THE LONG independent report into the murder of 37-year-old private detective Daniel Morgan in south London in 1987 was finally published on Tuesday and was a damning indictment of the entire Metropolitan Police force from top to bottom.
The 1,200 page report produced evidence that Scotland Yard had repeatedly covered up widespread corruption in its ranks with Baroness Nuala O’Loan, the chairman of the independent panel, concluding that corruption was not purely historical but was still present within the force and that it is ‘institutionally’ corrupt.
Morgan was killed in a pub car park with an axe in his head but despite five police inquiries and an inquest no one has been brought to trial.
Eight years ago, following a sustained campaign by Morgan’s family, the then Tory home secretary Theresa May commissioned this inquiry. In those eight long years the inquiry was met with a sustained campaign to withhold vital evidence from it by the Metropolitan Police.
Met Commissioner Cressida Dick was personally criticised in the report for delaying the panel’s work by not handing over information and not allowing access to the Met’s database in a timely manner.
As the report makes clear the corruption surrounding this case was the main factor in determining Morgan’s murder would never be resolved.
The panel discovered that police and criminals mixed socially in pubs, while some were involved in ‘lucrative corrupt practices’ such as selling confidential information to private detectives and the press.
Morgan’s agency, Southern Investigations, was found to have close links with the now defunct News of the World.
In 2011 the Met was forced to admit that police corruption had been a ‘factor’ in the failure of the initial and subsequent investigations but insisted that it was a case of one bad apple, or a ‘bad ‘un’ as Dick said last week.
On that occasion she was speaking about the kidnapping, rape and murder of Sarah Everard on the day that police officer Wayne Couzens admitted responsibility and pleaded guilty to kidnapping and rape.
In fact, an investigation by the Daily Telegraph in May revealed that within the past three years the Met had recruited people with records for actual bodily harm (ABH), multiple possession of the drug cocaine, drunk and disorderly, and assault along with a convicted sex offender.
Immediately following the report’s publication, Morgan’s family called for Dick to resign. Dick however has made it clear she has no intention of resigning, just as she didn’t when, as Assistant Police Commissioner in July 2005, she led the operation that fatally shot an entirely innocent man, Jean Charles de Menezes, seven times while he sat on a tube train.
She has been steadily promoted to head the Met where she enjoys the full support and confidence of senior officers and the Tory government, all of whom are lining up to deny institutional corruption. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said she has his backing and Scotland Yard is denying it sought to hamper the inquiry.
The Met should have been disbanded in 1999 when the MacPherson Report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence in a racist knife attack concluded that the Metropolitan police was ‘institutionally racist’.
This institutionally racist, institutionally corrupt police force enjoys the full support of the Tory government for the reason that it is the force it is relying upon to deal with the working class.
A corrupt, racist force is exactly what capitalism relies upon to enforce the Police and Crime Bill that gives it sweeping powers to ban protests, marches and picket lines considered a threat to the ‘economic’ security of the British state.
Small wonder the Tories are desperate to protect their police as the force that stands between them and the anger of the working class rising up against being impoverished by the capitalist economic collapse.
It is not a question of just kicking out Dick – the police cannot be reformed as they are an essential part of the capitalist state.
The only way forward is for the working class to mobilise to seize the power and carry out a socialist revolution to overthrow capitalism and smash its police state, replacing it with a workers state and a socialist planned economy.
