If you'd taken a look at the IMC UK site you may have, if you'd been lucky, seen a report of a worrying incident in Scotland last weekend.

Essentially, during an action against a nuclear submarine base near Glasgow, the police actually dared to arrest two members of parliament, one, Tom Sheridan, from Scotland, and the other, George Galloway, from Westminster.

Whilst there were some 3000 people arrested in total, including the senior churchman in Scotland, nobody seems to have noticed that there may be a deeper implication to the event over and above that of a protest-arrest. None of the mainstream papers has commented on the incident, and IMC UK has 'reposted' it, when in actuality it derserves much more attention.

'Democracy' is rubbish; we all know that in Britain, but it follows not that it can be discounted- far from it, the fact that, parliament, far from being in control of the police, army, state finances, monarchy &c [the Crown Establishment you overthrew in 1776] the House of Commons is now clearly subservient to these unelected, unaccountable, shadowy institutions. Astonishingly, Galloway is a member of the ruling Labour party, but nobody in the parliament has done anything to demand an explanation of the affront to simple democracy. Much of what Blair, Straw and Brown do is in fact based on Crown Perogative rather than power vested in the parliament itself.

It sems to me that there can now be a clear democratic AND revolutionary united platform: a demand that the House of 'Commons' gets up of its knees, protects its own members and declares itself the seat of power, supreme and sovereign above monarchy and all the rest of the establishment. This, as I'm sure you're aware in the USA (and god, I wish people knew their revolutionary history here) is entirely in keeping with both the revolution of 1640-60 AND the ideas of the great Tom Paine.

So far degenerated are democratic institutions and concepts in England that the left has failed to notice the seriousness of the Galloway incident; IMC UK has 'reposted' the report to a back page and the chief of police has not been summoned to the parliament.

Whereas in most countries, elected representatives are immune from legal proceedings unless stripped of it BY the parliament [eg Clinton], in Britain they get dragged away like a common criminal.

The report should refer to more than three hundred arrestees at Faslane, not 'three thousand'.

The man at the center of the article, George Galloway, is currently in Baghad, Iraq, on a protest/factfinding mission following the UK USA NATO bombing raid on friday.

The whereabouts of Tom Sheridan is unknown to me at present, but he is scheduled to address a socialist gathering in London next week so lets hope he's available by then !

CW