SPIES IN THE PICKET LINE

Part series The capitalists have never been satisfied with the regular police and army alone as a means of repressing the working class. They have called into existence all manner of spies and strike-breaking organizations as well as private police, armies, and in the last extreme, the fascists.

On the basis of 'know your enemy' some of these forces, past and present, which the employers use in order to defeat pickets, demonstrators, workers' defence and political organizations and revolution are looked at here.

It should be added though that Marxists have always been contemptuous mechanically list posed forces pronounce it too well-armed to eve Tr in 1934:

'The pacifists hoped that the military technique war impossible. tines have repeated for decades that the growth of military technique would make revolution impossible. However, wars and revolutions continue. Never has there been so many revolutions, including victorious revolutions, as there have been since the last war which uncovered all the might of military techniques.' ('Whither France?'.)

Spies and provocateurs In the early part of last century when trade unions were illegal, political and labour spies were so thick on the ground in Britain that they often betrayed each other to the authorities by mistake. Payments to spies were a regular feature of early Home Office records and magistrates also frequently employed them on a permanent basis.

Criminals and ex-convicts were often used as spys. They did not merely report what had taken place at workers' mectings - discussions on resistance to wage-cuts, political speeches and so on-but made up tales of conspiracy and proposed insurrection in order to justify their pay.

In many cases they acted as agent provocateurs, encouraging violent acts and riot so that workers' leaders could be got safely out of the way by transportation, prison or hanging.

One spy named Fletcher who operated a team of agents was getting £226 for a halfyear in 1816. Between 1812 and 1818 parliament spent £9,526 Os 9d on this type of spying activity. The police also paid out large amounts. Metropolitan police records contained a bill for £986 6s 3d paid to a firm of shorthand writers in 1848 for attending Chartist meetings and taking down speeches. The Chartists were well aware of the problem and any police agents discovered would be ejected with much violence.

In 1817, 'Oliver the Spy', a paid Home Office informer 9 of a series on Picke those who all the supcapital and strong, too n considèr a otsky wrote have long growth of would make The Philis; by Bernard Franks toured industrial districts of the north posing as a delegate from the London Physical Force Party and inciting local radicals to an insurrection which he assured them was about to break out in the rest of the country.

Very few people were taken in, but in Derbyshire he managed to get a few starving textile workers to take up arms and march to Nottingham in support of the Pentridge 'rising'.

They were quickly rounded up by a small detachment of troops and 35 were subsequently tried for high treason.

Of these, 11 were transported for life, three for 14 years, and four, including their leader, Teremiah Brandreth, were hanged.

Another notorious agent called Edwards travelled from town to town joining societies and reporting to the authorities lurid descriptions of treasons about to be committed.

In 1819 he alleged that in an interview William Cobbett had enthused over the actions of the Luddites and had deplored the fact that there a During the age of Chartism had been no general uprising.

comprehensive government espionage system existed. Postmasters were required to report all untoward occurrences in their districts and factory inspectors, appointed under the Factory Act of 1833, in addition to their inspection duties, respecting the reported from time to time state of the trade, the wages of labour, and the state of tranquility or excitement in the district in which you act'. (Home Office letter, May 1837.)

Two years later they were asked to 'report weekly respecting the Chartist meetings'. The same year a magstrate complained of newspaper reporters who refused to make depositions or come forward as witnesses in cases arising out of Chartist meetings.

In 1848 a Metropolitan police sPy, Thomas Powell, was in the witness box to give evidence against Chartist conspirators. Under stringent cross-examination, however, he admitted to drawing up plans to assassinate police, making implements to cripple cavalry horses, inducing incendiarism and bullets. He finally admitted: casting, entered the association for the purpose of getting information and communicating it to the police commissioners. encouraged and stimulated these men in order to inform against them.' For the safety of their own skins, spies were naturally reluctant to appear in court. In any case, the authorities did not want their best agents advertised. Nottingham's town producing a spy as a witness clerk argued in 1814 that not court would keep 'the source of our information pure and uncontaminated'. Workers protected themselves against all spies and informers by taking severe oaths of allegiance to their cause and making it extremely hot for anyone breaking the vows.

Today, examples freque ntly come to light oi factory spies, lacklisting and activities of the Special Branch which show that such private and state labour and political spying is on a more comprehensive scale than ever, and is using methods in keeping with the latest developments of modern technology.

Militia and yeomanry Two organizations which, in addition to regular troops, could be called upon in the early 19th century to break up political demonstrations, food riots and strikes were the militia and the yeomanry. The militia was a non-professional military force, mainly conscripted and not permanently embodied, but made available in times of internal unrest or invasion. A certain amount of training was given each year and the force paid for by a county levy.

It was not reliable for dealing with internal unrest because its part-time nature meant that members, often workers and shopkeepers, spent most of their lives in the communities which they might be called upon to repress. They were not to be compared with the professional soldiers who were kept somewhat isolated from the populace in specially-built barracks.

As one writer comments:

...Militia units were usually stationed outside their own counties when embodied, because the men's ties with the people of their own county might make them take the wrong side in civil disturbances.' ('The English Militia in the Eighteenth Century' by J. R. Weston, 1968.)

The Hammonds in "The Town Labourer' give a number of examples of militia refusing to shoot rioters, and even changing sides during the early 1800s.

The yeomanry was totally different. A mounted volunteer force formed in 1794, it was made up almost entirely of small landowners, tenant farmers and businessmen, officered by the landed ger try and aristocracy. Solidly Tory, it was regarded by the state as the most reliable force to suppress minor riots and industrial disturbances and to keep order in other cases until the military arrived.

The Hammonds cite a report to the Home Office about a seamens' strike in 1816, saying that the local militia could not be relied on but that a corps of yeomanry çould be raised without difficulty at Holdness, which would be 'worth more than all the regiments of militia in the West Riding'.

The yeomanry's most notorious action was their cavalry charge on a peaceful crowd listening to radical orators in St. Peter's Fields, Manchester in 1819.

The local yeomanry - consisting of Manchester businessmen-along with the Cheshire yeomen and a section of the 15th Hussars drove into the gathering of 60,000 people, which, reports of the time said, contained 'an unusually large proportion of women and children'. Brutally cutting and slashing with sabres they murdered 11 people, including two women and a child and injured 600 more, including 113 women. This was the Peterloo Massacre.

Both the militia and yeomanry declined in their importance to the capitalist state in the middle of the last century. For regular forces the British ruling class has preferred to concentrate on developing fully-trained and entirely full-time professional troops and police, highly disciplined and under tight control of the authorities at all CONTINUED

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