THERE is a fearful symmetry between the revelations that former Tory minister Norman Tebbitt relied on information provided by police spies and the purposes of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill presently going through Parliament.
Lord Tebbit, as he is now styled, was among Margaret Thatcher’s most hard-line ministers. His enduring trait is an open and unshakeable adherence to a set of extraordinarily reactionary political views.
His great virtue is that in his open expression of ruling-class arrogance and entitlement he makes abundantly clear that the sinews of the capitalist state are unreservedly devoted to countering the influence of the working class on the affairs of the nation and in countering the political influence of all those forces that represent working-class interests in the present moment or advance the cause of the working class in the future.
An aspect of his revelations at Richard Burgon’s enlightening Zoom conference with the Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance was that the briefings from the police and MI5 were detailed enough to include even the holiday destination of trade unionists under surveillance.
Tebbitt is a grotesque figure in a magical-realist novel of capitalist dystopia. But he and his like are real.
Let us step through the looking glass mirror.
Imagine, for a moment, a parallel universe in which a secret organisation infiltrated the boards of the biggest companies, that the executive meetings of bankers and businesses were carefully recorded, that their key executives and top managers were followed, that their personal lives were investigated, that their phone conversations were monitored and holiday destinations recorded.
Imagine that a secret committee of trade unionists would ensure that their prospective employers were warned that they held unacceptable views, enjoyed subversive connections and were throughly unsuitable for any responsible position.
Just to speculate upon such a scenario of a socialist “imagining” is enough to bring into sharp focus the repressive and class nature of the actually existing bourgeois state.
Back in this real world we know that many thousands of working-class families were put through decades of misery and deprivation by the blacklisting of trade union militants, health and safety activists and shop stewards.
Employers and their servants in the security and policing systems did this not out of mindless cruelty — although the whole enterprise was and is immensely damaging to the human being affected — but for clear class reasons. They do it because they cannot not do it.
In a world in which wages are seen as a charge on profits, those who profit from the work of others see nothing wrong in this.
Having this stuff in the open — even though it is known about for generations, even centuries, will likely give rise to illusions that it can be changed by legislative action, that a law could be passed to make it illegal.
It is not the existence of laws that compel their enforcement. At a time when rape and sexual assault has been practically decriminalised, when minimum wage enforcement has almost vanished and when human rights are subordinated to arms exporters’ appeals to the better nature of our rulers is a wasted effort.
In the same way that New Labour failed to repeal Thatcher’s anti-union laws the initial policy of Westminster Labour was to abstain on the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill.
The actions of many women and not a few men changed that overnight and gave the Tories cause to think.
Nothing changes the performance of politicians more than mass action but think not for a moment that, short of working-class state power, the right to work, to organise and walk the streets is given freely.
