A very 'public execution'

The eleventh-hour arrival of former England footballer Paul Gascoigne at the scene of the manhunt in Rothbury over the weekend certainly was bizarre. But unfortunately Gazza’s efforts at mediating a non-fatal outcome were unsuccessful. Like Raoul Moat’s brother and uncle, the footballer was turned away by the police.

Many who have followed the lurid coverage no doubt believe that a brutal man who killed his ex-girlfriend’s partner got his just deserts when he died on Sunday morning in what his brother likened to a “public execution”. But there are those who feel otherwise.

As Moat managed to outwit police for a week, Facebook sites supported by thousands of people sprang up in his support. Flowers have been left and a shrine set up outside his home by those who feel they were on his side against a police force which has a tense relationship with many Northumbrians.

One person wrote: “How many people cussing him on here would be able to keep thousands of armed police at bay for 8 days???? I think all of them would meekly and passively surrender. That's why he's an inspiration ... The French resistance would have loved him in 1940, they might not have surrendered so quick if they had more of him ..."

The £4 million operation, the biggest and most expensive in recent British history, included snipers armed with a variety of assault rifles, pistols, carbines and sniper rifles plus 50,000-volt electric Taser stun guns and an RAF Tornado aircraft with heat imaging. But despite vast resources, advanced technologies and huge firepower, the entire handling of the situation leaves many questions unanswered.

Northumbria police did not act on warnings from Durham prison that he intended to harm his former partner. Neither were at least eight sightings and incidents acted upon swiftly. But the most shocking aspects of the case were raised by Moat’s close relatives.

His brother Angus said he felt the round-the-clock media coverage seemed like “they’re working up to what could be a public execution in modern Britain of my little brother … I think I’m probably the only person who’s ever watched his brother die on national television in the UK, which is obviously horrific.”

Angus Moat had told police he was “willing to walk into the cordon with no flak jacket and try to talk to Raoul to calm him down”, but that his offer, like that of his uncle Charles Alexander, was rejected out of hand. He said: “If the police are so keen to get this defused and they want to talk him down and negotiate and his family are figuring so prominently in what he is saying, then why didn't they go for that option?” Good question.

They and others have raised the possibility that the two Taser shots fired by the police (who initially only admitted to one shot), could well have caused Moat to pull the trigger on the shotgun he had pointed at himself. Northumbrian police certainly love their Tasers. In the five years to April 2009 they used them more times against a population of 1.7 million than the Metropolitan Police did in area covering 7.4 million people.

Behind the ugly scenes in Rothbury are deep social tensions and massive deprivation. Northumbria has never recovered from the job losses and devastation of communities caused by the pit closures during the late 1980s and 1990s. Shocking as it may seem, elevating a man who has gone out of control to the status of a hero can be read as an attempt by those who feel abandoned by society to give themselves an identity and a status.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

The spirit of the Stasi lives on in Britain

Last night Gordon Brown joined other world leaders in Berlin to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall. But while he and others waxed lyrical about the joys of freedom, his government was forcing a sinister Bill through parliament which reinforces state secrecy in Britain.

Throughout its 12 year-rule, New Labour – with Jack Straw leading the charge – has tirelessly provided the police and the secret state with more and more powers. New Labour’s latest effort in this direction will reduce still further the power of the public and the media to find out why someone has died violently or from unknown causes.

The legislation was forced through the Commons with a majority of eight. This now means that those who have lost loved ones as well as the public, can be barred from attending hearings into controversial deaths. As Labour MP Bob Marshall-Andrews noted, “the government is handing a massive new power to the executive”.

The ancient right to a public inquest can now be overruled by government ministers and replaced with a secret inquiry simply by order under the new law, which was smuggled in via the Coroners and Justice Bill. Earlier this year, justice secretary Straw tried unsuccessfully to introduce secret inquests. Yesterday he claimed the secret inquiry measure was necessary to keep secret the snooping activities – also known as “intercepts” – by the police and intelligence agencies.

The measure went through only days after it emerged that Scotland Yard’s Territorial Support Group (TSG) – responsible for the death of Ian Tomlinson during the G20 City of London protests – has received 5,241 complaint allegations in the last four years. The figures also show that only nine – yes, you read that correctly, that’s nine, or 0.18 per cent – were “substantiated” after being investigated by the police’s own complaints department.

The results are so suspicious that even the normally pro-police Daily Mail has published allegations by a member of the Metropolitan Police Authority that the TSG “enjoys some form of immunity as far as the actions of its members are concerned”.

Scotland Yard has, naturally enough, denied this, saying complaints about the conduct of its officers are taken “extremely seriously”. Does this include the case of TSG officer, former Royal Marine PC Mark Jones, who has just returned to duty? Jones was one of the police officers present when a Muslim computer expert Babar Ahmad was arrested in his South London home. His accusations of police brutality were rejected by the Police Complaints Commission, but he was nonetheless awarded £60,000 after police admitted he had been subject to “gratuitous violence”. No less than 31 complaints have been made against Jones since 1993, 26 of them being allegations of assault, including one of racially aggravated assault. Many of those complaining have been black or Asian men.

The so-called independence of those who are supposed to monitor and investigate the activities of Scotland Yard’s finest is clear in the appointment last month of Commander Moir Stewart to the leadership of the Independent Police Complaints Commission and to its management board. Stewart, a top Scotland Yard officer, was personally criticised for failings in the bungled police anti-terror operation that lead to execution of the innocent Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes in July 2005 in Stockwell.

Back to Brown and the fall of Berlin Wall. The power of the hated East German Stasi secret police collapsed at the same time. But while Brown was in Berlin, his Home Office was announcing that it would push ahead with plans to compel communications firms to monitor all internet use in a measure that the Stalinists would have been proud of.

The Home Office says it wants to change the law to require communication service providers to collect and retain records of communications from a wider range of internet sources, from social networks through to chat rooms and unorthodox methods, such as within online games.

Christopher Graham, the Information Commissioner, commented tersely: “The proposal represents a step change in the relationship between the citizen and the state." Need we say more?

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Police above the law

The refusal of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair to quit over the killing – or, more precisely, execution - of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell Tube station in 2005 verifies one thing above all: the capitalist state and its institutions consider themselves above the rest of society and see no reason why they should be made accountable for their actions.

While ordinary workers can get fired on a pretext, or for some minor misdemeanour like stealing some paper clips or discarded materials, the police, MPs, ministers, judges, senior civil servants, MI5 and MI6 spies and the like can and do get away with almost anything. Police can kill innocent people going about their business, cover up their actions, block inquiries, while ministers break election promises, take secret decisions to go to war and authorise the infiltration and destabilisation of legal organisations.

All these actions are sanctioned because they carry the authority of a state that is there to rule over people and maintain the status quo. That, above all, means the perpetuation of private property rights. We’re not talking about people’s houses but the legal right to form companies, employ labour, sell products and services and keep the profits. What is generally known as capitalism. Try taking over a factory or office in defence or jobs and you are doing something illegal which strikes at the heart of private property. And the state will be down like a ton of bricks to restore the owner’s “rights”.

So Blair’s refusal to quit his job is no surprise. After all, no one in the Metropolitan Police has admitted responsibility for the shooting dead of a Brazilian electrician while he sat in a Tube carriage quietly reading his paper. In this sense, the police are above the law. They have a shoot-to-kill policy (nodded through in secret by the toothless, pathetic Metropolitan Police Authority) similar to the one adopted by the British army against Republicans in the north of Ireland.

So long as they think there is a danger to themselves or the public, they can kill someone – and there’s no comeback. The case of Harry Stanley, shot dead in 1999, is typical. He left a pub in Hackney carrying a chair leg in a bag. Someone phoned the police to say he had a weapon. Police arrived and minutes later Stanley was dead. No one was prosecuted. After all, police thought he had a weapon. De Menezes, despite police disinformation in the wake of his death, did not wear bulky clothes that might have concealed a bomb, did not leap over the Tube ticket barrier, behaved calmly and was given no warning before being shot. But Blair did attempt to block an independent inquiry, during which time the police involved wrote up their notes so that they told the same story.

It can only get worse as the state introduces ID cards, a national DNA database, extends the scope of what constitutes a criminal offence, monitors phone calls and e-mails and continues stop-and-search aimed at minority communities. This kind of state is beyond reform. Struggling for a new, democratic state, in which all institutions are subordinate and accountable to popular control, is the best way to remember Jean Charles de Menezes


Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor