INTRODUCTION BY BLACK FLAG:

We recently observed a very fruitful discussion on race and class on the internet, particularly around "black" anarchism, special oppressions and the desirability of separate organisation.

One of the best and most comprehensive posts came from a member of the Workers Solidarity Federation of South Africa, an anarchist/syndicalist group which while in a personal capacity reflects their politics and positions on these matters. Interest in anarchism is growing throughout the world. There are active groups in most parts of the world, with the exception of the Indian subcontinent, Antarctica and as far as we know the Chinese dictatorship. This process will no doubt accelerate and there is a challenge for us to make our ideas accessible. But as our South African comrades point out below, "it was the ability of anarchism to provide alternatives and to pay special attention to the specific needs of these different sections of the working class in order to unite the whole class that made the success (of the Cuban anarchists and IWW) possible," not "a revision of anarchism to accommodate nationalism".

RACE, CLASS AND ORGANISATION
THE VIEW FROM THE WORKERS SOLIDARITY FEDERATION

It is falsely claimed by some that Anarchism as currently constituted is unable to attract Black people, and other specially oppressed minorities. It is therefore argued that we should thus endorse separate Black-only anarchist/ community organisations that may in some (vague and unspecified) cases associate with "white" groups - "white" groups should "work among" "their own" people etc.). It is also asserted from this view point that Anarchism is "Eurocentric" and lacking an analysis of racism and imperialism.

IN DEFENSE OF CLASSICAL ANARCHISM

These arguments are wrong or lacking in clarity. They reflect a distortion of Anarchist history, and a misunderstanding of Anarchist strategy.

Firstly, class struggle anarchism has historically proved quite capable of attracting massive numbers of people of color. In fact, one could claim that historically most anarchist movements have been based in Third World countries. For example, anarchism dominated the revolutionary movement in China in the 1910s and early 1920s. In the First World, Anarchist movements historically attracted specially oppressed national minorities, for example, the syndicalist IWW attracted thousands of Black workers in the USA Deep South, and other movements, Jews in eastern Europe.

Today, there are groups such as the WSF in South Africa and the Awareness League of Nigeria.

The key to this success was a consistent class struggle program that combated all manifestations of oppression. For example, the Cuban Anarchists mobilized both Afro-Cubans,creoles and Spaniards in massive integrated anarcho-syndicalist unions because they opposed racist practices like apprenticeship laws, because they supported the anti-colonial struggle against Spain and because they provided a class struggle answer to the questions facing all sections of the working class. It was not a "revision" of anarchism to accommodate nationalist paradigms that made the breakthrough - it was the ability of anarchism to provide alternatives and to pay special attention to the specific needs of these different sections of the working class in order to unite the whole class that made the success possible. Anarchists did not capitulate to nationalist ideas- they combated them- they did not organise separately, they organised as Anarchists on a class struggle basis.

Similarly, they were key players in anti- imperialist struggles in many countries, for example, Cuba (1890s) Macedonia (1880s), Herzegovina (1900s), Nicaragua (1920s), Ukraine (1918-21) , Ireland (1916) and Korea (1920-40s). Again, class politics was the basis of this engagement.

Even today, the Anarchist groups emerging in Third World countries like Nigeria and South Africa base themselves on a class program- we have seen the end results of nationalism and we oppose it (although obviously we defend peoples right to choose to believe in it, and even if we recognize grassroots nationalists as progressive fighters against racism etc.).

This does not mean that we downplay imperialism or racism- on the contrary we pay specific attention to these key questions, but we subject them to class analysis and advocate class struggle strategies against them. This clearly shows that the claim that Anarchism is "white" or "Eurocentric" is fundamentally wrong, as Anarchism - in terms of its analysis, history and composition- has in all respects been a truly global movement against oppression in all guises. All modern Anarchists need to live up to this legacy.

Black nationalism and/or separatism is not the only thing that can fight racism or attract Black people and workers to organisations. Even in South Africa, the Communist Party was the main mass organisation throughout the 1930s and 1940s and dwarfed the nationalist groups like the ANC; in the 1920s the main mass organisation (aside from the Communist Party) was the quasi-syndicalist Industrial and Commercial Workers Union. In Harlem in the USA in the 1930s, the CPUSA was able to win Black workers away from Garveyism on the basis of a consistent defense of the unity of White and Black workers.

AGAINST SEPARATE ORGANISATION

**As Anarchists we call for separate organisation in one sense: we call on the working and poor people to organise separately from their class enemy, the bosses and rulers**.

What then of non-class based forms of separate organisation such as women-only organisation (as advocated by radical feminism) or Black-only organisation (as advocated by Black nationalists)?

Before dealing with this issue, we need to understand the links between racism, class and class struggle.

STATE, CAPITALISM AND RACISM: ONE ENEMY, ONE FIGHT

We would argue that racism is the product of capitalism and the State, created to justify slavery and colonialism in the Third World, and to divide workers, and super-exploit national minorities in the First World. Capitalism and the State are inherently racist: they always generate new forms of racism (e.g. against immigrants). The social inequalities created by racism can only be dealt with by the removal of capitalism and the State to allow for projects of redress, reconstruction etc.

[/i]*Therefore the fight against racism is a fight against capitalism and the State*

*Therefore the fight against racism requires a class struggle and a workers revolution*.

*Therefore the fight against capitalism and the state requires a fight against racism*.[i]

Given that the working class is multi-national and multi-racial, it follows that its struggle must be fought on internationalist, united, integrated lines. As argued above, this unity is only possible on a principled basis of opposition to all oppression.

ARE WHITE WORKERS A 'LABOUR ARISTOCRACY'?

No sections of the working class gain in real terms from the special oppression of Backs, colonial people etc. In the First World, White workers may have slightly less unemployment etc., but they are still the majority of the workers and the poor i.e. of the exploited classes victimized by capitalism and the State . Racism worsens conditions for all workers because it divides workers struggles and resistance and ability to destroy the system. That is why the ruling class promotes it: it would never promote something that benefited the majority of workers. Therefore it is in these workers' direct interest to fight racism and unite with Black workers.

Even if these workers accept racism, they are still not its primary cause: racist-capitalism is. Nor are they its beneficiaries.

At the same time, doubly oppressed groups like Blacks etc. require allies amongst the White working class. Without them, they lack the numbers, strategic position, or social power to defeat the racist system and its causes for once and for all. Unity is also in their interests.

Similarly, the argument that the Western working class benefits materially from imperialism, is false. There is not a shred of proof, nor a sustainable economic theory to show this. Nor can any correlation be shown between the level of imperialist activity and the living standards of First World workers.

On the contrary, imperialism is against the interests of these workers, because it strengthens the power of their own states (e.g. colonial armies are used against workers "at home" -remember Spain 1936?), wastes resources and lives that could be spent on people on the military, promotes reactionary ideas like racism and imperialist patriotism that divide workers and strengthen the ruling class, and allows multi-national companies to cut jobs and wages by shifting to repressive Third World colonial and semi- colonial regimes.

SEPARATE ORGANISATION?

As Anarchists should unconditionally defend the rights of specially oppressed sections of the working class to organise separately because we defend the principle of free association. BUT we should separate question of the right to organise separately from the issues of the usefulness of this mode of organisation.

We simply cannot take it for granted that separate organisations are necessarily progressive or travelling the same road as we are.

Separate organisations are not necessarily progressive - in some cases they are clearly reactionary and a backward step, in others they are poor strategy.

Non-class based separate organisations typically fails to correctly identify the source of the special oppression faced by the group in question. For example, separatist Black nationalism calls for people of African descent to organise separately on the basis that all Whites are the source of Black oppression. Therefore they are the enemy. What such an approach fails to recognize is the primary role of capitalism and the State in causing Black oppression, and the common interests of both working class Blacks and Whites in fighting racism on a class-struggle basis (see above). Or it may be argued that capitalism is a form of racism - this again fails to recognize the common interest of both working class Whites and Blacks in fighting capitalism.

Separate organisation that is not on a class struggle basis almost always lays the basis for cross-class alliances as is based on non-class identities and supposed common interests between all who share that identity. As we argue, only class struggle can end special oppressions such as racism and sexism.

They thus became hitched to the class projects of capitalists, bosses and power-hungry would-be rulers. A case in point is the Nation of Islam in the US.

Separate organisations can divide the working class into competing and fragmented sections. Why stop at separate organisation for women, Blacks etc? The whole notion of separate organisation lays the basis for a continual fragmentation of identities and issues: gay versus black versus women versus lesbians versus bisexuals versus gay blacks versus white blacks versus bisexual males etc.

Instead of an emphasis on difference, what is needed is a search for points of agreement and common interest: divided we are weak-it is class that provides a basis for uniting the vast majority of the world's population against the primary causes of poverty and oppression: capitalism/ the State/ the ruling class.

Some call for separate organisation on the basis that only separate organisation can prevent the marginalization of the concerns of a particular group. For example, Black nationalists in the US often call for Blacks to organise separately so that they are not, for example, marginalized or ignored in mainly White organisations.

While this is an important issue, it does not follow that separate organisation is the best solution. Not at all!

Separate organisation often reinforces the marginalization of a group's concerns, for example, it can be used to as a way of ghettoizing issues. Rather than challenging racism, such organisations allow racism to be ignored by others. White workers can ignore the issue: "leave it to the Blacks, its their concern, not ours". But should, say, illegal immigrants have to fight against racist immigration laws on their own, or should they have allies from other sections of the working class? "Self- determining" isolation can readily lay the basis for weak struggles that are easily defeated by the ruling class (see above). Finally, the claim that Blacks can never function in integrated organisations expresses a disturbing lack of confidence in Black people's abilities.

Instead, we should win all sections of the working class over to a program of opposing, not ignoring all oppression. This is a more effective way of winning demands. Even if some do not have direct experience of a given oppression, it does not follow that they are unable to be won to a position of opposing it. As argued earlier, no workers really benefit from special oppressions like racism. It is in their interest to be anti- racist.

Separate organisation is not even progressive in some cases.

Separate organisation in the workplace is NOT acceptable in any case where industrial unions of all workers exist. The logic of trade-union organisation is to unify different categories of workers, who can only find strength in their unity. To set up a separate Black trade union in a situation where Blacks are a minority weakens the existing unions, but puts these workers themselves in a weak and unsustainable position due to their limited numbers, as well as in direct conflict with the existing union, thus creating a dynamic that can lead to the destruction of union organisation in the plant as a whole.

Maximum unity on a principled basis is always desirable, supported and fought for. Black-only unions are a recipe for failure where Black people form a minority in the working class (obviously the situation is different in South Africa where the Black working class is the majority- but more on this later). How can one even launch mild forms of industrial action without the support of most workers?

Furthermore, separate organisation is only admissible in cases where workers face a special oppression. We do not support Zulu-only unions like UWUSA (in South Africa) because Zulus do not face a special oppression as Zulus.

Separate organisation is not innately progressive. It can be used as a tactic to roll-back worker struggles and undermine the left. For example, the nationalist-minded liberal middle-class Black leaders of the mass Industrial and Commercial Workers Union in SA in the 1920s used arguments that the Communist Party was a "White" institution to expel socialists from their ranks and had the union over to (White!!) liberals like Ballinger who opposed anything other than simple bread and butter, non-political orthodox trade unionism, as opposed to the ICU's previously semi-syndicalist positions.

SPECIAL ORGANISING COMMITTEES

Having said this, it is clear that Anarchist political organisations should be integrated. Having said this, we do recognize that it may be necessary to set up commissions/ task grippes within these organisations to focus on specific issues e.g. groups to work on immigrant support. These are not separate organisations, but working groups integrated into the overall organisation, and to which any member may belong.

RELATIONS WITH EXISTING SEPARATE GROUPS

People respond to capitalism and the State in a variety of ways, and through a variety of ideologies. How should we relate to these groups?

In general, the WSF apply the following "rule of thumb". A basic distinction can be drawn between "political groups" (those which unite people on the basis of accepting a certain ideology- such as political parties), and "economic groups" (those which unite people on the basis of their common, immediate social and economic interests- such as unions, rent-strike committees).

We would work alongside in "political groups", for example, around campaigns.

And we would work within "economic groups". Economic groups tend to have working class bases and deal with issues relevant to working and poor people. They therefore have a class dimension. Our aim here would be to promote

(1) class consciousness and workers power: these grippes should be run by the working class and reject class collaboration.

(2) work in principled alliance with other working class formations out of recognition of the common interests of the working and poor people and the necessity of class struggle

(3) do not undermine the unions, but on the contrary work with them, defend them and promote them

(4) take up arguments about the need for anti-racism etc. with other sections of the working class

(5) win them to a revolutionary Anarchist program

Our aim here would be to unite and merge these "economic organisations": those in the workplace should be united into "One Big (Trade) union"; those in (working class) residential areas into "One Big (Community) Union". They would have a common struggle: against capitalism, the State and all oppression. In this way, they could provide the nucleus for the self-governing worker and community councils of the Anarchist future. Thus, we call for this unity to

(1) unite the working and poor masses around their common interests and needs

(2) provide a united basis for self-management after the revolution.

SOUTH AFRICA - A SPECIAL CASE

In South Africa, this situation is somewhat different. Clearly, the defeat of racism in South Africa does also require a class struggle and a workers revolution (as elsewhere). But here the Black working class is the majority of the population, the most radical, combative and organised force in society. Thus the question of Black workers presents itself in a different fashion here as it is obvious that the Black working class will be the force that makes the SA revolution. Since there is no left-wing or working class movement that can possibly marginalize the Black working class, the need for special committees, sections etc. to deal with racism is redundant in the South Africa case.

What then of White/Black worker unity? This unity was remote in the extreme in the apartheid years- it was extremely unusual for White workers to join the struggle of the Black working class under apartheid, precisely because of their extreme level of privilege (although some did, mainly from the Communist Party). So, in contrast to the situation in the West, White workers here actually did benefit from racism. Nonetheless, interracial workers unity (on an anti-racist platform) would have been advantageous even under apartheid because it would have weakened the armed power of the State (most Whites were at some or other point soldiers and were and are workers). With the demise of formal apartheid and the move to a formally non-racial bourgeois parliament, the prospects for such unity are far better. The economic crisis, the removal of job reservation and other legal privileges, the breakdown of the alliance between Whites of different classes that underpinned the racist regime all make a workers alliance and unity more feasible.

Thus we have a situation where literally tens of thousands of White workers and historically White unions have actually joined the non- racial integrated COSATU unions; the main historically white union federation, FEDSAL, has also begun co-operating with COSATU in negotiations and even demos (although White worker attendance is quite poor). We should support this unity, so long as it is on an anti-racist basis, and so long as the general layers of activists remain broadly representative of the mainly Black unions. In other words, workers unity is good, if only in terms of our proletarian internationalism and non-racialism, but the basis of that unity must still be the struggle against racism as well as capitalism. In any case, it is clear that the Black working class will still be the battering ram that destroys the system (the possible participation of White workers as reliable allies notwithstanding). Therefore, class unity on a principled anti-racist basis (with the provisions for special organisations outlined above) is the key to freedom.

This is why we say

"BLACK LIBERATION THROUGH CLASS WAR"

"STATE, CAPITALISM, RACISM: ONE ENEMY, ONE FIGHT"

Originally published in Black Flag, 1998

Content warning: sexual violence, rape.

On 10th July 1997 a Jamaican national, Eaton Green, lost his battle to avoid deportation to Jamaica. Green's counsel, in seeking to resist a deportation order, had argued that Green, a police informer serving six years for armed robbery, had been told by a Metropolitan Police intelligence officer that he would be "protected".

The High Court judge, Mr Justice Jarrett, ruled that the Home Office was not bound by any such undertaking. Eaton Green's original trial, for a robbery in Nottingham, attracted a flurry of media attention because of the revelation that he had carried out the robbery and dealt crack and run a South London protection racket, while operating as an informer, and further, that Green's handlers (in particular PC Steve Barker) had full knowledge of his activities and attempted to protect him from arrest and prosecution by Nottingham police.

The line adopted by the media in relation to this, and subsequent revelations about "Yardie" informers, was that good "street cops" under pressure, under resourced and unsupported, had bent rules to try to effectively tackle a "Yardie" crime wave. The main proponent of this line is a Guardian journalist, Nick Davies. "How the Yardies Duped the Yard" was the headline of an article he wrote on 3/2/97.

Whether Davies believes what he writes is open to question. The articles themselves read like a damage limitation exercise drafted by Scotland Yard's press office. Their central proposition, though, does not stand up to examination. They do not fit with the facts.

In his 3rd February article, Davies opens with

"Ten years ago, Scotland Yard realised that organised criminals from Jamaica - the Yardies - were moving into London. By 1987 they were pumping crack cocaine into black housing estates and establishing their control with terrifying violence. The response from police was chaotic and pathetic. A 1993 official report warned that ‘unless there is a consistent, aggressive and long-term strategy", drug related crime would soar.’"

In fact, Scotland yard's "yardie" strategy stems from a meeting in 1989 between UK police officers and Robert Stutman, then head of the New York office of the Drug Enforcement Administration, in which he warned that most crack dealing in the US was controlled by two ethnic groups - Dominicans and Jamaicans - and that these gangs were determined to engineer a "crack explosion" in the UK. Up until 1989, Yard policy had been in the hands of Roy Ramm, who stated soon after his appointment in 1987

"I'm absolutely convinced that there is no such thing as a black mafia or black Godfather operating in this country."

In 1988 armed police raided the New Four Aces club in Dalston to target suspected Yardie gang dealing in cocaine. The raid netted £6,000 worth of cocaine - not a significant quantity given that a kilo of coke carries a street value of about £160,000. Further Metropolitan Police figures for 1989 show 58 grams of crack being seized in the whole year, compared to 331 kilos of heroin, 424 kilos of cocaine and 50,000 kilos of cannabis.

In consequence of this, for all the apocalyptic proclamations of the likes of Stutman, police units like Operation Lucy were in fact wound down. The journalist Jim Davison, a former Sunday Times writer, and like Nick Davies, a proponent of the "Yardie" myth, reports a discussion with Roy Ramm at the time as follows:

"It is a loose association of violent criminals bent on making profits from drugs and then spending them as quickly as possible", he (Ramm) said.

Unlike the Mafia or the Colombian cartels, the gangs opted for a "little and often" method of importation rather than large scale smuggling operations. The end result of this is, as Davies reports, a Yardie Squad set up and killed off within six months in 1990, and the establishment of Operation Dalehouse in 1991, to target what the Squad Commander DS John Jones (who I'm sure would throw his hands in the air in Hendon-shaded outrage if numbered as a racist) called "a fairly wide-based criminal fraternity of black British people." So successful were they that this squad also wound up in November 1992.

Davies throws up a smokescreen around the reality of Operation Dalehouse. He writes that it

"made 274 arrests often for attacks on black victims. John Jones feared that part of the problem was that black victims of crime attracted less press attention, and therefore tempted the policy makers at Scotland Yard to ignore them. And all the time that the generals at Scotland Yard were ordering their foot-soldiers to retreat, there were more Yardies flowing into London."

In truth Operation Dalehouse did make 274 arrests, but of these only 25 were charged with serious criminal offences, and the Sunday Times journalist Davison concedes the squad met with a "lack of co-operation from the local community."
The end result was that by 1993, according to Davies, his heroes were reduced to

"a hard core of half a dozen detectives and immigration officers who were still trying to tackle the Yardies. They had no office and no facilities and were reduced to using the bar of a small pub in Southwark where... they swapped intelligence and tried to cobble together a strategy.... officers had been forced to spend their own money to fund operations."

It's here that Davies' argument begins to fall apart. Soon after pleading poverty on the anti-Yardie squad's behalf, he reveals that the Drug Related Violence Intelligence Unit (DRVIU) (which Davies snidely notes was so named to avoid triggering complaints of racism) ran an informer code-named Andrew Gold who was able to live a life of indulgence,

“driving around in a Golf GTI, eating expensive meals, drinking fine wines, playing golf, making endless transatlantic phone calls and sleeping in a luxury furnished flat with a view of the Thames - all supplied at the British taxpayers expense."

Not bad for an outfit that Davies had earlier told us was reduced to running its operations form a pub back room at its own expense.

Davies provides details of three Yardies informers run by one SO11 linked DRVIU. Andrew Gold, we are told, produced a report on the Yardies in London which contained no useable new intelligence, at a cost of more than $45,000, before returning to Jamaica in January 1994.

Eaton green carried out armed robberies and ran protection rackets under the protection of the unit. The DRVIU cannot deny that they protected Green. Cecil Thomas and Rohan Thomas came into the UK on March 28th 1993 on false passports, to work with Green. An immigration officer who worked with the DRVIU, Brian Fotheringham, secured residence rights for Green after he married a British national whose child he claimed he'd fathered, even though the child's date of birth made clear that the women in question had been pregnant for four months before she met Green.

At Green's robbery trial, DRVIU officers made illegal approaches to both the Crown Prosecution Service and the trial judge to try to protect Green. From May 1994, Fotheringham and PC Steve Barker ran another informer, Delroy Denton, who had agreed to work for the SO11-linked team following his arrest after a raid on the Atlantic pub in Brixton. Immigration's initial assessment of Denton was as a "dangerous Jamaican criminal, given 16 years in Jamaica for firearms/aggravated burglary offences."

Following the intervention of Fotheringham and Barker, Denton was back on the streets. On 19th December 1994, Denton raped a 15 year old schoolgirl. On 1st February 1995 the CPS dropped a rape charge against him on the grounds of insufficient evidence. Fotheringham and Barker continued to run Denton, who by this stage had acquired a reputation as a psychotic, who Davies concedes fantasised about "how he would like to tell a man and a woman that he was going to kill them, then order them to stay and have sex, and then when the man was too scared to perform, he would rape the woman himself before he blew out both their brains".

In April 1995, Denton entered a flat in Brixton and raped and stabbed to death a 24 year old mother of 2, Marcia Lawes. Denton was charged with murder on 29th June 1995. On 29th October 1995 the CPS again dropped the charge because of "insufficient evidence".

The Number Five Area Major Investigation Pool detectives investigating Denton contacted Fotheringham and advised him of the informer’s status as an illegal immigrant. Fotheringham refused to act. Barker, with full knowledge of senior SO11 officers, continued to meet Denton. In July 1996, following further AMIP work, Denton was jailed for life. Nick Davies argues that the DRVIU was starved of "power and leadership" and in consequence, front-line officers, with falling morale, committed errors in the field. "In the background, Scotland Yard's policy makers blocked a series of anti-Yardie initiatives which had been proposed by front-line officers." This is bullshit.

Whatever Davies and the media management teams at Scotland Yard are trying to conceal, the chronology of their cover story makes no sense. The DRVIU was, we are told, set up following recommendations from Detective Chief Superintendent (now deputy Assistant Commissioner) Ray Clark. Clark made 35 recommendations and delivered a report which concluded

"It has been made abundantly clear by all I have spoken to that unless there is a consistent, aggressive and long term strategy to deal with Jamaican criminals in London, there will be ever and sharply increasing incidents of murder, violence, drug related crime and crack availability."

Davies would have it that "the policy makers at Scotland Yard then side-lined a substantial number if Clark's 35 recommendations", and things then began to go wrong.

But Eaton Green was arrested on July 8th1993, only 2 days after Clark signed his report and BEFORE the DRVIU was officially established. Both Eaton Green and Andrew Gold (with his $45,000 budget) were being run by Scotland Yard officers before Clark delivered his report. Green and Gold were only able to remain in the UK due to the manoeuvres of immigration officers like Brian Fotheringham. If Scotland Yard policy indeed led to the "almost complete breakdown of the Metropolitan Police strategic response (to Yardie crime) and of the formal intelligence gathering and development structure" and if the anti-Yardie squad was really reduced to a Southwark drinking club, how and why were the resources to run Gold and Green obtained? If Barker and Fotheringham had already overseen Eaton Green's crime spree of their own initiative, and with a PR disaster and the souring of relations between the Yard and Nottingham CID the chief results, why accept Clark's report at all?

Whatever the reason, we can be sure it wasn't to stay a Yardie controlled crack epidemic. Any balanced examination of the drug scene in the UK would suggest that Ramm's "little and often" assessment of Yardie drug dealing activity remains correct. Jamaica Perera, from the Centre for Research on Drugs and Health, noted in a recent report on dealers in Kings Cross that all the dealers revealed their original supplies of crack came from white criminal families in Bermondsey. In 1988, Eddie Richardson was gaoled for the importation of 2 tonnes of cannabis and 153.8 kilos of cocaine - to a street value of £43 million, linked to the Cali cartel. The operation involved connections and communications, bank accounts and front operations between Britain and Bangkok.

More recently a joint police/customs operation Operation Crayfish resulted in the conviction for importation of Curtis Warren, a mixed race Liverpudlian, "The Mr Big's Mr Big" as the Observer described him, who made the Sunday Times list of Britain's 500 richest citizens, and has alleged links with the Cali cartel. (There are many aspects of the surveillance operation which led to Warren's arrest and conviction, not least the procuring of drug buys by undercover cops, which give cause for concern, and an appeal is pending).

Vincent Ruggiero, a reader in criminology at Middlesex University, in his survey "Brixton, London: A Drug Culture without a Drug Economy" noted the clear absence in areas of south London targeted by the DRVIU - Brixton, Clapham, Peckham - of the money laundering and investment in legal business that illustrate a sophisticated, expanding drug economy. Quoted in The Guardian on 15/7/96, Ruggiero observed "The profits of the drug economy are nowhere to be seen in inner-city London areas." The major suppliers did not generally live in these heavily policed areas but in "respectable, affluent, white, areas."

The DRVIU seems, from all the reports of its activities to date, to do nothing but run informers. It is fair to say that street crime of the kind the DRVIU allege is committed by the Yardie gangs usually is contained by more obvious police methods - surveillance, stop and search, interviewing of witnesses, etc.

In his book "Gangsta", John Davison details the operational methods of Operation Dalehouse;

"a combination of intense surveillance and computer analysis.. large numbers of ‘spins’, both looking for guns and to accumulate intelligence from interviewing suspects and analysing sheaves of their documents. Names and numbers in address books were particularly fruitful, as were numbers on itemised mobile phone bills, fed into a computer and cross checked with all dedicated Yardie databases in the Met, a detailed pattern of connections were built up, aliases and street names were unscrambled and addresses targeted."

All standard operational routines. The protracted use of informers, however, suggests not the monitoring and containment of crime, but its procurement. Research carried out by Colin Dunningham of Durham University and Clive Norris of Hull University notes that

"the most effective informers are actively involved in crime themselves and one consequence is that their handlers frequently turn a blind eye to offences committed by their informers, leaving numerous detectable crimes unsolved." (The Role of the Informer in the Criminal Justice System, 1996).

The Guardian's regular crime correspondent, Duncan Campbell, has written

"many defendants, particularly in drug cases, claim that the main player in trafficking operations is often acting at the behest of his handler and that the crimes would not have taken place without their encouragement. A number have claimed that the police handlers encourage much larger deals than would have taken place or of Class A rather than a Class B drug, with cannabis smugglers being urged to move to ecstasy." (30/4/96)

The particular history of the Yardie gangs may well make them especially susceptible to procurement by the state. Gangs linked to the right-wing Jamaican Labour Party (JLP) were covertly armed in the 1970s as a means of destabilising the social democratic Peoples National Party government of Michael Manley.

CIA involvement in the arming of the JLP-linked gangs was revealed by the former agent Philip Agee. By the end of the 70s, JLP and PNP politicians bought gunmen as a means of sustaining political influence and handing out jobs and favours. After the 1980 election in Jamaica which brought the CIA stooge Edward Seaga to office, Jamaica became a sweatshop for American manufacturers, with Nike paying 20 cents an hour to handpicked cheap labour. Seaga turned the police and army onto the gun gangs whose expansion he'd overseen. By the mid 80s, the Americas Watch human rights monitoring group estimated that one third of the island's homicides were committed by the police. The gangs moved to New York and Miami, and many of them became street soldiers for the Cali cartel.

Given the posses origins, their attitude to the state was necessarily more ambiguous than was the case with other criminal gangs, and informers and supergrasses have a long history within the posses.

Eaton Green was recruited in 1991 following his arrest by Steve Barker for a minor traffic offence. During his time with SO11 he provided 168 intelligence reports on Yardie-related activity (at £1000 a time). On the back of this, Barker went from being a bent Brixton cop to a big fish at the Yard. John Davison and Nick Davies would argue that

"in order to combat the bad men the police need bad men on their side - and in some respects the badder the better."

But according to the Clark report, the new unit was established to combat "sharply increased incidents of murder, violence, drug-related crime and crack availability." The reality is that the unit clearly and deliberately managed such incidents.

Again, if the anti-Yardie work of Scotland Yard had been stepped down to almost nothing prior to Clark's report, why were Barker and his associates spending thousands on informers and why did Barker go to Jamaica in the summer of 1993, at a time when, according to Davies, "officers had been forced to spend their own money to fund operations"? Why was the unit set up despite the Eaton Green fiasco?

Any answers to these questions are necessarily speculative, but it's clearly the case that the answers Nick Davies and Scotland Yard would like us to swallow won't do.

What if money was channelled covertly to officers like Barker while the official monitoring of Yardie gangs was stepped down? What if this was done because publicly accountable expenditure was not justifiable on the basis of the evidence of the real extent of the Yardie gangs' involvement in crack dealing, but that infiltrators of the Yardie gang served some other purpose? What if, when the shit hit the fan the best form of defence was seen by the Yard as attack - to blame a combination of politicians over-sensitivity to complaints of "racism" and inept "policy-makers" for the mess, and propose as a solution the formalisation of the covert activities which had led to the mess in the first place?
Even if any of the above speculation makes sense, the question remaining to be answered is - why?
In an article in The Guardian of 15/7/96, Mark Olden interviews a Ladbroke Grove crack dealer named Eric. In answer to the question "What about the police?", Eric replies

"when we were out on the streets, we paid. When we were visited, we paid. Some of the gear I've had taken off me, I can't swear to it, but I'm sure it's back out there within weeks."

Media hype over crack epidemics in the US resulted in a "War on Drugs" which allowed parts of urban America to be under permanent police siege while drug rehabilitation projects were closed due to cutbacks. under the guise of anti-gang activity, the LAPD has compiled a "gangbangers" register which lists more suspects than there are black and latino youth in LA!

The LAPD carry out semi-permanent community occupations, "narcotic enforcement zones", which serve a dual purpose of whipping up middle class fears of crime, which serve as a useful justification for directing more resources towards policing, while justifying the virtual lockdown of working class communities. Equally, the containment of drugs and drug related crime within working class areas effectively serves to divide and to pacify working class communities.

The US anti-drugs activist, Clarence Lusane, in his book "Pipe Dream Blues" asserts:

"In numerous black communities, police departments have launched what are essentially full scale military assaults. With the logistics of the kind usually reserved for invasions of other nations, police raid black neighbourhoods weekly...The proliferation of hard drug use in these communities plays the dual role of social control and economic delusion. A drugged out community, pacified, subdued, and bent on self-destruction, is not going to rise up against the white corporate power structure. The youth of these communities, who are most likely to rebel, are at the centre of the drug epidemic and the government sponsored drug war."

If police strategy is in reality about the confinement of crime within working class areas; if, whether for political purpose of private gain, some police are actively involved in the drug trade in inner cities, then, far from being an embarrassment, the Eaton Greens of this world are doing exactly what they're paid to do, and the only embarrassment comes from the public disclosure of such activities.

It couldn't happen here? Maybe not; but consider, finally, the following two points:

1. According to HM Customs & Excise 89% of all drugs aimed at the UK market get past them and the police. If the police and customs aren't involved in the drug trade the figure is meaningless, just a guess from the number of port/street seizures per annum. So, either police/customs expenditure is based on nonsensical guesswork, or, to state that 89% get past them, the Customs & Excise must have knowledge of, and control of, drug traffic in the UK.

2. Steve Barker is still operationally active with the SO11-linked unit. He likes to brag that he's been nicknamed John Wayne. It's fair to say that someone who's overseen an armed robber, a rapist and a murderer and a $45,000 con-artist as informants wouldn't normally have been sitting pretty at the Yard. There can only be one reason why "John Wayne" is still running his show. There are more Eaton Greens and Delroy Dentons out there, and Barker is still needed to handle them.

Responses to Labour Election Victory

How many times since 1st May and the landslide election of Tony Blair’s Labour Government have you had conversations with punch drunk lefties that begin “What was your favourite memory of election night '97?”. Maybe it’s a sign of political illiteracy that party manifestos are so dull that no one bothers to read them anymore, but it seems that the media euphoria and the popping of champagne corks at Walworth Road have served to obscure the fact that New Labour was supported by The Sun, The Times, The Financial Times and The Economist and the New Labour Manifesto set out its aims as follows:

“In industrial relations we make it clear that there will be no return to flying pickets, secondary action, strikes with no ballot or the trade union laws of the 1970s.”

In their book “The Blair Revolution” Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle set down in detail what Labour’s pledges to “crackdown on petty crime and neighbourhood disorder” and “stop the growth of an underclass” in Britain” will actually mean.

On crime; “To improve the effectiveness of the police, so they catch more criminals....The issue is not just more bobbies on the beat but how the police best organise themselves to exploit technological advance - from genetic identification techniques to the use of video recorders, to data matching systems.”

“...To increase the likelihood of convictions in the courts and through reform of our criminal justice procedures, reduce the number of technical acquittals.”

On the “underclass”; “It is not right that some people should collect the dole, live on the black economy and then refuse to co-operate with society’s efforts to reintegrate them into the labour market. It is dishonest and corrosive of our attempt to build a sense of mutual obligations in the community. In the circumstances where new opportunity is being offered and refused there should be no absolute entitlement to continued receipt of full social security benefits.”

The Economist and The Sun both backed Labour because they read between the lines and anticipated what lay behind all the cheery grins and photo opportunities.

European capital cannot afford the cost of the maintenance of the welfare state. Germany’s unemployment stands at 4.5 million, French unemployment is over 3 million, Britain’s around 3.5 million. The cost of unemployment is borne through the provision of welfare benefits. The welfare state is a drag anchor on economic growth. If European capital is to compete with the Asian economies and the US economy, it requires labour market flexibility to hold down wages so intervention by the state to sustain the labour market as a way of reducing unemployment is out. The only remaining solution is to dismantle the welfare state itself. The Financial Times, in calling for support for Blair, recognised that the party best placed politically to dismantle the welfare state is the party which gave birth to it. Blair’s vision, which he has sold to the CBI, The Economist and a host of other business forums, is of a hi-tech, low wage economy. As Mandelson describes it “John Major presided over a massive boost to government spending in the run up to the 1992 election. Public spending rose by 5.7% in the election year alone... Public borrowing has too often absorbed too high a share of the country’s savings. Government policy must ensure that the nations savings are put to productive purposes, rather than immediate public or personal consumption.”

The vote cast for Labour on 1st May was objectively a vote for the dismantling of the welfare state, slashing of public sector pay, workfare and a high tech police force to save the middle classes from the disorder likely to result. Does anyone still need to ask why Labour didn’t oppose the Criminal Justice Act?

Whatever subjective intentions Labour voters had, the end result was the replacement of a weak, divided anti-working class government with a right wing anti-working class government with a massive majority!

Over the next 5 years Labour will seek to drain resources form working class communities. The closure of schools, youth clubs, libraries and playgroups, and the selling off of housing stock and chronic disrepair which are the trademark of Labour in local office will be attempted on a national scale. Unless the resistance to this responds on the basis that Labour is the class enemy in office, and opposes it as such and fights from the basis that every school, every youth club, every council home, belongs to the community in which it is based and is not the property of the grinning Rachmans of Blairism, the Labour project will succeed, and the wholesale abandonment to 3rd world levels of poverty of whole sections of the working class which is the legacy of Clinton in the US will be our fate here.

My favourite memory of May 1st? Well, mine was a week or so later, in Socialist Worker, with a headline “We Didn’t Vote for This.” Tough shit, comrades, you voted for it, campaigned for it and the rest of us are now going to pay for it.

Published in Black Flag Issue No. 212.