08.10.2008
Rotten apples and dictator mayors
James Turley assesses the politics around Sir Ian Blair's resignation
Last week’s resignation of Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Ian Blair followed a long period of mounting controversies.
He had been ‘encouraged’ to depart (he was the first commissioner to resign since 1918) by Boris Johnson, the London mayor, who argues that it is time for a “change in leadership” and “clarity of purpose” at the Met. Johnson’s decision has been highly controversial, and a Metropolitan Police Authority meeting on Monday, which he chaired, revealed extreme frustration with the mayor’s actions.
If the whims of Boris Johnson are the most immediate cause for Blair’s resignation, there are other problems of which he will be glad to see the back. The last few weeks have seen the eruption of yet another race scandal, after the suspension of senior Muslim officer Tarique Ghaffur, and the opening of another inquiry into the 2005 killing of Jean Charles de Menezes by armed police officers.
Blair has also come under fire for his close friendship with Andy Miller, the owner of an IT company called Impact Plus, which has benefited from Met contracts to the tune of £3 million - concerns compounded after the revelation that the same Impact Plus had been paid £15,000 for a PR contract, with no other bids taken.
Dubious as that looks, however, it is more likely another friendship of Blair’s that has scuppered his tenure: that with his namesake, former prime minister Tony Blair. The ex-commissioner had enjoyed a very close working relationship with the Labour government, under Blair and Gordon Brown, and had rarely been caught politically off message.
That message has, of course, been one of full support for the ‘war on terror’, coupled with periodically making the (politically) correct noises on race issues. His falling out with Ghaffur, and the most substantial subject of the latter’s personal allegations of racism against Blair, was over the Met’s declared support for 42 days’ detention of terror suspects; Blair has meanwhile declared that media coverage of crime is racially biased, with far more coverage given to white victims than those from ethnic minorities.
Shambles
The gap between Ian Blair’s intentions and the actual course of his tenure has been quite extraordinary, however.
The self-proclaimed crusader against ‘institutional racism’ in the force and society at large has managed to preside over the public execution of Jean Charles de Menezes, the bungled Forest Gate operation in 2006, during which another innocent man was shot, and the recent Ghaffur affair.
In some respects, this dubious record has little to do with Blair himself. The political necessities of responding to the July 7 bombings made it more or less inevitable that the Met would alienate large sections of Muslims, both within its ranks and without. And barbaric acts against the innocent are to be expected in such times when the force has an ingrained practice of de facto ethnic profiling (de Menezes was targeted because of his ‘Mongolian eyes’).
Blair, then, had become emblematic of the Met’s failure to escape its now avowed racist past. It is not a blind coincidence that the aftermath of his resignation has seen Johnson call for a public inquiry into the recruitment and promotion prospects of black and ethnic-minority officers, and race and faith relations more generally; and the Black Police Association’s announcement of a boycott of the Met’s recruitment events.
The involvement of Johnson in the whole affair is another dimension. Blair made no secret of the primary importance of the meeting between the two last week, at which the mayor explicitly called for his resignation. Johnson has no formal power over the position, appointments being handled internally - but as the key local policymaker his support is pivotal. He has effectively vetoed the Met’s choice of commissioner. The Guardian has claimed that Johnson’s original plan was to delay the appointment of a new permanent commissioner until the Conservatives win the next general election.
This is looking rather less like a brave new era of executive local government, however, since Johnson’s aforementioned appearance at the MPA meeting. By all accounts, the crowd was hostile - the mayor appears to have spent most of the meeting apologising for the manner in which he forced Blair from the job, along with his other recent summary decisions (the inquiry on racial matters, for example). While Blair’s resignation has been warmly received on the Tory front benches, it looks like Johnson’s move against him has backfired.
The left
The left, at the time of writing, has been quiet on the issue. The more or less honourable exception is the Socialist Workers Party, which has run a Socialist Worker article under the headline, ‘Crisis in the Metropolitan Police’ (October 11). It is not much more than an outline of the recent events, allied to a recapitulation of the narrative surrounding de Menezes’ death. In this regard, deputy assistant commissioner Cressida Dick, who led the operation, is left to speak for herself: “He had the great misfortune of entering the same tube station that three of the bombers had entered the day before ... If you ask me whether I think anybody did anything wrong or unreasonable in the operation, I don’t think they did.”
The piece ends with an elliptical statement: “One rotten apple may have gone - but it’s the whole barrel that needs throwing out.” Does this mean just the current batch of senior police officers, or the Met, or the state ...? How exactly are we to throw this barrel out? Who knows?
The Socialist Worker piece is all very well as far as it goes, but it barely raises any of the questions thrown up by this bizarre series of events. One is police racism - granted; another is the Met’s wholehearted commitment to the present drive towards authoritarian policy. But there is more to it than that - an SW reader could be forgiven for imagining that the authoritarianism and racism in the Met were some kind of abyssal cosmic accident. This barrel just happens to be full of rotten apples.
In reality, there are a whole host of additional questions posed - both in terms of who runs the Met and in whose interests, and also who runs the mayor’s office.
Communists, contrary to their popular bourgeois image, are not advocates of centralism pure and simple. Centralism must be accompanied by local autonomy and democratic decision-making. That said, we do not favour a situation where ‘local government’ is a matter of negotiations between a petty dictator-mayor on the one hand and myriad inert bureaucracies on the other. It should no more be the case that Boris Johnson can single-handedly force out individual bureaucrats, such as Blair, than these bureaucrats should appear in their capacities by oozing their way up the chain of command. All public officials should be subject to election and immediate recall.
We reject the notion that we need a leftwing petty dictator rather than a rightwing one. This much is clear from Ken Livingstone’s forthright defence of the Met in the wake of the de Menezes killing. Communists in general oppose the ‘separation of powers’, which raises the executive above the legislature. The elected representatives of the people, in a truly representative body, with (again) the possibility of immediate recall, are the democratic solution - liberal ‘checks and balances’ serve only to dilute the democratic decisions of the populace, and thus ultimately serve the class enemies of the workers.
As for the Met, the Marxist position is unambiguous. The police force is an armed body in the service of the bourgeois state - as such, we call for its replacement by a people’s militia. We are for the right of workers to defend themselves - including against the bourgeois cops. Simultaneously we defend the right of the lower ranks of the police to organise themselves, including in trade unions.
