The Workers Party of Britain is very much concerned with the causes of crime, especially deprivation in our inner cities and the desperation that causes so many to rely on the black economy, get into debt or use drugs to get through the day. However, we are also determined not to be soft on crime itself. Criminal behaviour may inconvenience the upper middle classes but it largely preys on the poor and most vulnerable in our society.
We are not soft-hearted liberals who believe that everyone is capable of redemption. Most people are with the right change of conditions but we have to face the fact that society has a proportion of antisocial sociopaths within it and that sociopaths create networks of organised crime that accumulate significant amounts of capital on the backs of the vulnerable both as their ‘soldiers’ and as their victims.
A police force that acts as the cultural engineering arm of the middle-class state is not serving the people. It is indulging the fantasies of the few at huge expense. The Workers Party of Britain, while determined to weed out organised crime infiltration, corruption and incompetence in our police service, also recognises the frustration of many police officers that bureaucratic systems and political decisions are weakening their ability to function and their relationship with working class communities.
The police must be accountable and transparent in their operations but police officers are workers too, tasked with protecting the poor and the vulnerable, and they deserve our support if they prove they do indeed deserve it. Our approach will remain centred absolutely on Peel’s principles of policing as codified by Charles Reith in 1948 and we will never permit military forces to be used on the streets of Britain. We will overhaul liberal laws that weaken the ability of the police to protect the most vulnerable while continuing to ensure appropriate civil liberties protections, increase police capacity in high crime areas, increase funding and capacity for operations targeting organised crime (including human trafficking and fraud gangs and witness protection arrangements) and seek to shift sentencing guidelines to target organised crime leaders and rehabilitate ‘soldiers’ trapped in their system.
We will work to expand the social care system and integrate it with national policing (as well as with the NHS and educational system) precisely in order to relieve police officers of having to become social workers in default of sufficient resources. We will also give the police greater statutory independence from political interference or by the security services in their lawful enforcement operations while making greater statutory demands on their own ethical conduct in office with non-political community scrutiny in selected crime hot spots.
Julie Lowe 