But what else do you expect of people who take a job that involves wearing a uniform and having power over other people? I mean, get real. How many are going to be the humane and compassionate type? And just how likely are they to be politicised in a way that means they challenge the system, as opposed to promoting their own interests within it?

Debate re POA has been running in Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! since May Day


1. Article from FRFI 203 June/July 2008

FRFI ‘banned from May Day’ by Labour sectarians
FRFI comrades in all areas joined the annual May Day international worker’s day demonstrations. In London we marched with Turkish communists and Latin American community activists. In Edinburgh comrades marched with banners of Che Guevara and the Cuban 5, distributing leaflets calling for a demonstration outside the US consulate in Edinburgh on 26 July. In Manchester FRFI and North West Asylum Seekers Defence Group NWASDG had a lively, visual contingent on the demo organised by Manchester Trades Council and Manchester Committee to Defend Asylum Seekers.

In Newcastle Tyneside Community Action for Refugees TCAR, Rock Around the Blockade RATB and FRFI formed a militant anti-imperialist contingent on the annual Tyne and Wear May Day march. Advertised speakers for the end rally included Colin Moses, Chair of the Prison Officers Association (POA). The POA is currently in dispute over the pay and conditions of its members, which are under attack, as are those of all public sector workers. However, as FRFI has consistently pointed out, POA members are at the forefront of attacking and abusing prisoners and the union unashamedly defends those who are caught doing so. It also campaigns for greater weaponry with which to inflict pain, including on imprisoned children. It is a club for thugs and we do not see how progressive people can listen to and applaud its speakers.

FRFI supporters erected a banner behind their stall reading ‘POA – enemy of the working class’ and distributed leaflets exposing the racist, anti-working class nature of the POA. We called for solidarity with the prisoners who have experienced systematic abuse over decades by POA members. In the event Moses was delayed and never spoke. No one expressed any objection to our banner or leaflets until the rally had finished when Martin Levy, chair of the May Day Committee and Communist Party of Britain (CPB) member, demanded that we take down the banner immediately or face being ‘banned from May Day’ next year, fuming that if we attempted to take part he would have us removed by the police.

Three weeks later a comrade in TCAR received the following email:

Dear Comrades

It has come to my attention that the organisation who are promoting the Northern Conference Against Racism have attacked the Prison Officers Association at the recent May Day Rally in Newcastle. The "Tyneside Community Action For Refugees" who are organising the conference, along with the "Fight Racism-Fight Imperialism" group and the "Rock Around the Blockade" campaign for Cuba, are all fronts for the Revolutionary Communist Group. While the LRC supports any measures which raise the consciousness and awareness of these issues and defends the right of any organisation to pursue them in their own way, i.e. fronts etc, we cannot condone a blatant attack upon fellow Trades Unionists in such a negative way. Specifically; a banner was raised at the May Day Rally by the group, accusing the POA of being "Enemies of the Working Class" which is clearly false from start to finish, being that the POA is an important section of the said "Working Class". How can a section of the "working class" be "enemies" of itself?

Perhaps in some circumstances a Trades Union "leadership" could be described in such terms, such as the reactionary role played by the official Trades Union leadership in Venezuela who backed the employers blockade in 2001 and stood idly by during the coup in 2002 and who were eventually replaced by the workers themselves, but we cannot support such a confused slogan or have any truck with any group who support it in Britain today. While some will be critical of some of the leaders of our movement, we cannot allow these sentiments and criticisms to be confused with the people they represent, i.e. the working class. The slogan "POA-Enemies of the Working Class" makes no sense!

The LRC stands for the unity of all campaigns, both in the Labour Party and in the community, which seeks to unite and bond together opposition to attacks on the Trades Union movement and builds solidarity with those who fight for the principles of socialism upon which the movement was founded and which continue to develop.

The Fight Racism-Fight Imperialism group and the RCG have been banned from next years Rally.

Fraternally, Steve Brown.
LRC Northern Region Co-ordinator.

Some of this nonsense is not worth even engaging with but the attacks by both Martin Levy (CPB) and Steve Brown (LRC) on FRFI have to be understood in the context that their organisations have consistently supported and covered up for the imperialist British Labour Party. The CPB is committed to the ‘parliamentary road to socialism’ and the Labour Representation Committee (LRC)’s entire reason for existence is ‘rebuilding the Labour Party’. These organisations nominally oppose the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, but do nothing to dissuade anyone from joining the party leading that occupation. Both call for a vote for Labour in elections and the LRC actively recruits members to it. Similarly, while they would never publically own up to supporting brutality against prisoners, in reality they do nothing to support those who are beaten or murdered by prison officers. Instead they defend the ‘rights’ of the brutalisers. Labour has introduced 3,000 new criminal offences and the gap between rich and poor has increased. As a result of this inequality, alienation and repression the prison population has spiralled out of control. The overwhelming majority of prisoners are poor and working class. So-called left organisations like the CPB and LRC not only fail to support those at the sharp end of state repression, but when their view is challenged, reach for the same weapons their Labour Party task-masters would employ – censorship and threats to call the police.

May Day is international workers’ day. It belongs to the workers – all of us. Not to the CPB, the LRC or anyone else. They are in no position to ‘ban us from May Day’ as though it were their personal property. Every year in countries like Turkey workers are murdered by the state as they exercise their right to show solidarity with the working class around the world. In Britain in 2000 when the London May Day demonstration was for once much more than the usual passive affair, demonstrators were beaten, arrested and taken to prisons, presided over by screws from the union the CPB and LRC are now so keen to defend. It is not our analysis that is confused, as Mr Brown suggests. We are clear. We defend the working class. As our article on last year’s POA strike said: ‘Most prison officers are from the working class but, like the police, they are hired to protect the ruling class by enforcing its laws and punishing those who do not obey them. They are the defenders of inequality and privilege…Whilst it is clearly the case that the POA’s members’ wages and privileges are currently being squeezed because of the contradictions that the state has to deal with when needing to run a massive repressive apparatus and trying to do so at minimum cost, this does not make their struggle a progressive one, and it should not be supported by socialists.’


2. Letter to FRFI 204 August/September 2008 and reply

Dear FRFI

I attended the May Day rally in Newcastle's Exhibition Park this year, but was unaware of the FRFI banner denouncing the Prison Officers Association or the subsequent reaction of the chairman of the May Day Committee. Until, that is, I read the article in FRFI number 203. My concern is that FRFI are being rather naive in that it is not possible to pick and choose which sections of the working class can or cannot be supported. Prison officers undoubtedly directly support the State and are in the contradictory position of having to supervise the incarceration of fellow workers. But such contradiction is in the very nature of capitalism and despite its need for gaolers the capitalist state wishes to pay them as little as possible thus fostering a working class reaction, a trade union response.

As a teacher I am implicated in the transmission of the capitalist ideology and inculcating the skills and discipline required for the future functioning of the system. If I am accused by a student of some impropriety then my union, the NUT, will support me. Does this place me and my colleagues beyond the pale? Should I renounce my adherence to the socialist cause and promulgate a more (C)conservative position in keeping with the actuality of my job?

When the London dockers marched in enthusiastic support of Enoch Powell following his "rivers of blood speech" I'm sure FRFI, had it been around then, would have opposed them. I doubt, though, that banners calling dockers enemies of the working class would have been publicly displayed. The ideological infiltration into the working class is profound and those ideas need to be confronted and countered. However, this will not be achieved by selective ostracism. While there are no doubt large numbers jailed who should not be, that is not the fault of the POA. Would FRFI erect a similar banner condemning Cuban prison officers? They may well serve a different cause, but I suspect they are similar characters.

Brutality is a feature of capitalism: after all criminals can be brutal towards their victims who are usually fellow members of the working class and to each other. There will be a need for Laval controls under socialism and the means to enforce them. The FRFI are surely not anarchists who hold a seemingly simplistic view that merely abolishing capitalism will realise universal virtue? Radical looking sloganeering will do nothing to further the socialist cause, only engaging with the whole disparate class can, even those we are not so comfortable with. After all, the Bolsheviks actively campaigned amongst soldiers to join the cause rather than anathematise them as brutal agents of the Tsar.

Dave Alton
Newcastle

FRFI would like to thank Dave Alton for his letter. At a time when there is relatively little political struggle taking place in Britain, it is not surprising that people on the left should examine any sign of militancy to see how the immediate demands being made by one section relate to the wider interests of the working class as a whole.

Dave compares the British POA in 2008 with Russian soldiers at the time of the Russian Revolution. The two are difficult to compare as Britain is not in a revolutionary situation, however, if we follow the logic for a while we see that the Bolsheviks created Soviets of soldiers with the precise aim of fomenting dissent and getting the soldiers to turn their guns against the state, instead of against the Revolution. The focus of their political work among the army was not to defend the soldiers’ own narrow interests while shoring up the status quo. In contrast, those on the British left today who are so keen to support the POA against the government are not putting any revolutionary demands on the union but slavishly following its economistic agenda.

So, what should socialists ask of the Prison Officers’ Association? It is certainly true that the union has tried to reposition itself over the past 20 years and shake off its erstwhile brutal, racist image. But this has to date been packaging, rather than substance. If the POA has any claim to be progressive, it must resolutely stand up for the human rights of prisoners. John McDonnell has issued a ten-point programme of demands for the Labour Party – here are FRFI’s five for the POA.

1. Campaign against imprisoning children, not for more weaponry to inflict injury on imprisoned children. The POA correctly criticised the Prison Service’s authorisation of the use of PAVA, an immobilising gas, on young protesting prisoners in June 2007, but its members did not refuse to use the gas and the POA exploited the occasion to demand staff in prisons holding children be issued with extendable batons.

2. Stop attacking asylum seekers. The routine response to protests in immigration detention centres is to call in ‘Tornado teams’ of prison officers to break up the protests. The POA claims to be against racism so it should refuse to allow its members to attack detainees who are demonstrating against Britain’s racist immigration laws and practices.

3. Concentrate press statements on attacking the government, not prisoners. Left supporters of the POA claim the union’s members and prisoners have a shared interest in improving prison conditions. So the union should instruct its officials to stop issuing scaremongering press statements opposing government measures to relieve overcrowding by moving prisoners to less restrictive regimes and telling journalists that prisons are so cushy that no-one would want to escape.

4. Campaign for less imprisonment, not more. Although the POA is a member of the Criminal Justice Alliance, which campaigns against prison overcrowding, its approach is in contrast with that of other members, who campaign for less use of custody. When the government issued its consultation document on Titan prisons, POA National Chairman Colin Moses said ‘New prisons are welcome, but old established prisons that deliver must not be closed.’

5. Work to rule in the interests of prisoners! Faced with the legal restrictions on prison officers going on strike, POA branches frequently ‘work to rule’. This inevitably means prisoners not getting out of their cells for association, exercise or education, life sentence prisoners not getting ‘escorted town visits’ and a general reduction in the few facilities prisoners can usually rely on. A progressive POA would turn this on its head and work to rule by not giving out disciplinary charges and behaviour warnings, refusing to conduct unnecessary searches, not writing up ‘security reports’, not censoring mail, listening into phonecalls or banning visitors.

Nicki Jameson

3. Two letters to FRFI 205 October/November 2008

Dear FRFI

I have taken the last two issues of FRFI and been impressed with the quality of the articles but was very disappointed with the stance of the RCG regarding the POA.

In Britain today most production has moved abroad. Of all the workers only production workers, as a group, have a vested interest in the overthrow of the capitalist state and will naturally develop a revolutionary perspective for it is they that create the surplus value that enables the capitalist class to employ all the other workers.

The other workers are, in one way or another, capitalism’s little helpers and have a vested interest in the continuation of capitalism. These workers range from office workers, bank workers, armament workers, workers feeding the life-style of the rich right through to the army, police and prison officers.

If production workers are to make a revolution these latter workers must become allies or remain neutral. Therefore when one of these groups, however improbable, comes and says ‘we want to be on your side’, you welcome them and do not send them away with a set of tests to prove their revolutionary credentials as Nicki Jameson suggests.

Production in Britain is now more often than not in the hands of non-union immigrant workers. If the RCG wants to change the nature of working class politics and make a revolution it should concentrate on organising these groups and stop attacking trade union structures and revising Marx’s ideas by suggesting that it is the unemployed who will lead the revolution (Robert Clough, FRFI).
TOM BURR
Redhill



Dear FRFI

Dave Alton’s letter in your August/September issue (‘The POA and the working class’), in which he defends the POA and prison officers, is absolutely typical of these middle-class ‘socialists’ who have been fortunate enough never to have experienced prison or the brutality of prison staff; maybe a good dose of the reality of what working class ‘criminals’ have to endure at the hands of a brutal and inhumane prison system would radically improve people like Dave’s understanding of the role of prison officers.

Let’s get it straight: prison officers are not what these middle-class idiots describe as ‘a section of the working class’. They are hired lackeys of the state who willingly betray their working class roots for financial gain and from perverse pleasure in locking up and brutalising the poorest and most socially disadvantaged people in capitalist society. They are the enemy of the working class.

I am amazed Nicki Jameson lent Dave Alton’s reactionary arguments any credibility by systematically answering them. Genuine revolutionaries and those seriously committed to prisoners’ rights should not provide a platform for middle-class idiots who have not the slightest understanding of what is inflicted on working class people in prison and who have never experienced the vicious sadism of those who administer and enforce prison repression.

JOHN BOWDEN
Glenochil Prison


4. Two letters to FRFI December 2008/January 2009


POA does not show solidarity with other trade unionists 415 words
In December 2007 RMT News printed a letter I wrote criticizing the union’s support for the POA. I was pleased that subsequent issued carried responses from former RMT President Tony Donaghey and current Executive Council member, Alex Gordon, although I don't feel they addressed the concerns I raised. I thought it was important to discuss who the RMT supports and why. Support for radical causes
abroad should be matched by a radical stance at home.

It is up to prison and police officers how they organise themselves. But just because they are organised doesn't mean the RMT should support them. The POA and Police Federation are very effective at representing their members and
securing generous pay and conditions. However it's all about the role
these two groups of workers perform in capitalist society. They are
servants of the crown paid to uphold and enforce the laws of the ruling
class.

Alex Gordon painted the POA as some sort of liberalising or progressive influence on penal policy. This is laughable, if not absurd. In all major investigations, inquiries and reviews into the prison system (eg post-Strangeways, Learmont Inquiry...) the POA has always advocated greater repression of prisoners. The POA may be involved in a battle with the government over the growth of the private sector in the prison system but it has not, for instance, spoken out against the new
proposed 'super prisons'.

Tony Donaghey’s response stated that the POA 'has always been at the forefront of the struggle against anti-union laws' but there has never been one instance of POA members taking a stand and refusing to lock up militant trade
unionists involved in struggle. From the upheavals of the 1970s to the
Miners' Strike and Wapping, they've willingly behaved as just another
arm of the state. The RMT rightly prides itself on its support of other
workers in struggle and adopts an internationalist outlook. When has the
POA ever acted in solidarity with other workers?
Whilst most other sectors of the workforce have felt the squeeze
throughout the last three decades, under Labour and Tory
administrations, the POA and Police Federation have been rewarded very
well for doing their dirty work. If an individual or group is to be
judged by the company they keep, then the sight of the BNP mayoral
candidate at the front of the Police Federation march in London
spoke volumes.

Phil
Brighton RMT member


POA – racist and brutal
I have spent the last eight years in prison resisting the brutal oppression of the POA in its most raw and sublime form, so when reading comrades John Bowden and Nicki Jameson’s debate over the POA’s feeble attempts to be accepted by the revolutionary socialist working class when concern for their paycheques led them to seek public sympathy via strikes and tactical misinformative media drip-feed, I felt inclined to give my perspective.

For anyone to claim the POA ‘working class’ at any level, one must first learn its actual workings. Many years ago I was ‘visited’ by a POA committee of half a dozen drunk ‘working class’ men who beat me unconscious and called me every ‘black bastard’ under the sun for my heinous crime of ringing the cell bell and kicking the door in an attempt to establish why I had not been allowed an xmas visit from my family. When I regained consciousness, I was confronted with POA members brandishing a home-made noose and spouting threats and racial abuse. This history was accepted by 12 jury members and a judge at Sittingbourne Crown Court, where I was cleared of stabbing two POA scum in self-defence, in fear for my life.

After this I was sent from seg to seg, POA stronghold to POA stronghold, where I was enlightened as to the true nature of the ‘working class’ POA:
• Whitemoor, where I suffered multiple fractures and received an out-of-court settlement at the County Court, following my taking action against Whitemoor’s long renowned brutal racist POA scum fraternity;
• Frankland, where I unexpectedly found a POA member pouring a translucent liquid from a small medical vial covertly into segregated inmates’ water flasks;
• Long Lartin, where POA militia rushed mob-handed onto the field and attacked inmates indiscriminately on camera, wielding batons and unleashing dogs, after an officer falsely claimed an incident had taken place;
• Full Sutton, where, having been put on trial for attacking three racist prison officers, my solicitor uncovered POA-written phone records with such quotes as ‘wog speak’ and ‘nigga talk – can’t understand’. I was cleared of three counts of GBH. At a later date I returned to Full Sutton to have my left arm broken by the POA ‘working classes’.

Similar brutality has continued ever since at HMPs Wandsworth, Strangeways, Blakenhurst, Birmingham, Swaleside, Hull, Leeds, Bristol, Cardiff, Gloucester – to name but a few. The POA grapevine targets inmates and ensures perpetual hardship and torture by abusing their authority and covering each others’ backs with a secret society like kinship. Twelve Crown Court cases later I am still in the POA stranglehold where I am targeted at every level from mail/money/property going ‘missing’ or being damaged, right down to the POA members paying weak inmates with drugs to try and do me harm. I have seen the POA in its raw, uncensored form and know it to be nothing more than a club of corrupt, racist, brutal thugs employed by an equally uncouth Prison Service. Though some prison officers may well have joined the Prison Service with the illusion of simply gaining an easy mortgage through lack of intensive manual labour or need for any real degree of qualification or even intelligence, and some still harbouring notions of their job as a valued necessity in this crumbling society, every prison officer soon becomes fully aware of the real underbelly and criminal actions of many other officers. And with such knowledge, even if they as individuals take no active role in corrupt/racist/brutal actions, they are as much involved as the more blatant criminal officers and ensure the POA status quo by their silence and corrupt partisanship.

The ‘Bad Apple’ argument does not apply to the POA as it would be like claiming some Nazis were good officers. The root of the POA’s authority and the abuse of it are built upon the oppression of inmates in the service of a government that propagates brutality, racism and torture towards all humans – be they civilians or prisoners, here or abroad - who resist repression. The POA are to be regarded as scum. Bottom line.

Sean Higgins (VA3977) HMP Birmingham

LibCom not only supported the prison officers, along with every other dubious industrial dispute, they also have promoted the concept of anarchist prisons here while attacking local prisoner support groups. They are Swappie entryists wrapped in the black-flag. CH and Makhno from IM Scotland, this means you.

people in prison because they have raped,murdered & robbed innocent fellow members of the working class. There needs to be detention for them, lets not trade inusults with lefty jargon.
Prison system needs to be about reform, rehabilitation & therapy, as someone who has been victim of child abusers I say this, but we need detention centres for dangerous people we live in a uncivilised society& whilst many in our movement seem to argue that we look ridiculous.
Good luck ti & well bloody done to any good people in the POA they deserve our support it has been a bad union. Until we live in a true direct democracy prisons will always increase,be unjust & overcrowded, at same time for direct democracy to happen we need as many as possibles involement & a stop to any repression in the POA by those in it & against the penal system.
We can support the POA when it wants to do good, recently POA protested about overcrowding themselves as well as pay, we can also criticise them, there doesnt have to either or that just helps the system. As someone they have tried to lock up many times unjustly I know what Iam on about, its not black & bloody white!

What would many anarchists do with paedophiles & nazis just kill them all? after a "fair" trail & obviously we cant let them roam about preying on people. There were prisons in spainish civil war for nazis, Bakunin even advocated taking away the liberty of those that dont work, this was before the advent of majot industrialisation& he probably meant robber barons, detention is necessary, a penal ststem isnt.

>What would many anarchists do with paedophiles & nazis just kill them all?

The rest of your post is toss ( sorry but it is) but this is a fair question that deserves a serious answer. I can only answer for myself and wouldn't claim to be in the right. I have met a paedophile and several Nazis over the past years, and have suffered at their hands.

My initial reaction in both cases was to try to warn others, to try to take joint action. That should be possible but in my case failed, at least in the case of paedo who is a well respected activist. As a last resort, I would indeed kill any Nazi or child-abuser. I have contemplated this in depth. As an intermediate stage, I am going to go to the cops, tommorow, simply because noone has shown a genuine interest in this. If you are interested in a solution suitable for most of humanity then you should perhaps ask what societies which didn't or still don't have prisons do to their more dangerous members.

Some readers here may consider themselves anarchist and yet still support prisons. This is more instrinsically contradictory than me being forced to become a police informer. It requires the concept of anarchist judges, anarchist lawyers and anarchist prison wardens. And maybe unicorns.

The POA says 'Prisoners have abused the Human Rights Act and use it on a daily basis to achieve their own aims and this was not the purpose of this Act.'

What exactly are 'their own aims' ?

The HRA isn't a magic carpet and as a general charter is a bit lacking (no right to eat, shelter, health care etc) but it does contain the right to family life, freedom of expression etc, most of which are surrounded by caveats that the state can still legally interfere with these things in order to preserve national security etc.

So since 2000 prisoners and their lawyers have used the HRA to obtain legal representation at disciplinary hearings and Parole Board panels, allow mothers to keep babies in prison with them, get better inquiries where someone dies or nearly dies in prison and, in Scotland, not be forced to slop out (ie live with a bucket of shit). Oh dear, oh dear, how abusive and exploitative of them.

Perhaps a better anti-prison utopia is Woman on The Edge of Time where deviants are deported. They are shot if they return twice. We oppose the injustices of the present and it's hard to imagine a utopia. Leaders of the POA oppose human rights. That doesn't prove that all POA members oppose human rights but, like concentration camp guards, they do work in a brutalising environment.

 http://www.revolutionarycommunist.org/frfipages/199/FRFI_199_pri.html

 http://www.bolshevik.org/1917/no30/no30-Screws_out_PCS.html

so the POA are beyond the pale for actively supporting prisons under capitalism but in an anarchist society we would have no legal system and suspected paedophiles would be lynched or driven out of the community??? the POA and the wider community of prison officers is undoubtedly dominated by some very nasty people and the vast majority of people in prison are there to enforce compliance with capitalism (non-payment of fines, theft etc). But, calling the POA reactionary and ostracising them from the rest of the labour movement will only have the effect of isolating any progressive forces that may exist in the POA, and tying the POA completely to the state. The workers movement needs be constructively critical of the role of the POA.

What if we took the same attitude to oil refinery workers??? they are agents of capitalism, robbing the natural resources of third world countries, supporting the growth of trans-national capitalism, causing wars, and wreaking environmental destruction that could wipe out the entire human race. If they had a revolutionary conciousness they would destroy the refineries and start making solar panels. So we denounce them as enemies of the working class, yeah???

I basically agree with Phil Pope.

We all know that the POA contains many racist thugs and bullies and others who are anti-working class. Being working class sociologically doesn't stop you being anti-working class politically. Many of its members used to be in the NF or BM and today many are probably in the BNP.

The remarks of Caton and Moses re the pitifully weak Human Rights Act shows that their union is on the wrong side of any debate on democratic rights and civil liberties and is in the Daily Mail/Telegraph camp.

But does that mean we completely write off the POA? I think you can support them when they are in confrontation with the State over things like the right to take industrial action, pay etc. whilst being criticial of the fact that they have acted effectively as scabs against other workers locked up for taking industrial action.

Many miners joined the prison service because there were no other jobs after the Miners' Strike. Do we just write them off?

The Police Federation, which isn't a union incidentally, came about as a result of the Liverpool Police strike circa 1918. The State did not want those it relied on for coercion to join unions as that might make them unreliable. I'm in favour of unreliability amongst the state forces and encouraging them to see that their interests too do not lie with our rulers.

So I don't think we should, on a blanket basis, oppose everything the POA does and nor do I think we should be uncritical of them like the Socialist Party.