THE SPECIAL BRANCH & THE NEWSLETTER

A S readers will have learned from the brief announcement in last week’s issue, our paper has recently received some attention from Britain’s political police, ° the Special Branch. We are grateful to all readers and supporters who. have written or telephoned to assure us ‘of. their moral and. material support. if—as seems unlikely—proceedings are taken against us. .We value . especially the. assurances of. solidarity from comrades who on many questions do not share our views: notably from a member of the New Reasoner’s editorial board.

* , ; HE offence of ‘seditious libel’ is an extremely elastic one. Just as any report of parliamentary proceedings. is technically a breach of privilege, so almost any piece of socialist propaganda could, if the letter of the law were. strictly observed, bring its writer and. publisher into. court.. One kind of ‘seditious libel’ consists of words written or spoken with the intention of promoting ill will and hostility. between different classes of the Queen’s subjects. (This is just as nebulous as the 1936 Public Order Act, nicknamed by policemen the ‘breathing Act’, since it enabled them if they felt like itor so they boasted—to arrest a person for breathing.) A definition of ‘seditious libel’ so vague as. this enables the authorities to widen or narrow the meshes of their net at will. Thus, to the best of our knowledge, no. police action has. been taken, nor warning delivered, against the writers and distributors of ‘Keep Britain White’ propaganda, of varied provenance, which may: well have played a part in unleashing the Notting Hill riots. The. Mosleyites, of course; have a finger in the pie; there are also the ‘National Labour Party’ and the sixpenny broadsheet called “Black and White News’, put out by the ‘Britons Publishing Society’, which has headlines such as ‘Blacks milk the Assistance Board’ and ‘Blacks seek .white women’. By what criterion are these not words written with the intention of. promoting ill will and. hostility between’ different classes of the Queen’s subjects?. -* IN ths connexion, whatever one’s feelings about the brutality of: the nine young. men who went ‘nigger -hunting’, it is difficult not to be seized-with the contrast -between the severity of the sentences imposed on them and .the failure to take action against those who incited them. Severiteen-year-old hooligans, . their. minds moulded. by a sick society, are. punished rigorously; at least one fifty-year-old ringleader goes scot-free.. © Several white people told me: “You see older men who sit in cars and give directions.’ Nobody can identify them: T looked. for ‘them. at the flashpoint, but in vain.

I did see one man.in obvious.authority in the Kensington Park Hotel, rallying centre of the gangs. About fifty, -with a brutalized red face, he wore a leather jacket and a peaked cap modelled on the old German Army pattern. The gangs certainly have a plan of campaign. People had heard shouts. of ‘Oxford Gardens next!’ and ‘All up to Blenheim. Crescent!’ I saw obvious messengers on fast: motor-cycles. Gangs arrive in cars from other parts of London.

There are signals, too. As a parked car drove by, one young thug said to another:. ‘It ain’t them. Hasn’t got its indicator out.’

‘E reckon it’s the Mosleyites,’ declared a young policeman. Their paper, Action, is sold vigorously in the riot area. And on Monday they held a meeting just where the clashes had been worst, in a place where meetings have never been “held before. Nobody can understand why it was allowed.

Thus wrote Mervyn Jones in Tribune of September 5. Yet the police officers who visited -our office admitted that they had not even read that article. We suggested that before coming to see us ‘again they might do their homework. Even the Daily Telegraph, whose reporting of the riots was scarcely distinguished by impartiality, now says in its comment on the sentences imposed‘ on the nine young men: ‘It is natural to suspect incitement by somebody else. Should not. this possibility also be. explored by the authorities?’

HAT. in fact was said in THe NEWSLETTER that -might have afnoyed the police? Bearing in ming that the record of the police in the pre-war fascist disorders gave little ground for confidence in their im-~ partiality, we suggested that the sort of ‘order’ they might.bring about might be one where coloured people had in practice fewer rights than white people. Fortyeight hours after our: article appeared Mr’ Norman " Manley, Chief Minister of Jamaica, was complaining about an instance of police discrimination in which he himself. was involved: coloured people, including the Chief Minister, were told to move on while white people were given the freedom of the streets, We suggested that a responsibility lay on the Labour Party, on trades councils and on trade union branches to protect. coloured. workers against hooligans..and fascists, not as an act of charity, but as an elementary measure of working-class self-defence. We said, in fact; no more than did the Labour Party in Salford which has called for the setting up of ‘joint committees to organize practical united action by coloured and white people against fascist-inspired hooliganism’. The only force which can defeat fascism and racialism is the organized working class; to suggest otherwise, to foster illusions in the willingness or ability of the. capitalist State machine to do the job, is to deceive the workers. .