The riots and working-class solidarity: a model motion for labour movement organisations
This branch believes:
- The August riots have not taken place in a vacuum, but in the context of mass unemployment, cuts, wage freezes, attacks on benefits and police brutality which have combined to marginalise many working-class people, particularly young people in BME communities.
- It is not a question of “condemning” or “condoning” the riots but understanding and responding to the root causes.
- Further police repression – more police on the streets or giving the police access to more powerful weaponry – will make the situation worse.
- The response from the state so far, which has included sentencing teenagers merely for posting remarks on Facebook appearing to support the riots, has been extremely draconian and must be opposed.
This branch further believes:
- A key context for the riots is the decline of labour movement organisation and our failure to maintain trade unions as centres for working-class solidarity in many workplaces and communities.
- The labour movement must launch a radical campaign to organise young, low-paid and unemployed workers to ensure that the next time social discontent is expressed on Britain’s streets, it is on the basis of class politics and confrontation with employers and the government.
This branch resolves:
- To work with other local labour movement bodies and anti-cuts groups to call a public meeting to discuss the context to the riots and how to build working-class solidarity.
- To campaign on the basis of the following principles:
1. End police repression
• End “stop and search”
• Disarm the police
• Get the police’s Territorial Support Group off the streets
• Oppose immediate police repression — raiding homes, imposing curfews; calling in the army
• Oppose further increases in policing powers e.g. use of water cannons, rubber bullets
• Oppose Labour using these events to demand the reversal of cuts in the police service. Increasing police numbers is not the answer
• Demand directly elected police committees with the power to hire and fire police chiefs, with operational and budgetary control over the police service, so that working-class communities are better able to control what the police does.
2. Fight poverty. For working-class and social solidarity:
• Jobs for all with a real living wage; free education and a living grant/maintenance allowance for all students
• Restore cuts to youth services and youth provision
• End homelessness, build council housing. For a programme of inner city renovation
• Trade unions should organise the unemployed, the young and low paid workers
• Labour should not call for more police. And it should stop making cuts in local government. Affiliated unions must impose these demands on the Labour Party.
3. For a labour movement inquiry into the causes of the riots.
4. Against a government of and for the rich we fight for a government that represents the working-class.
