Time to sack the watchdog

Two advisors have resigned from the community group set up by the Independent Police Complaints Commission after the police killing of Mark Duggan in Tottenham last August.

The move marks a serious breakdown of relations between the black community and the body that is supposed to monitor police behaviour.

A statement by Stafford Scott reveals the IPCC’s complicity in a process of deliberate disinformation. Scott, who has engaged with the police since the Macpherson report, says that police removal of the vehicle that Duggan travelled in shortly before he was shot has so tainted the investigation that “we will never be able to have faith in their final report into the killing.”

Scott says the IPCC broke its own guidelines “by giving out erroneous information to journalists regarding the 'shoot-out' involving Mark Duggan and police that didn't actually happen.”

Both the Met and the IPCC are now threatening to report the Guardian to the Press Complaints Commission for stating that Mark Duggan was unarmed at the time he was shot by a police marksman.

Scott, who was an advisor to the Met, now believes the IPCC suffers worse flaws than the force it is investigating.”

But the police killing of Duggan is, human rights campaign group Black Mental Health UK, says, is not simply an isolated example of cover-ups. It forms part of a pattern and a “hidden history” of black people in Britain.

Matilda MacAttram, editor of the BMH’s Solution Magazine , told A World to Win that “a very important part of the black experience is marked by deaths in custody. This is something as live today in the recent cases of Kingsley Burrell-Brown and Mark Duggan as it was over 42 years ago when police hounded David Oluvale to death and threw him into a river.”

The second-ever edition of the on-line magazine, produced during Black History Month, has Oluwale and five other black men on its commemorative cover. Oluwale, Orville Blackwood, David Bennett, Mikey Powell, Sean Rigg, Kingsley Burrell-Brown - none of them over 40 years of age - all died in custody between 1969 and 2011.

“It is a pattern, which is the same whether or not you are a mental health user. The deaths of these men may not seem linked, but for their families, a fit and healthy man, their loved one, no longer exists,” MacAttram says.

The Solution Magazine highlights the long-term effect of deaths in custody or during police raids on the children left behind, by interviewing the sons of Orville Blackwood and Cherry Groce.

African Caribbeans are 50% more likely to enter the psychiatric health system, 44% are more likely to be sectioned, 29% more likely to be forcibly restrained, 50% more likely to be placed in seclusion. Detention rates for people from the UK African Caribbean community has doubled over 2005-2010 and over half the deaths of people in police custody are mental health users.

Stafford Scott and his fellow adviser John Noblemunn should be commended for refusing to serve on the community reference group set up by the IPCC. Scott has courageously broken the confidentiality agreement he signed when agreeing to serve on the group. He is now calling for “a body truly willing and able to investigate the police,” which he says, “is the only way to ensure that they will learn from their mistakes; and that, when mistakes occur, communities do not believe the one route to justice lies in taking matters into their own hands.”

But the lack of progress in the treatment of ethnic minority and black people in custody, whether directly by police or in mental health institutions, shows that existing institutions are far more than just flawed. It is a powerful argument for the disbanding not only of the IPCC, but of the police and the prison system and their replacement by bodies under the control of communities they are intended to serve.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Peak extraction of minerals spells disaster

Environmental damage and increased global warming are the direct result of a poisonous combination of commodity speculation, reckless overproduction and failing to recycle.

Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee highlight this deadly brew in the report of an enquiry into strategically important metals.

The price of metals and minerals is soaring, as hedge fund speculators move in. They are buying up vast quantities of copper on the London Metals Exchange – but also dealing directly in more obscure metals such as rare earths, lithium and tungsten.

The committee heard from the Royal Society of Chemistry that vast quantities of metals have been removed from the ground over the past 50 years (the period of corporate-driven globalisation more or less). There are still reserves but these are harder to get at.

“You just have to dig deeper,” the committee was told. But digging deeper uses more energy – contributing to global warming – and causes greater environmental degradation.

The Royal Institute of International Affairs confirmed that while there may be few short-term shortages, there is a growing pattern of metals being drawn into trade wars and political disputes. And in the long term, unsustainable consumption patterns will result in actual scarcities.

In other words, as with oil, there is a growing trend to higher metal prices, to resource wars and disputes, and to greater environmental degradation and global warming, up to and beyond the point of peak extraction.

The environmental impacts may be quite close to home. A Cornish tin mine is to reopen soon, as well as a tungsten mine on the edge of Dartmoor. They are extracting gold in Wales and the Grampian mountains.

The committee recognised that there is far greater scope for recycling and recommended “cradle to grave” models of production. However, since production of commodities largely takes place in other countries, the UK has no power to impose this approach.

And indeed the UK is guilty of exporting its recycling problems. Where cheap, but environmentally damaging processes are available, waste is often exported to other countries.

For example, insulated copper cable can be granulated and the plastic coating removed, so both materials can be reused. But the easy solution is just to burn off the plastic coating. “This creates environmental issues which, within the UK, would be expensive to overcome,” the committee heard.

Therefore the problem is being exported to places like India, China, Africa and the Philippines where the initial reprocessing is “crude and environmentally damaging”.

UK firms are also guilty of illegally exporting electrical and electronic equipment, labelled as second hand and for re-use, when in reality it is going to be dismantled by hand, with huge health risks for workers handling dangerous substances with no protection.

The committee also took the opportunity to refer practices on the London Metal Exchange to the Office of Fair Trading. They found that big trading firms were warehousing vast quantities of metals through wholly-owned subsidiaries, thereby benefiting twice from higher prices – as traders and as suppliers.

Sadly, the idea of a green economic miracle is impossible in a profit-driven capitalist economy. The majority of the money printed by the US and British governments in an attempt to fund a recovery has not been lent for green initiatives but drawn into commodity speculation. Governments have been entirely unable and unwilling to prevent this.

The contradiction is that the resulting rising prices will limit consumption. At this point more firms descend into bankruptcy and more workers are thrown on the dole. Whatever happens, it is ordinary working people – and the eco-system – that will pay. We need not only an economic, but first an enabling political revolution, to halt this crisis.

Penny Cole

Environment editor