A METROPOLITAN Police officer is facing jail after acting as a recruiter for a banned neo-Nazi terrorist group. PC Benjamin Hannam, from Edmonton in north London, is the first police officer to be convicted of involvement in far-right terrorism.
The 22-year-old was found guilty by an Old Bailey jury of being a member of National Action, a proscribed terrorist organisation, along with two counts of possessing documents useful for terrorism and for fraud.
National Action was proscribed by the government as a terrorist group on 16 December 2016. Meanwhile, a Met Police officer has raped two female colleagues but escaped suspension.
The male officer was not charged or suspended, but is to face a misconduct hearing, more than three years after the claims were made.
The women, who both had a relationship with the senior male officer, received compensation from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority after it concluded they had both had forced ‘non-consensual’ sex with the officer.
However, a criminal investigation was launched by Essex Police, given the area where the alleged crimes had taken place, and the officer was permitted to carry on working without suspension.
This damning example of a refusal even to suspend came after documents showed there was a total of 594 complaints against Met employees between 2012 and 2018, of which 119 were upheld.
Then there is the case of Sarah Everard, abducted and murdered after she walked home from a friend’s house on March 3rd. As we all know, the man accused of her murder was a serving Metropolitan Police officer.
The attack on the vigil for Sarah Everard, where the Met police force brutalised young women at the Clapham bandstand, has been met with furious anger by UK workers after young women were handcuffed and dragged away by the police.
To rub salt into the wound, a report released earlier this week by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, Fire and Rescue Services (HMICFRS) concluded that the force had acted appropriately when it broke up the gathering. They have been given the go-ahead by the state to do the same again!
The Police and Crime Bill is now being pushed through Parliament giving the police and the Home Office sweeping powers to ban protests they consider ‘too noisy’. This will include strike pickets as well. The fundamental right to strike is under threat.
Adding fuel to the fire, the Coronavirus Act was extended by six months, allowing the police to shut down ‘unsafe’ protests. Today will be the third weekend of protests to defend the hard-won basic democratic rights of the working class against the bosses’ police state.
Hundreds of thousands of workers and young people in cities throughout the country have been protesting against the Tory Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, and they have been met with violent and brutal attacks from the police.
The current Head of the Met Police, Cressida Dick, cut her teeth when she was in overall charge of the police operation which, in a case of ‘misidentification’, followed young innocent electrician Jean Charles de Menezes into Stockwell Station, held him down on the tube and shot seven bullets into his head.
In fact, over 2,000 people have died after contact with the police since 1990. Not a single police officer has ever been tried for murder!
This situation is not a case of good cops versus bad cops, and reforming the police by removing a few ‘bad apples’.
The entire force from top to bottom makes up the capitalist state, a body armed and dangerous from head to foot, existing solely to defend the ruling class by any means necessary. If a homeless person steals food from a supermarket they can get arrested, but when 72 men, women and children died in the Grenfell Tower fire … over three and a half years later, there has not been a single arrest on a murder charge of those that are responsible.
It is one law for the ruling class and quite another for the working class.
This situation has now become as clear as day to millions of people – the police cannot be reformed. The Met police and the other forces must be disbanded!
They must be replaced by a workers state and socialism with the common ownership of the means of production. Forward with the British socialist revolution!
