* A leading British counter-insurgency expert claimed last Thursday that Britain did not need a 'Third Force' along the lines of the CRS in France, or the National Guard of the United States.
Major-General R.L.Clutterbuck, author of Protest and the Urban Guerilla, and now lecturer in Politics at Exeter University, was speaking at a seminar at Reading University on the subject 'Does Britain need a Third Force like the C.R.S.?" The seminar was part of a series on "Military and Police in Society' which is open to academics in the Politics and Sociology Departments of Reading University, and of Bramshill Police College near Reading. TOO PROVOCATIVE Major-General Clutterbuck's conclusion was that Britain had no need of a CRS-type force, which would be too provocative, and would run the danger of leading to incidents like that at Kent State University in the USA, when students were killed by National Guardsmen. His reasoning is that Britain does not need a "Third Force' because there is 'mutual confidence' between the police and 90% of the population: Ireland is a 'special case'.
Clutterbuck also made the extraordinary claim that the army had not been used inside Britain for 54 years; obviously he has not read his recent history -from the Glasgow firemen's strike, the use of men from the Special Air Services regiment to back up the police during the bomb scares in Birmingham in August this year, the London dock strike, and back to the General Strike.
Despite the apparently 'liberal' views expressed Telegraph, 29 November). ING ACTION this seminar was part of a campaign to sound out liberal and academic opinion in Britain Union. towards the moves to a strong state. Clutterbuck's remarks should be taken in conjunction with a recent speech made by the Assistant Chief Constable of Birmingham, Peter Bellamy, who said recently that 'a police force which is not an instrument of power is nothing', and that a police force should be a 'sensitive instrument of social control rather than a simple law enforcement agency' (see Daily This shows the correctness of the IMG's action in Reading in putting forward a motion calling for the cancellation of the meeting to the Students Union. The motion was defeated, although it received the highest ever vote for an IMG motion on Ireland in the Students A mobilisation took place despite the defeat of the motion, but when the demonstration had assembled, it was discovered that the meeting had been moved out of the University on the instructions of the University Administration, who obviously feared that the meeting would cause disruption in the Unviersity. When the meeting was eventually located at a hotel in the town, there were not enough people to stop the meeting. Nevertheless, the demonstrators were able to put forward a political statement against the role of the British Army in Ireland, and the role of academics in counter-insurgency.
ROSEMARY SULLIVAN