Violence in the Streets

...The vote was taken on March 25, 1947...

...Secondly, prosecutions under it have to be authorized by the Attorney General (the legal ofricer of the government, and thus a political person) and not just by the Director of Public Prosecutions...

...The Radical Party, for example, is leading a campaign for a popular referendum that would call for abrogation...

...Perhaps one of the most tedious, but also one of the most pernicious things about British politics today is the way that this boastful, puerile and illiterate fallacy is continuously employed by every politician in sight, to the great insult and detriment of the people as a whole...

...they therefore tend to refuse to ask for a ban, especially when the march as such (as distinct from the behavior of those provoked by it) seems likely to be "peaceful...

...For of the ten candidates, all but two lost their deposits, and the Labor candidate won by a very comfortable margin (as expected...

...In the Lewisham case, it seems with hindsight obvious (as many sensible local people pleaded at the time) that the police should have swallowed their pride, and sought a ban...

...It was instructive, however, to learn that one elderly female 'shopper' felled-and photographed--in the street, thus gaining much public sympathy, turns out to have been a National Front member herself...

...While glinting jars await the strutting dill, between the rows, like scars, the rut fills in as far as the light can sprawl or spill...

...The Ladywood riot was undoubtedly given extra prominence and importance by the fact that two days earlier, there had been a street demonstration by the National Front in Lewisham (a district of South-East London heavily populated by black immigrants) which resulted in a good deal of violence and many casualties, including police casualties...

...The leaders of the German government in that period and such lesser criminals as Col...

...The teaching of Catholic doctrine was to be considered fundamental to public education...

...But neither of these conditions can be counted upon with any certainty at present...

...Legal forms of words can never at one and the same time be precise enough to catch the offender and wide-ranging enough to prevent the spirit of the legislation being flouted (as distinct from the mere letter...

...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 FROM ROME END OF THE CONCOBDAT...

...This is why people like Enoch Powell have never been prosecuted under the Act, whereas lesser fry have...

...Captured, their fate should have been simply to be shot on sight, granted dental, fingerprint identification, whatever...

...But it is also because (as in the case of obscenity) the judgments involved are subjective...

...Mussolini has become the leader of Catholic conservatism," wrote a London newspaper, "able to unite around himself all of moderate Europe...

...Yet this arrangement has its own dangers...

...When the Germans try it again--and the Kappler case is disquieting as evidence of the long-range intention there---we should remember all this, plan accordingly and have some hope that that time the end will be the end...

...At Lewisham, on the other hand, a street demonstration was organized deliberately to pass through crowded shopping streets full of Asian and West Indian citizens...

...That course would have spared us Speer as best-selling author: "How I Made Millions in the Nazi Slave Trade, Repented and Made Millions More as a Contrite Sinner...

...The police are naturally reluctant to admit that they cannot handle something in their own field...

...For one thing, the incitement has to happen before it can be stopped...

...As a result of the agreement, Mussolini's Fascist government gained enormous international, as well as domestic, prestige...

...Thus the Home Secretary is the only person who can actuatly ban an otherwise legal march through the streets: and he can only do so on the recommendation of the local police chief...

...One doesn't want possibly biased politicians interfering with activities that the local peep!e, including police, know they can control and which are not provocative...

...The Home Secretary should have decided on such a course, and the Metropolitan Police Commissioner should have had the sense to recommend it...

...After the fall of Fascism, the Constituent Assembly ----composed of all the anti-Fascist forces--was called upon to decide the future of the Concordat...

...There is little doubt that what happened has given people a general impression that the police are more concerned to protect the right of the National Front to march than they are to protect the people caught unwittingly in the middle, or victims of Front abuse who cannot protect themselves...

...First of all, this means having a public which is politically intelligent enough to see what is happening, and active enough to take part in opposing it...

...There's a rick of them, arrayed like stars around a center, thick as thieves, awning-striped and quick with seed...

...On the other hand, the political decision to ban a march must be taken by a democratically accountable person...

...Of course, in this domain the law is designed to be more "educative" than "punitive": its object is more to encourage a certain atmosphere than to bring about remedies for all particular offenses...

...There is obvious merit in this arrangement...

...Certainly to indulge in provocatively violent opposition to the Front in the streets, with the TV cameras all set-up in expectation of a brawl, is simply to play into the hands of the Front itself...

...Much ink has already been spilled, and many words spoken about the Lewisham and Ladywood incidents...

...The National Front is not a banned organization: its candidate had every legal right to stand...

...The physical decay of Ladywood is not only a disgrace: it is a potent symbol of the neglect by politicians of what matters most to ordinary people...

...The "agreement," co-signedby Benito Mussolini in the name of Italy and Gasparri himself in the name of the Holy See at the Lateran Palace in Rome, became known as the Lateran Pact...

...On the other, it is important that the police should not seek to interfere with people's rights to demonstrate unless this is manifestly necessary in order to protect other, equally important rights...

...Mussolini, boasted the Fascist press, had succeeded where everyone else, beginning with Cavour, had failed...

...Despite the noble declarations of reconciliation and concern for religious peace, however, the treaties had clear political dimensions...

...Some believe that it simply should be abrogated, insisting that it is anti-democratic, authoritarian, illiberal and unconstitutional (the recognition of Catholicism as a state religion violates the constitutional principle of religious freedom...

...an attempt on the life of a Pope is punishable by death although the death penalty was abolished in Italy in 1947...

...As such, it is a standing invitation to fascist thuggery...

...The Christian Democrats, then leading a coalition government that included the Italian Communists, asked that it be incorporated unaltered into the new Italian Constitution...

...The National Front are adept at keeping within the letter of the law while deliberately breaking its spirit...

...Its leader, Lelio Basso, then general secretary of the Socialist Party, declared: "It is not a question of safeguarding religious peace...

...Not only was the two-party system practically endorsed by an electorate which is more than forty percent-immigrant, but the swing against the government was far lower than in other recent by-elections...

...The fact that the police have also been shown t o be unable to cope with a situation they partly helped to create, has only exacerbated the problem...

...The lay front--in the majority--adamantly refused...

...It is probable that history will record these pieces of violence (as indeed the media have already) in much greater detail than it will remember the more prosaic fact that the by-election result itself tends to suggest the underlying stability of British politics...

...In a last minute about-face, however, the Italian Communists, led by Palmiro Togliatti, broke away from the lay ranks and swung the vote in favor of inserting the Concordat in Article 7 of the Constitution, claiming that the party did not want a split for religious reasons between the Communist masses and Catholic workers...

...But the upshot seems to me clear in one respect at least: there is no easy solution to the problems raised...

...Kappler, had placed themselves outside the law...

...The most notorious fact about this election has been the riot caused during the campaign by the presence of opposed factions, most notably the National Front (which campaigned on a racist and antiimmigrant ticket) and the Socialist Workers' Party...

...BRIAN WICKER (Brian Wicker is Commonweal's regular correspondent in Great Britain...

...Others--ineluding the Vatican itself--agree that the Concordat is outdated, but maintain that it can be merely revised rather than dropped entirely...

...Better still, there was plenty of justification for a total ban...

...In short, the Concordat destroyed any idea of Church-State separation...

...But it also Commonweal: 583 means having politicians who are united in their opposition to fascism, racism, etc., not just verbally but in terms of political action...

...Of course, in addition to the Public Order Act (which governs the banning of demonstrations) there is the Race Relations Act, which makes incitement to racial hatred a crime...

...The long-term effects on policeimmigrant relations can hardly be other than bad...

...Yet the law relating to all these matters is intricate and full of pitfalls...

...Composed of the Lateran Treaty in which the Italian state recoguized the sovereignty of the Vatican and the Concordat which regulated the Church's activities within the Italian state, the pact was, according to its authors, a long-awaited solution to the so-called "Roman question" which dated from the time of Italian unity when the Italian army had put an end to the temporal power of the Popes...

...It would have spared us Kappler as a German hero...

...In Ladywood, the violence occurred outside a National Front meeting held in a school hall during an election campaign...

...On the one hand, it is important that essentially political decisions should be taken by politicians, not policemen...

...The British public at present tends to blame the government for everything that goes wrong, and to expect it to do everything which is necessary, to put things right...

...The election result, then, would tend to suggest that not too much attention should be paid to the activity of the National Front, even though it came third (above the Liberal party, which once held the seat...

...This being so, it is impossible to deny the right of the Front and its candidate to hold an election meeting during the campaign...

...Hence the apathy on which fascism breeds...

...Socialism certainly needs to be protected from the thuggish simplifications of the Socialist Workers' Party...

...Thus the police often have covertly to make "political" decisions precisely in the name of political neutrality...

...At the very least, it should have been re-routed through relatively unimportant streets, where most people would have had the sense to ignore it, or better gone to the simultaneous service for racial harmony held nearby by all the local churches...

...In other words, if it is thought politically unwise to prosecute for fear that the result might be worse than the offense, then nothing happens...

...The dill has grown so tall it looks us in the eye like a peacock's tail let fly, and the impending ball at the green onion's tip, as if about to fall or be toppled after all, has spun off at the lip of balance, in the nick of time, now letting rip with these little fingertipsize blossoms...

...The only solution, then, is "political...

...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ROY SCHEELE A COUNTERPOISE The garden in July starts suddenly to lean this way and that, under green...

...To spend too much time talking about the Front's odious bigotry is bound to give it more publicity: and publicity is what above all the Front seeks at the present time...

...Not all agree, however, on just what is to be done with it...

...This is precisely why the National Front so constantly proclaims that all its opponents need to do if offended by their activities, is to prosecute them under the Race Relations Act...

...16 September 1977:$82 Nevertheless, the legal position, as I understand it, is complex...

...But in the present sort of case, this act is virtually useless...

...No doubt a feeling that the worst is over with the prices explosion lay behind this apparently orthodox result: but it is also possible that the result reflects a general disgust with the antics of political hooligans, especially when they leave a trail of debris in the streets...

...It is also possible that they tend in any case to look favorably on groups which stand for more "order" than on "anarchists...

...FRANK GBTLEIN 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 FROM BRITAIN VIOLENCE IN THE STREETS I am writing this article on the morning after the result of the Ladywoocl by-election, here in my adopted city of Birmingham...

...No peace can be founded on laws that offend the civil conscience...

...Thus, while it is hard to see how the Ladywood meeting could have been properly stopped, the Lewisham march was quite another matter...

...Although the Spot chosen was a sensitive one, there was no obligation on anyone to attend it, and nobody could say he had been wantonly insulted or offended by what he saw or heard: he need not have seen or heard anything...

...People going about their ordinary business could not help being assaulted verbally and subjected to cruel and provoking scorn...

...And the politicians have to share the guilt for this, by their tendency to assume that post hoc propter hoe" is a valid inference: whatever is good is the fruit of good government (thus the party in power), whatever is bad is the fault of bad government (thus the opposition...

...Two months later-despite Togliatti's sacrifices in the name of Catholic-Communist unity--the Communists were expelled from the government and the Christian Democratic hegemony in Italian politics which was tO last three decades--began...

...This is the political result of an attempt to be non-political...

...First of all, it is necessary to distinguish sharply between the two cases themselves...

...In the latter category are the Italian Communists who after three decades of exile from the "stanza dei 16 September 1977:584...

...An agreement between Caesar and Peter has finally been reached," Cardinal Pietro Gasparri announced in February 1929...

...The Ladywood turnout was 45 percent of the electorate...

...The clear conclusion is forced upon one, then, that the application of purely legal remedies is not likely to have much effect in problems of this kind...

...In return the Catholic Church received recognition as the "sole religion of the State," was granted a series of financial and fiscal privileges and was given judicial supremacy in matters of religious marriages (which would be legally binding in the eyes of the State, but could only be dissolved by an ecclesiastical court...

...Now thirty years later--and almost a half a century since the signing of the Concordat--Italy is reexamining the infamous pact...

...The plot's gone all awry...