Institutionally beyond reform

Wheeling out Cressida Dick to give the Metropolitan Police’s reaction to the conviction of two men for the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence almost 19 years ago says it all really.

Dick, acting deputy commissioner at Scotland Yard, was notoriously in charge of the bungled police operation that resulted in the virtual execution of Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes as he sat in a Tube carriage at Stockwell in 2005.

Menezes was shot seven times in the head after being mistaken for a terror suspect, denied a chance to identify himself. Immediately the Met went into cover-up mode, claiming that Menezes had vaulted the gates at the station and was wearing bulky clothing that could have hidden a bomb.

None of this was true, of course. Menezes’ simple misfortune was to be identified as a possible wanted man by watchers for whom one “foreigner” clearly looked like another. Not to mince words, this was racism in practice.

Now the police did not murder Lawrence. But they did their best to prevent his killers from being convicted by wilfully ignoring the evidence that this was a racist killing involving David Norris, Gary Dobson and other local gang members.

Dick claimed that the recommendations in the 1999 Macpherson inquiry report into the Met’s failures over the Lawrence killing “have transformed policing”. Oh really? Among other things, Macpherson found that the Met was “institutionally racist”.

Leaving aside the absolutely indifferent handling of the forensic evidence which threatened to wreck the case against Norris and Dobson, other facts do not back up Dick’s claim.

Statistics show that a black person is more than nine times more likely to be searched than a white person. This is a higher ratio than before the Macpherson report was published.

The number of black and Asian people stopped and searched by the police increased by more than 70% in the five years between 2004 and 2009, according to Ministry of Justice figures. They show that more than 310,000 black and Asian people were searched by the police on the streets in 2008/09, compared with 178,000 in 2004/05. Although the Met covers only 14% of the population of England and Wales, their officers carried out 42% of all stop and searches. The figures for 2008/09 show there were three times more arrests of black people than white people, based on per 1,000 population figures.

Ann Juliette Roberts, of Edmonton, north London, was initially targeted by officers in September 2010 because she did not have enough money on her Oyster card for her journey. But the situation soon escalated after they insisted on searching her bag because she was holding it "suspiciously", the High Court heard last year.

The black special needs assistant was restrained face down on the floor and handcuffed. Officers found bank cards with different identities, which she explained were in her name, her maiden name - having recently married - and her son's name. She was arrested on suspicion of fraud and given a drugs test.

Roberts is asking the High Court to rule Section 60 of the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act "incompatible" with the European Convention on Human Rights.
Section 60 allows officers to search anyone, without suspicion, for dangerous instruments or offensive weapons in a designated area for a 24-hour period.

Most recently, of course, are the suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of black man Mark Duggan, shot by police in north London in August outside the vehicle he was travelling in. The official version of events indicated that Duggan fired a gun and a bullet lodged in a police radio. An investigation has since found no forensic evidence that Duggan was carrying a weapon at the time. Duggan’s killing triggered a wave of inner-city rioting across England.

The facts (including involvement with News International over phone hacking, leading to top resignations and Dick becoming acting no 2) point to a Met that is yet another unreformable section of a state that oppresses rather than serves most of its citizens – black and white – in one way or another, most of the time.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

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

Police provocateurs are par for the course

Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Police has cancelled publication of a report into undercover operations initiated when spies in environmental campaigns, including Mark Kennedy, were exposed. No doubt they were planning the usual 'one rogue operation gone wrong' cover up.

But another operations has just come to light. Officer Jim Boyling, working undercover in Reclaim the Streets as Jim Sutton, was allowed to use his cover name in court. Police, prosecutors and others must have known. Lying about your name under oath? That's definitely against the law.

The convictions of twenty environmental campaigners were recently overturned in light of the Mark Kennedy revelations; lots of Reclaim the Streeters will be on the phone to their lawyers today.

The reality is that state does not hesitate to use violence, undercover agents, bugging, provocations, and other ruthless and illegal methods to enforce the rule of the few over the many and to selectively defend the laws of private property and state power as and when it chooses.

And the ongoing police-bailiff operation to evict travellers at the Dale Farm site in Essex also reveals the twisting of the law, the use of informers combined with brute force against anyone who resists the inhuman activities of bailiffs who are “only doing their job”.

Police say they came armed with tasers because intelligence from within the camp told them there were weapons hidden there. Of course there were no weapons, but who on the inside supplied police that provocative piece of disinformation?

No one could fail to feel a chill at the statement by Essex County leader Tony Ball. Ball, who could easily serve as Minister of Truth in the coalition, when he stated: "I hope that there are no repeats of yesterday's scenes of premeditated violence and disorder from the protestors on the site, and that we can get on with the job of upholding the law, and clearing the site in a safe, professional and dignified way." Yes, professional beatings, “dignified” taserings, and illegal upholdings of some laws.

Police came armed with tasers, which they used, it isn't clear yet how often but more than once. They beat people. There have been at least two serious head injuries. They smashed in the sides of people's vans, making them unusable, and the electricity has been cut off on a freezing cold night. Generator fuel ran out in the early hours of this morning. Helicopters circle continuously. Now the Bailiffs have moved in behind police.

As traveller Mary Sheridan said: "The only premeditated violence has come from the police - they knew exactly what they were doing when they started beating and tazering people. This is not how a community should be treated by its own Council. It’s illegal for us to travel, but illegal for us to settle down here. We’re getting hit by the police but we’ve got nowhere else to go.”

Another Dale Farm resident Kathleen McCarthy said: "The way in which the police are acting has shocked and outraged everyone here. We hope the world is watching.” We are, Kathleen: from Cairo, to New York, to London, to Madrid to Athens, we are watching and learning.

As the occupation outside St Paul’s, Dale Farm, the death of newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson and the anti-cuts protests have all shown – a key role of police operations has been to instigate violence, not prevent it and, secretly, to set others up for arrest.

Mass action is needed to abolish the laws that enforce the rights of private property and profit over all other human and social rights, including the right to travel and to have a place to stay. Organised in a network of People's Assemblies across the globe, we will develop a democratic framework of rights and rule of law. This will involve a Charter of Rights under a new constitution.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Met 'institutionally corrupt' says ex-spy

It’s a plum number: £260,000 a year salary, Thames-side flat, luxury car complete with chauffeur and a bullet-proof pension. And there’s a vacancy if you feel like applying.

The Metropolitan Police are currently seeking a new boss in the wake of hackgate which brought down its top two officers last month. Former Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson and counter-terrorism chief Assistant Commissioner John Yates resigned within the same 24 hours on July 18.

Both were seen as being compromised by their too-intimate relationship with News of the World deputy editor Neil Wallis. More and more evidence of the web of connections and cover-ups is still emerging.

Top contenders include Cressida Dick who replaced Yates as head of the anti-terrorism section. She remains best known for her role in the killing of Brazilian electrician Jean de Menezes as he travelled to work on the Underground. Dick was commander of the operation that resulted in de Menezes being executed as he sat reading his paper.

Joint favourites are Sir Hugh Orde, president of the unaccountable and secretive Association of Chief Police Officer and Deputy Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe. But as yesterday’s London Evening Standard notes, the position is actually a poisoned chalice. The Met is clearly in disarray and losing credibility by the day.

Yesterday it had to chastise its own colleagues in the City of Westminster’s “counter-terrorist focus desk” (whatever that may be when it’s at home). Under the auspices of Project Griffin, which is supposed to raise awareness of security issues, a police station in Belgravia last week asked citizens to inform on any anarchists they might spot, stating:

"Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy. Any information relating to anarchists should be reported to your local police”.

The appeal provoked accusations that this amounted to the criminalisation of anyone with an anarchist bent of mind. Some called on people to report suspect police officers to their local anarchist branch. Now the Met has had to soothe its critics, stating that it “does not seek to stigmatise those people with legitimate political views”.

Serious divisions within the Met and between Scotland Yard and the military also came to light yesterday. Met detectives have sat on documents showing that the News of the World had been snooping on an army intelligence officer’s emails for four years. Ex-army spy Ian Hurst complained that his computer was secretly hacked for three months after he wrote a book alleging that an IRA member was actually working as a double agent for British intelligence.

Hurst complained that he was shocked to find that these crimes were not investigated by the Met, “which, given everything else that happened reinforces my belief that that Met is institutionally corrupt”.

Apart from more revelations about its incestuous relationship with the media, there is another serious issue. When the London Olympic Games open in July 2012, the Met will face its biggest-ever challenge.

The current “ring of steel plan” involves an army of 27,000 police and security officials. Assistant police commissioner Chris Allison has announced that there will be 300 search and scanning entry points in the main Olympic stadium alone.

Not surprisingly, he anticipates that security threat levels will rise to “severe” before and during the games. The Olympics organising committee LOCOG will be installing thousands of CCTV cameras and hundreds of search arches, which will mean an average 20-minute wait for spectators.

The Olympics will be certainly be a target for those seeking everything from publicity to revenge. Recent history demonstrates only too clearly that existing have huge difficulties in preventing those who have no qualms targeting innocent civilians.

It is a misplaced hope to rely on the forces of the capitalist state to protect the population from possible acts of terror or protect human rights. A deconstructed and re-shaped democratic state is a realistic and positive approach to this issue.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Crisis at the top out of hand

A full-blown constitutional crisis is emerging within the British state, with the country’s top policeman challenging the authority of the prime minister who himself is connected to phone hacking through his former press secretary.

For Cameron to rush back from South Africa, while asking Parliament to meet on Wednesday – it was due to go into recess tomorrow – indicates the ever-increasing scale and scope of events precipitated by the Murdoch news empire’s meltdown.

The latest casualty is deep in the heart of the state – Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson. Although Home Secretary Teresa May poured oil on troubled waters in an unctuous statement, thanking the commissioner for his splendid work, knives are out big time between the police chief and the government.

The Commissioner claims there was nothing untoward in his relationship with ex-News International deputy editor Neil Wallis, But, as the Guardian points out: “The Metropolitan Police chose to hire the former second-in-command of an organisation while that organisation was being publicly accused of criminal activity”. Worse still, it failed to inform Downing Street about its close relationship with Wallis.

The real bombshell in Stephenson’s statement is his thinly-disguised challenge to Cameron. By comparing the PM’s hiring of former News of the World editor Andy Coulson to Scotland Yard’s hiring of Wallis, Stephenson has made a direct challenge to Cameron. Coming from Britain’s top police officer, who has only been in the job since 2009, this has the makings of a constitutional crisis.

The truth is that the media, the police and politicians (including of course New Labour) are all part of the system of governance. They have formed a social glue over a half-century as Murdoch’s media web stretched its tentacles around the world.

From the standpoint of logic, Stephenson is right. Cameron, like his New Labour predecessors, is absolutely tainted – and with him, Blair and Brown who repeatedly turned down opportunities to reopen hacking inquiries. Ed Miliband has also courted Murdoch and hired a former News International hack with question marks hanging over him as his own press advisor.

Stephenson’s resignation reveals a crisis of the state, intensified by the globalisation process and its subsequent crash. Deputy prime minister Nick Clegg yesterday warned of the dangers of another meltdown. A new report out today shows the UK economy is faltering – so badly that some suggest the Murdoch crisis is a convenient deflection from the real crisis.

The departure of the Met chief, under pressure from London mayor Boris Johnson, leaves a leadership gap at Scotland Yard which will grow if – as seems likely - counter-terrorism chief John Yates also resigns. It’s becoming blindingly clear that the Met is like that because the state as a whole is rotten and undemocratic and confidence in politicians as well as the media – and the police – continues to plummet. Now no one believes what they say – even if they are right!

The political turmoil is exacerbated by the plotting of right-wing Tories who see Cameron as too soft. The Telegraph and the Daily Mail are gunning for the Tory leader, believing they can get a more “traditional” one in his place.

So, while we can be pleased that the Pandora’s Box (more like a three-way sewer between Scotland Yard, Downing Street and Media-ville) is open, its secrets out and many involved tearing each other apart, there are many dangers behind the scenes.

Not least is the threat of a national government as the political crisis meets a worsening economic situation. Such a government would undoubtedly introduce emergency measures in “the national interest”.

The whole political structure and its disgruntled counterparts in the police and security services are irretrievably tainted and compromised. We should take up the call from the Spanish Real Democracy Now activists: Don’t vote for them! Build People’s Assemblies instead!

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Game over as the Met's mask slips

Just in case any student still thinks that the police’s role ought to be to facilitate protests and demonstrations, the commissioner of the Met, Sir Paul Stephenson, has put them right. As they showed in London on Wednesday, the police as a state force have other loyalties.

They kept a mainly teenage, mostly peaceful group of protesters against the rise in tuition fees hemmed in between police lines for over nine hours in the freezing cold. This was after a police van was conveniently left isolated and promptly vandalised.

Stephenson defended the notorious “kettling” operation, describing the area as a “crime scene”. What rubbish! The police on the ground were under orders from Scotland Yard and no doubt the Home Office. The clear objective was to demoralise the school and university students by denying them the right to move through the streets.

Michael Chessum, a co-founder of the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts, was right when he commented: "It is the kind of policing we saw on Wednesday that creates disorder. If you refuse to allow people, many of them young, first-time protesters, the right to walk down the streets of their own capital city, and then 'kettle' them in Whitehall for eight or nine hours, people are going to get frustrated."

As Jenny Jones, a Green Party representative on the Metropolitan Police Authority which questioned Stephenson, pointed out, the effect had been to “imprison thousands of people”, adding: "You kept people for nine-and-a-half hours. You punished innocent people for going on a protest. How can that be right? I just do not see it."

Stephenson does not have to account for tactics to the MPA and he told – or rather warned – the authority that the “game has changed and we must act”. In recent years the Met had reduced the numbers of officers deployed to tackle demonstrations, he said. "Regrettably, we are going to have to review that. We are going to have to take a more cautious approach."

The Met chief’s statement is a clear indication that the police are preparing to suppress mass civil disorder which is an expression of the anger that the spending cuts and the consequent rise in tuition fees – have already provoked and which is bound to intensify.

In practice, is not that the “game” has changed but that the mask has slipped. How the police like to portray themselves and the reality of their actual role in the power structures of the state is usually obscured by anodyne statements like “serving the community” and “protecting the public”.

But when push comes to shove, when resistance to government’s policies strays beyond marching from point A to point B or signing petitions and actually expresses social frustration and anger, the role of the police is solely to protect the state. Before most of today’s student marchers were born, the police showed their loyalty by brutally attacking pickets and communities during the 1984-5 miners’ strike for jobs.

So this not some “neutral” state that is just a little too skewed towards big business and property, which can be redirected to serve a more progressive purpose. The modern state evolved alongside and in response to the needs of capitalism and is geared in every way to sustaining and developing the profit system. So when, for example, the financial markets insist on spending cuts, the state – and its political expression in the form of the government – jumps to attention.

A strategy for resisting the cuts and the rise in tuition fees must, therefore, incorporate the vision of creating new democratic social and political structures, building on the ideas like People’s Assemblies. Then the game of capitalist rule will really be over.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Parlament's crisis goes from bad to worse

The present Parliamentary system is fast digging its own grave if yesterday’s events are anything to go by and the danger is that without the creation of a democratic alternative, populist forces could try and replace it with something even worse and less representative.

Westminster is plagued by the abuse of state funds for personal gain (the expenses scandal), the arbitrary use of state power against MPs (the case of Damian Green) and the continuing ignoring of Parliament when it comes to government announcements (the fire sale of state assets planned by Gordon Brown, leaked to the press over the weekend).

The expenses furore lurched towards the ridiculous yesterday when a former senior civil servant appointed by Brown instructed some MPs to repay money while others, notably former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, got away with an apology while being allowed to keep dodgy second-home “allowances”.

MPs complained that the rules had been changed retrospectively to catch them out, and they have a point. But if it’s arbitrary power they’re worried about, then they need look no further than the Cabinet Office, the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police – where the real power in the state is located.

Last year, you will recall, Tory MP Damian Green revealed immigration figures leaked to him by a civil servant. Green was arrested in the House of Commons and held under anti-terror laws while his home was searched from top to bottom on the grounds that the information could threaten “national security”

Of course it was nothing of the kind, but that didn’t prevent Brown’s boot-boys from rampaging about. Two reports published yesterday said Green’s arrest was “disproportionate and ill-advised” (no charges were brought) but the MP was less forgiving. He said if it became a criminal offence to embarrass ministers “then you have crossed a great big line away from being a democracy.”

Pointing to a deteriorating state of relations between the police and the policed, Green added: “My arrest is a very small corner of this but the whole surveillance state, database collection, keeping details of people on the DNA database, all that aggregation of data which makes all of us suspects in the long run is going to make more and more people feel the police are not on my side.”

Green’s comments confirm that it is the power of the state that is overwhelmingly apparent in Britain, with Parliament’s role in this set-up reduced to a cipher. The incredibly low esteem in which Parliament is held is an opportunity as well as a danger.

Its decline reflects a profound shift over the last 30 or so years towards a market, or business state. In this way, Britain has become a branch of a global PLC and the state is its executive management team. Parliament is irrelevant in this arrangement, at best to be “consulted” after the event, at worst to be left to its own devices.

So the challenge is to remake the relations of power in Britain in order to enhance and develop democracy in any meaningful way. A transfer of power out of the hands of the capitalist state, as well the key corporate and financial enterprises, would create the conditions for a new type of revolutionary Parliament along the lines advocated in our People’s Charter for Democracy.

The danger in all this is that the present Parliament becomes so discredited that a clamour led by right-wing populists to shut it down gathers momentum. In the midst of the grave economic and financial crisis, we should be on full alert. We may yet be forced to defend Parliament against authoritarian rule in a way that at the same time challenges the power and legitimacy of the ruling elites themselves.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

A law unto themselves

Once again the police have blood on their hands and a cover-up is already well under way. That’s the only conclusion you can draw from the video of the gratuitous police attack on bystander Ian Tomlinson during last week’s G20 protests in the City of London, soon after which he collapsed and died. 

The police had the area covered from every angle by CCTV and by their own photographers and must have known what happened. Yet the first official statement said that Tomlinson just happened to be found in a side street and that the Met’s brave police were attacked when they went to his assistance! 

Sounds familiar? Jean Charles de Menezes, you will recall, was alleged to have leapt over a Tube ticket barrier and was wearing a bulky jacket, clearly trying to evade the police. None of this, naturally enough, turned out to be true. Yet no one was prosecuted for the execution of the Brazilian electrician while he sat reading his newspaper. And you can bet that the same will apply in the case of Tomlinson. 

Why? Because the police are always only “doing their duty” in “difficult circumstances”. And what is this higher “duty” that allows them to behave with impunity and do things that ordinary citizens would end up in jail for? The duty in question conferred on the police by the state is to protect the status quo of capitalist society by whatever means are necessary, lawful and otherwise. 

The first professional police force in the world was set up first in London in the 1830s and then throughout the rest of the country at a time of major social and political unrest. Workers had demanded and been refused the vote, trade unionists were deported from Dorset for illegally combining and riots were breaking out against the introduction of the workhouse for the unemployed. 

The Royal Commission on the Police 1839 reported that the creation of a force  throughout the country was a way in which “the constitutional authority of the supreme executive is thus emphatically asserted”. What the commission was talking about was the authority of the state as a whole in relation to maintaining and developing capitalism in terms of  private property, as our book Unmasking the State – a rough guide to real democracy elaborates in more detail.  

And that’s how the boys in blue have behaved ever since, with the notable exception of the London police strike after World War One when demands for an independent union were ruthlessly crushed. The high command of the state in the shape of senior officers sets the tone with wild statements about a “summer of rage” on the streets and then the unthinking plods are sent into action to do their worst, which they gleefully do. That’s what happened at the Climate Camp in Kent last year and is routine for just about any protest or action that is not some orderly march from point A to point B. 

As the economic slump develops, more and more people will act to defend their jobs and their livelihoods. The police are being prepared for this by the sinister and secret Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO). This is the organisation that did the Thatcher’s government’s bidding during the miners’ strike, which began 25 years ago. In the course of that dispute, a total of 11,000 miners were arrested, 7,000 injured, eleven people died, and 1,000 men were sacked. More than 100 were jailed.

The present capitalist state is clearly an alienating power that is undemocratic and more or less the plaything of the corporations and banks. The police, together with the army and the spy agencies, are this state’s enforcers and nothing will change their historic role. This should add to the urgency of developing a strategy for creating a new kind of  political democracy. This would be founded on co-ownership and control of resources and require the replacement of institutions like the police with new forms of community control.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor 

Something rotten in the state of the Met

The open war raging at the very top of the Metropolitan police is revealing deep schisms that go far beyond a personality clash between the top officers involved or the accusations flying thick and fast.

Tarique Ghaffur, the 53-year-old assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard and its most senior Asian officer, went public yesterday to the shock of his colleagues. At a press conference he accused Commissioner Sir Ian Blair of “degrading and humiliating treatment”, barring him from key meetings and criticism that amounted to racial discrimination and victimisation. Ghaffur’s employment tribunal claim also accuses Blair and Deputy Assistant Commissioner Richard Bryant of harassment and “creating a degrading and humiliating environment”.

Resentment has been brewing since 2000, when a corruption unit headed by Blair investigated an Asian officer, Commander Ali Dizaei, who was mentored by Ghaffur. Dizaei, who is president of the National Black Police Association, went on to win a £60,000 award after a £4m anti-corruption investigation, during which his meetings with Ghaffur were placed under surveillance.There is no doubt that racism remains rampant in the Met. The Metropolitan Police branch of the Black Police Association says that morale amongst ethnic minority officers is even lower than a decade ago when the Macpherson report into the Stephen Lawrence murder case concluded that the Met was “institutionally racist”.

Blair has been in deep water with his senior colleagues a number of times already. The police shooting of Jean Charles De Menezes in 2005 caused a crisis when Brian Paddick, the then deputy assistant commissioner, suggested that Scotland Yard staff knew within six hours of the shooting at Stockwell that an innocent man had been killed. Blair fell out with his own deputy, Paul Stephenson, when the latter disagreed about the pay-out of a £25,000 bonus payment made to senior officers in the aftermath of the Menezes shooting.

So far, so clear. Or is it? There are also wider political issues. Sir Ian Blair’s star was in the ascendancy in the Tony Blair years as New Labour’s favourite copper. He was in fact demonised by the right as the “PC PC”, as the Force adopted New Labour speak. Its management documents say that “performance in respect of race and diversity [should] be measured through a corporate measurement framework” and the need to “facilitate the change process through the establishment of the development and organisation improvement team (DOIT)”. Indeed right wing commentators have even compared the Met under Blair’s watch to “those extremist Left-wing councils of the 1980s”!

Blair can no longer count on backing from the London Mayor. Unlike Ken Livingstone, who chose to support Blair, not least defending the Met over the Menezes killing, Boris Johnson is set to push for his removal in October. And last, but certainly not least, there is rumbling disaffection in the Met itself amongst PC plods who distrust Blair’s intellectual aspirations and liberal credentials, and who have other issues too - in January this year, police officers marched through London in a pay protest. In fact, Paddick and Ghaffur’s defections must seem to Sir Ian like a double “et tu Brute” – as their promotions were part of his own “modernising agenda”. Both of them were promoted to their high office under Blair, only to turn against him later. Indeed one source has said: “The Commissioner is incandescent that a guy he agreed with on so much, in particular race, is now playing the race card on him.”

The sense of personal betrayal, racial discrimination, careerism, big financial stakes, firearms killings spiralling out of control on the streets – it is a tale of crisis and failure, despite the Met’s budget of £2.6bn. In reality, the problems are much bigger than any policing, even of the “best” kind can resolve. No wonder those in charge are turning against each other. The crisis at Scotland Yard is symptomatic of the decay and unravelling of Britain’s state institutions, which are not “fit for purpose”. The causes of this crisis at the heart of the state – and solutions to it – are analysed in A World to Win’s forthcoming book, Unmasking the State and will be at the centre of debate at A World to Win’s festival on October 18.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary