WHILE the TUC and trade union leaders frantically cancelled strikes and conferences as a ‘mark of respect’ over the death of 96-year-old Elizabeth II, over 3,000 workers and young people marched on Saturday from Parliament Square to the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police Force (MPF) at New Scotland Yard with chants of ‘Who are the murderers? The police are the murderers!’
This march and rally followed the shooting dead of Chris Kaba, a 24-year-old black rapper, by police on Monday 5th September.
This demonstration clearly shattered the narrative being shoved down the throats of workers and youth by the ruling class and its media of ‘a country in mourning’, united in grief and ‘coming together’ – a narrative that demands a suspension of the class struggle by workers, facing who face poverty and destitution on a scale not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
While the TUC and leaders of trade unions may have bought into this reactionary and treacherous outlook, and declared a truce with capitalism, workers and youth most certainly haven’t.
The car Chris Kaba was driving was boxed in by police cars in Streatham and he was killed after a police officer fired a single shot through the driver’s side windscreen hitting him in the head.
Police have since confirmed that Kaba was unarmed and that no gun had been found in the car.
The firearms officer involved is reported to have been served with a ‘gross misconduct notice’ and, last Friday, following a post mortem, the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) announced that it was belatedly opening a homicide and disciplinary investigation of the officer after ‘reviewing’ the killing.
Currently, this officer has not been suspended but placed on administrative duties.
None of this is surprising given the record of the Metropolitan Police which was declared institutionally racist by the McPherson inquiry into the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence in April 1993.
This damning report did not stop the litany of killings, or the murder and rape of Sarah Everard by serving Met officer Wayne Couzens in 2021.
This is the Met that seamlessly promoted Cressida Dick to Chief Commissioner – Dick who cut her teeth in 2005 when she headed the operation which led to innocent electrician Jean Charles de Menezes being ‘mistaken as a suicide bomber’ and shot seven times in the head.
She ordered police to storm the peaceful vigil for Sarah Everard, while in 2021 a long-awaited report into the axe murder of private detective Daniel Morgan accused the force of ‘institutional corruption’.
Dick was forced out after massive revulsion at her role in presiding over an institutionally corrupt, misogynistic and racist police force.
Her replacement, Sir Mark Rowley, took office yesterday, swearing allegiance to the new King, saying he would ‘hit the ground running’ by announcing steps to restore ‘trust and confidence’ in the Met and ‘root out racism and corruption’.
Rowley in fact is a former assistant commissioner in the Met and head of counter-terrorism at the National Police Chiefs’ Council from 2014 to 2018.
So, another safe pair of hands as far as the Tories are concerned.
His immediate first act was to cancel any announcement on his plans to ‘reform’ the Met until after the royal funeral.
The allegiance of the Met and the entire police force is to the King, the monarchy and to the capitalist system.
The police are instruments of the state, serving only the interests of capitalism for the protection of private property, profits and big business.
It is not a question of reforming the Met but of disbanding it and the entire national police force.
With new Tory laws aimed at making strikes illegal and giving police powers to ban and arrest demonstrators, the issue today is building a new revolutionary leadership in the unions and working class to replace those leaders who call off strikes and avoid the call for a general strike by closing down the TUC conference.
A new leadership will immediately call a general strike to kick out the Tories and go forward to a workers’ government that will bring down the capitalist state, disband the police and bring in a workers’ state and socialism.
