By Marcus Halaby THE HEADY combination of big business, land development, local and national politics, and the struggle for international prestige has always ensured that major sporting events like the Olympics are fraught with issues for the communities that live and work near them. Few people, however, could have expected the news that ground-based […]
The latest crisis in the police goes beyond individual racism, the whole system defends the police from accountability or prosecution. Crown Prosecution Service The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), the government agency involved in bringing forward cases for prosecution, works hand in glove with the police. It has a long record of giving police a ‘get […]
Only token changes have been made since the 1999 Macpherson report concluded that the police were “institutionally racist”, after an inquiry into the Stephen Lawrence murder case exposed rampant police corruption and racism. Despite rising discrimination against Black and Asian people critical reports on continued police racism in 2004 and 2009, particularly around the racist […]
In the last week, the London Metropolitan Police have become swamped by a series of exposes of police racism dating back to the London riots. The allegations expose the way the whole justice system protects the police and defends racism. On 30 March the Guardian newspaper released a recording made by Mauro Demetrio, a 21 […]
This article gives a stark insight into the day-to-day experience of police brutality and racism in our inner city communities that fuelled the recent riots. Although we don’t agree with the author’s opposition to cuts in police budgets (Workers Power stands for democratic, working class policing from below, not capitalist policing from above), it’s vital reading […]
The vengeful sentencing after the riots have revealed the true nature of the capitalist state. Jeremy Dewar calls for a campaign to defend all the detainees
Jeremy Dewar looks at some of the most shocking riot-related sentences to date. Others will surely follow, as the crown courts start to deliver their sentences. • Anderson Fernandes, 22, was charged with burglary in Manchester after he took two scoops of coffee ice cream and a cone from a delicatessen. He gave the cone […]
Jeremy Dewar argues that the Conservative Party has completely reverted to type after the riots
As images of buildings and cars set ablaze spread through the media, Joana Ramiro reports on the harsh reality of North London’s Tottenham Hale community, where police brutality, racism and repression are, 30 years after the Brixton riots, still the inescapable reality.
Last year, returning from a football match, student Tommy Meyers was savaged by a police dog while being arrested for assault. Now, following his acquittal, he and his family talk about the incident at Guardian.co.uk
The anti-union laws are holding us back – we have to organise to break them, writes Joy Macready
By Simon Hardy Many people think that the police in Britain are somehow neutral in political matters. But recent events have exposed the real nature of the police force. This article examines the role of the police and the state in our society The role of the police Lord Imbert, ex-chief of the Metropolitan Police, […]
The Philip K Dick short story Minority Report, which was made into a film starring Tom Cruise, sees a futuristic police force arresting people before they have committed a crime. Worryingly, the arrests of ‘might-be’ protesters before the Royal Wedding have turned this sci-fi fiction story into a near reality.
Fifty anticuts pages taken down under cover of royal celebrations At the same time as the royal wedding, alongside a wave of raids on squats and ‘pre-emptive’ arrests of activists, Facebook took down fifty pages, all belonging to groups coordinating protest against the government’s vicious spending cuts.
Nina Power comments in The Guardian on the intense and repressive police crackdown on anti-cuts protesters, just a few days before the royal wedding. Today, several social centres were raided. In Camberwell, south London, between 8 and 10 police vans tried to evict residents from the ‘Ratstar’, even though they had been given permission to […]
“DIRTY BABYLON!” snarled the crowd in time to the reggae beat. It was a line from a 1980s Smiley Culture hit: “Cockney say Ol’ Bill, we say Dirty Babylon”. How appropriate. The death of Smiley Culture in police custody is yet another suspicious death at the hand of the Met. Little wonder it has angered […]
The death of Smiley Culture while in police custody has struck a chord that has resonated deeply across south London and Britain’s black community. Even the Evening Standard says thousands will march on 16 April in “the largest black community-led demonstration in years”. Jeremy Drinkall reports
The explosion that claimed the life of Omagh policeman Ronan Kerr does not further the struggle against British occupation in Ireland one jot, writes Bernie McAdam.
Demonstrate against police custody deaths, remember Smiley 16 April 2011, 12pm South Bank Gym, 124-130 Wandsworth Road (Vauxhall tube) SMILEY CULTURE, Britain’s first rap star, died on Tuesday 15 March with a single stab wound to the heart. His family, friends and the black community as a whole are in shock and demand answers. The […]
A campaign of repression against the growing resistance to the cuts exposes collusion between the different arms of the state – the police, courts, intelligence agencies – even drawing in the supposedly independent media. With the aid of the right-wing papers, the police are trying to demonise students that took to the streets in the […]
In the summer of 1994, when I was visiting my Iraqi cousins in Baghdad, I told them the story of the accidental death by hanging of Stephen Milligan MP in an auto-erotic incident involving self-strangulation and drugs. Their immediate response was to ask in disbelief: “Why did they kill him like that?” From then on, […]