NEVILLE LAWRENCE, the father of Stephen Lawrence, the teenager who was murdered by a racist gang in 1993, said yesterday that he was very sceptical about Home Secretary May’s announcement that there would be yet another inquiry into the murder, this time into the activities of the police undercover squad, the SDS.
His scepticism came after the revelation that there were police spies put into the Lawrence family circle, before and even during the Macpherson Inquiry into why the killers had not been brought to trial.
These police spies were top secret. They took their identities from the gravestones of dead children, were guaranteed immunity from prosecution and were guaranteed secrecy for life.
These spies kept the police high command and others up to date as to what the intentions of the Lawrence family were.
They were all part of the apparatus that kept vital information away from the Macpherson Inquiry, protected police officers when there was evidence of a corrupt relationship with the family of one of the killers, and ensured that there was not a single conviction for the killing for 19 years.
Neville Lawrence said yesterday: ‘From what happened with the Macpherson Inquiry, I’m very, very wary about what’s going to happen now.
‘It’s like the Metropolitan Police seem to be always trying to hide what they are and put a different face out there all the time, and I now feel that I will never be able to trust these people.’
Doreen Lawrence wants officers accused of wrongdoing over the case to be ‘rooted out’ and face criminal charges, her lawyer says.
He added that the police failings went to ‘the highest level’ and Doreen Lawrence wanted ‘heads to roll’.
The Lawrences are right that the police are trying to hide the truth, and see the series of inquiries as a way to further hold up and prevent the truth emerging.
Heads must roll right across the very top of the state apparatus, and the government and the ruling class, if there is to be justice.
However, this will be achieved not by seeking to reform the state but by mobilising the working class to overthrow it, and thus open the archives of all the evidence that has been well hidden over all of these years.
It was Karl Marx who defined the capitalist state as being made up of bodies of armed men whose sole function was to preserve the established capitalist order, by any means that are necessary, against the working class and the middle class.
There have always been police spies in the workers’ movement, and there have always been police agents and provocateurs of all kinds that have been trained and sent into the ranks of the working class to achieve what the ruling class wants, through provocations of all kinds.
The modern version of this state is made up of armed police officers possessing automatic weapons, Taser guns, rubber bullets, reinforced by water cannon.
Then there are the provocateurs who are trained to suggest the most radical and often suicidal actions to the protest groups and the political movements that they intervene in.
Today, every advance in science is used to re-arm this state and revolutionise surveillance especially, with millions of CCTV cameras, and the monitoring of every text, e-mail, webcam and all electronic communications anywhere on the planet.
The ruling class is so insecure that it wants to have the earliest possible warnings of any revolutionary developments.
The other side of all this is that any ruling class that needs the means of oppression and spying on this fantastic scale is doomed, since the enemy is 90% of the population, while the ruling classes and their state apparatuses make up a tiny minority.
The Lawrences are right to be sceptical about ruling class inquiries into their own state forces, and right to demand that heads at the very top of the state must roll.
However, this task is well beyond a hundred judge-led inquiries. It will require a socialist revolution to smash capitalism and its state apparatus and bring in socialism.
