ON Thursday, Tory Home Secretary Suella Braverman announced new government reforms of the police disciplinary system which means that in future any police officer found guilty of gross misconduct will be automatically sacked.
In addition, all police staff who fail vetting will also be liable to dismissal under these measures, introduced in a desperate attempt to restore public faith in a police system that has been correctly branded as corrupt, misogynistic, homophobic and racist by a series of public inquiries. It is a perfect system for bankrupt capitalism!
What drove the Tories to ‘reforms’ of the police was the massive outrage and anger of millions over the brutal rape and murder of Sarah Everard by serving police officer Wayne Couzens in 2021, followed this year with the conviction of serial rapist and fellow serving officer David Carrick.
In both cases, numerous complaints by victims levelled against them were dismissed or simply ignored. However, these two represented only the tip of a very deep and corrupt iceberg that runs throughout the police service.
In April, the newly installed Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, revealed that 1,131 claims of sexual or domestic violence had been made against serving police officers, and that out of these, in only 246 cases were police chiefs satisfied the decision to leave the accused in post had been correct.
Rowley was brought in to try and convince the public that the leadership of the Met and the Tories are seriously going to clean out all the ‘bad apples’.
Now, Braverman is attempting the same trick with new powers for chief constables to sack those police found guilty of crimes, or whose past convictions were ignored when vetted for employment as ‘officers of the law’.
These police bosses had the power before, they chose not to use it. Instead, they presided over a police force that happily recruited criminals and harboured and protected depraved violent sexual predators.
It is a police force that meets the needs of the ruling class to have an arm of the state willing to carry out any order to repress workers, young people, minority groups or anyone who dares protest and march against a capitalist system that is determined to impose poverty on the working class.
Sacking the most obvious criminals is not the issue – the entire police force must be disbanded, consigned to the dustbin of history along with the capitalist state it serves.
Another desperate attempt to avoid damaging revelations, was launched when the Tories announced that the inquiry into how nurse Lucy Letby was allowed to murder seven babies and attempt the murder of six others would now have the power to compel hospital managers to give evidence.
Letby was able to carry out her murderous activities despite numerous warnings by senior doctors that she was the only nurse present during each of the deaths. The doctors who made the warnings were treated as the enemy for stating she should be suspended while proper medical and police inquiries were carried out.
The Tories fear this inquiry will expose an NHS hospital system that is run by managers whose primary objective was to intimidate doctors and nurses from raising concerns about the dangerous conditions caused by decades of cuts to NHS budgets.
In fact, managers had to be prepared to ignore the health of patients in the drive to implement all the Tory cuts aimed to privatise the NHS.
Both these announcements on the police and the lack of an inquiry into the Letby murders are attempts to convince the public that the police can be reformed and that individual hospital managers will be held accountable.
There can be no reform of the police. Their profession is to maintain capitalism by any means necessary, while the only way to maintain and develop the NHS health system, the great gain of the Attlee-Bevan government of 1945, is to remove these privatising managers and place hospitals under the control and management of doctors, nurses and representatives of NHS trade unions.
It is not individuals but the capitalist system that is rotten to the core and must be overthrown.
This demands serious action by the TUC Congress that meets in Liverpool on September 10. Congress must call a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers government and socialism. Join the WRP lobby of the TUC on Monday 11 September to force the TUC to call a general strike.
