an interrogation but also at any time during the
interrogation at the suspects request. On 21 April the Scottish Government
announced that it was putting on hold this process; clearly with the pending
referendum they have calculated that this could be detrimental to the SNPs independence
ambitions. In the final analysis these matters will be dependent on the prevailing
balance of political forces.
The increasing propensity towards criminalisation,
the restriction of access to justice by undermining legal aid and the moves towards
abolishing corroboration cannot be separated from the economic and social
crisis facing British imperialism. The great contradiction of so much injustice
with so little resistance is a temporary state of affairs. These developments
show that the ruling class are preparing for a deeper class war than we are
currently enduring.
Where will the resistance come from? History is
loaded with examples of what propels individuals into political action; we say
that the contradictions of our times will inevitably give rise to opportunities
for revolutionary advances to be made. The Edinburgh born Irish revolutionary
James Connolly understood and articulated very clearly the material basis of
political action in an important article published in the Workers’ Republic on 12 August 1899. His prophetic words are worth
recalling;
‘In every case the social condition of the mass
of the people was the determining factor in political activity. Where the mass
of the people find existing conditions intolerable, and imagine they see a way
out, there will be a great political movement; where the social conditions are
not so abnormally acute no amount of political oratory, nor yet co-operation of
leaders, can produce a movement.’
There is no such thing as a problem without a solution;
the solution lies within the problem.
What is the role of progressive people at this time?
Our primary duty must be to struggle; we must prove ourselves capable of
articulating the frustrations and aspirations of our communities. To do so
effectively we must constantly be on our guard against our biggest enemies at
this time; pessimism, indifference and inaction. We must understand that from
nothing comes nothing. We must be able to take each and every particular
problem, each instance of injustice to its roots in the general crisis of
capitalism and back to the particular solution. We must be vigilant and
actively oppose those who would steer struggles into dead ends; those who
promote narrow class interests over the interests of working class as a whole. We
cannot offer readymade solutions but know that the struggle contains the
solution.
Today
by having meetings and discussions such as this we are rebuilding the
revolutionary traditions firmly grounded upon our knowledge of the economic
basis of all political action. As James Connolly stated;
‘Examine the great revolutionary movements of
history and you find that in all cases they sprang from unsatisfactory social
conditions, and had their origin in a desire for material well being. In other
words, the seat of progress and source of revolution is not in the brain, but
in the stomach.’
In
these times it is absolutely vital that we take hope and inspiration from our
revolutionary traditions, as Walter Benjamin once noted, it is only for the
sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.
Paul
McKenna, chairperson of the Glasgow Defence Campaign.
