David Lammy MP has had to undertake some quite serious back-tracking over the past 48 hours. After his comments in support of corporal punishment, headlines in the mainstream press included “Smacking ban led to riots because parents fear children will be taken away if they discipline them”. As the elected representative of Tottenham, and the appointed representative of much of the African/Caribbean population of the UK (or so it seems), Lammy thought he’d found common ground among the Black parents of Tottenham, and the conservative establishment his policies (and rhetoric) often reflect. However, this hasty assumption meant he failed to factor in the class, gender and post-colonial context in which his statement was made, in addition to the obvious racialised links made between the August ‘riots’ and urban crime at large.

One of the most striking aspects of Lammy’s remarks, is his inference that the British state is doing too much to protect young Black people from violence. According to Lammy, Black communities “live in fear of the social services turning up on their doorstep”. It is indeed true that social services operate far more in working class (and by extension Black) communities, due as much to institutional racism as demand – we see that the stress and trauma of socio-economic deprivation tends to go hand in hand with a prevalence of domestic abuse in these areas. However, even if we are to assume that Lammy is right, he makes little effort to bring attention to the other agents of the state, a knock on the door Tottenham constituents and Black communities live in far greater fear of.

In 2008, Frank Odame died from head injuries after the UK border agency raided his flat in Redbridge. In that same year, a Ghanian man fell from the third floor of a block of flats and another broke both his legs following a raid on a restaurant in which he was working. Both these people too, were being pursued by the UK border agencies. Asylum seekers driven to near and actual suicide, in preference to the prospect of UK Border Agency’s detention centres, speaks volumes of their extensively documented ill-treatment. And although Lammy has focused his attention on some officers involved in unlawful killings, such as that of Mark Duggan, he has never attempted to address the legislative and institutional flaws which often lead to deaths in the hands of police. In the same way that Lammy understands that the isolation of specific social workers will not stop Black/working class communities feeling vulnerable to the state when raising their children, he must surely understand that the targeting of specific officers will not stop institutional discrimination in other mechanisms of the state.

Secondly, (and perhaps more controversially), Lammy’s approach to corporal punishment, I feel, is profoundly damaging to Black, working class,or any community which wishes to view children as human beings, rather than property. To illustrate this, an anecdote from bell hooks is useful:

“Often I tell the story of being at a fancy dinner party where a woman is describing the way she disciplines her young son by pinching him hard, clamping down on his little flesh for as long as it takes to control him. And how everyone applauded her willingness to be a disciplinarian. I shared the awareness that her behaviour was abusive, that she was potentially planting seeds for this male child to grow up and be abusive to women. Significantly, I told the audience of listeners that if we had heard a man telling us how he just clamps down on a woman’s flesh, pinching it hard to control her behaviour it would have been immediately acknowledged as abusive”

Hooks not only highlights the populist appeal of corporal punishment, to which Lammy panders, but also the psychological effects of growing up around violence. Learning that power and control are exerted physically is the exact mindset which led to the ‘riots’ which Lammy is so hasty to condemn. In fact, corporal punishment has a very lousy track record when it comes to discipline. There is ample evidence to suggest not only that corporal punishment is not an effective way of teaching children the difference between right and wrong, but it in fact leads to an increased likelihood of the child being critical of the moral values his/her physical punishment was supposed to instil. Policy shifts in West African private schools allowed academics to follow the progress of similar children, some of whom were disciplined with corporal punishment, others who were not. The study found that children in the punitive school performed significantly worse than their counterparts in the non-punitive school. Similar studies have been carried out in Europe and North America, with similar results.

What David Lammy is in fact doing, is not protecting Black and working class parents from social workers and other intrusive state agents. He furthers a culture of domination in which we are socialised into accepting violence as a legitimate means of control, even when this violence is disproportionate to the threat, or perceived threat. As has been widely documented, the race and class of populations often plays a critical role in their chances of experiencing violence at state hands. The logic of the exertion of violent control led David Lammy to vote for a stronger asylum system, Labour’s anti-terror laws and the Iraq war, and informs his latest public support for the physical control of children, particularly those in Black and working class communities. Only by challenging both domestic and state violence, can we properly understand the social, economic and political issues which lead to young people growing up in poverty, rioting and dying at the hands of police.

Indeed, half way down the page, after solemn updates on terrorist incidents in ‘Colombia’, ‘Pakistan/Al-Qaeda’ and ‘Belarus’, we find a curious segment on … the ‘Occupy London Stock Exchange’ movement (OccupyLSX). This contained even more curious mentions of people who “fit the anti-capitalist profile” and are alleged to be undertaking “hostile reconnaissance”.

Most of those tweeting about this were uncertain as to the document’s authenticity. I decided to give up trying to guess and, instead, filed a Freedom of Information Act request asking City Police to confirm whether the communiqué was genuine and, if so, to provide copies of all communiqués issued by it that mentioned OccupyLSX. For good measure, I asked City Police to confirm whether it considered OccupyLSX to be a domestic extremist group.

With the start of the New Year came the much awaited response. Despite the rigmarole of FOI and its somewhat weak make-up, it delivered results on this occasion. It turned out the document was genuine. As an afterthought, I immediately called back and asked: how many communiqués have been issued from the day OccupyLSX started until Jan 4th? A total of nine, answered the helpful officer. Out of those, seven mentioned OccupyLSX.

Accompanying OccupyLSX in this ‘Terrorism/Extremism’ rogues’ gallery is a series of other peaceful protest groups and organisations: a list that includes “UKUNCUT”, “Climate Justice Collective” and, most dangerous of all, a “Mass healing ritual performed as a silent march”.

In other words, a regular “Terrorism/Extremism” business community update disseminated by City Police has, on seven separate occasions, not only slandered a group of peaceful protestors camping in freezing weather against corporate greed, but smeared them as somehow being connected to proscribed and violent organisations such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and Al-Qai’da.

Unsurprisingly, the City of London Police now state that they do “not regard the LSX Occupy movement as a domestic extremist group”. Indeed, when the story was initially broken by The Independent in early December, a “police source” insisted that although the wording of the communiqué was poor its intention was never to suggest that OccupyLSX demonstrators posed “a terrorist threat”.

The source’s remarks clearly intended to suggest this was simply a case of an honest mistake. One could be tempted to take this explanation at face value. After all, Police forces and large governmental organisations are run by human beings, and all human beings make mistakes. However, what could be presented as incompetence or an error in good faith the first or second time starts to look suspiciously like deliberate sabotage after six or seven repeats.

As my personal experiences have taught me over the last three years, and my research is teaching me at present, a lot of these so-called ‘mistakes’ are widespread not because of inadvertence or carelessness, but because British security bodies and the police, are systemically ultra-suspicious of anyone seen as out of step with the establishment and big business. As such, rather than highlighting an aberration, this latest episode fits an observed, well-known pattern.

Of course, whether the (City of London) police genuinely believe OccupyLSX are domestic extremists or not is a debatable matter; a debate that needs to be had. As yesterday’s Independent, reporting on my findings, pointed out, the Police have a case to answer over their approach to protest groups.

But before that, two things must happen. Firstly, City of London Police need to issue a full and unconditional apology to OccupyLSX and all other peaceful organisations included in communiqués featuring violent groups. OccupyLSX are not domestic extremists or terrorists, so City Police should have no problem understanding why they, and their supporters (including myself), are deeply offended by their repeated attempts to insinuate such sinister connections.

Secondly, the body responsible for coordinating the policing response to counter-terrorism and domestic extremism in England, Wales and Northern Ireland is SO-15, or ‘Counter-Terrorism Command’ (CTC), situated in New Scotland Yard. This organisation should provide an official confirmation regarding the risk (i.e. lack of) posed to either national security or public order not only by OccupyLSX but also groups such as UKUNCUT.

Once these clarifications have been offered, and a little transparency given, an open, frank debate can take place about how the British State has been maltreating peaceful campaigners and activists, many of whom selfless individuals trying, as best they can, to make this country, and the wider world, a fairer, more equal place. Unless this is done, “mistakes” will continue to be made, and innocent individuals and communities will continue to pay the price for them.

The FOI request and the original disclosure can be viewed by clicking here.

And what better time for British liberals to attack Abbott for racism than towards the end of a week during which they’ve been patting each other on the back for finally ‘securing justice’ for Stephen Lawrence? Indeed, throughout the Lawrence trial, institutional racism was rarely mentioned and when it was little analysis was produced. The reaction to Abbott’s tweet confirms that this absence of analysis was not just down to a lack of understanding, but the feeling that there is nothing there to “understand” to start with.

Of course, one of the reasons racism fails to be seen, let alone understood, is because many people in the public eye benefit from it, not necessarily because they are white, but often because their very internalisation of the assumptions of white supremacy is what has secured their acceptance into the hierarchies of power in the first place.

Only by understanding institutional racism can we hope to understand, and defeat, racism itself. Racism is not simply disliking, or assuming generalisations about a certain ethnic or racial group; it is a system of power in which a certain racial or ethnic group holds social, political and economic power over another racial or ethnic group(s).

The numerous commentators gleefully baying for Abbott’s blood, proclaiming that a white politician making a similar comment – but about black people – would have already lost their job, are probably right about the latter speculation but are either unaware, or deliberately ignoring, the inherent meaninglessness of their analogy. After all, such an equivalence would only make sense in a world in which whites were so victimised by racism as to be unable to even utter the same racialised statements as their socially-dominant Black counterparts. In reality, a white Briton today, whether he/she acknowledges it or not, continues to benefit from a social, cultural, economic and political system that has been built upon, and sustained by, racist assumptions and prejudices that have permeated imperial and colonised societies for centuries.

Of course, a Black individual has, in theory, the possibility of discriminating against another person or people on the basis of their race, but this form of racial discrimination clearly does not have the same effect as white racism does, because the power structures in which we live both amplify, and are themselves amplified by, the latter form.

Let us remember that we live in a system that sees Black people disproportionately affected by educational underachievement, under employment, ethnic cleansing, police harassment, disproportionate sentencing, the demonization of cultural practices and a host of other factors. Consequently, when the beneficiaries of this system take it upon themselves to further ridicule or verbally attack those victimised by it there is, rightly, outrage and offence.

However, when a Black person makes a similar remark, it will have comparatively little or no impact: a white person will still find employment in the highest-paying and most powerful jobs, attend the best schools, dictate foreign policy or occupy the best housing and environments. In short, British society can just about recognise some forms of racism, but is still unwilling to conceptualise its most enduring, nefarious and powerful manifestation, white privilege.

These huge gaping differences in the lives of white and Black people are what dictates the way racism operates within society, and this is why even the most elementary understanding of racism clearly indicates that Abbott’s tweet cannot seriously be thought comparable to a “reverse scenario” statement by a white politician. (Which should indeed have legitimately led to a sacking).

Britain, despite the progress epitomised by the MacPherson Report, clearly has a long way to go before a proper understanding of racism and the power relations that frame it becomes the norm. Only then can we, as a society, really claim to have secured justice of Stephen Lawrence, for his family, and for so many countless others.

Mothers who are heads of households are one of the groups (including young people) that are the hardest hit by the austerity measures and economic downturn in the UK. As Howard Reed, for the Fabian Review argues, the government’s programme of public spending cuts is having a disproportionate effect on women. Cutbacks to benefits, tax credits and other subsidies affect women severely, particularly working mothers. The removal of state services privatises reproductive labour onto the family, hence often onto the shoulders of women, who are still predominantly those that carry out domestic labour. As Emilia Hill recently argued in the Guardian, hard won victories for women’s equality are being eroded.

Women are often employed in unregulated and precarious working conditions, on temporary contracts with little or no rights to maternity leave, sick pay and protections against sexual harassment. As a recent TUC report demonstrates, these are the first economic sectors to be hit by cuts and as they are feminised it is women who are hit the most severely. Yet these women still have to ensure that their children eat, have a roof over their heads, clothes, schooling, health, love and nurture. What can be learnt from women of the Global South?

Women in the global south (and sections of the global north) have experienced the dislocations, violences and exclusions of market logics for decades. The removal of public provision of health, education and housing reinforces the care responsibilities of women. Economic crisis and cuts backs increase unemployment undercutting the survival mechanisms of poor families. Taken together they result in the breakdown of community solidarities, social bonds and collectivity (a similar story to the story of austerity and marketisation in the UK).

Yet they are not only victims of these processes, as women never are. At the heart of the community and the family they have been at the heart of resisting these processes by organising the collective provision of housing, education, health and childcare.

In the process, the meaning and practice of motherhood and womanhood become a place of political struggle.

No longer is motherhood confined to the individual care of partner and children. Instead motherhood becomes a symbol of collective community caring and nurturing. Women’s knowledges are combined and reclaimed as the basis of creating sustainable systems of food production, health care, community education and housing.

Many food co-operatives collectively organise the production, distribution and consumption process with community need as opposed to profit the ethic that underlies the entire process. Through this they attempt to ensure a sustainable use of land and resources and the distribution of food to ensure everyone’s survival. This ruptures the logic of competition, individualism and consumerism that rips communities apart.

Education projects organised with popular education methodologies are widespread. These build upon participants’ life experiences which are engaged with as sources of knowledge and understanding. This involves a recovery and reconstruction of cultural traditions of dance, song, and music and local knowledges about the geography of place and traditions of healing and herbal lore. Education is not viewed as a means to an end (of becoming an exploitable and docile worker) but rather as a path of empowerment and liberation through collective thought and action.

Property and land have often been privatised or sold off, displacing rural communities and excluding poor communities from a right to be a part of the city they live in and the right to have a decent home. Women and family-led movements are taking back land, buildings and the city by occupying and reclaiming space for the community. An inspiring, poor people-led community organisation in the United States is Poor Magazine.

Education projects and food–cooperatives, as well as a plethora of other projects are organised in these spaces. The occupation of space in this way recreates community by transforming relationships of strangers characteristic of austerity to relationships of friendship and solidarity characteristic of resistance. This opens up possibilities for poor women and their families to live decent and dignified lives.

As part of these struggles no longer is womenhood confined to a role in the private sphere as mother, daughter or wife or to an unregulated market sphere of super-exploitation. Rather women take centre stage in the struggles for recognition of their community and family’s right to a dignified life determined on their own terms. Women become the thinkers, facilitators and organisers in their communities.

As Mariela, community organiser from the Comités de Tierra Urbana (Urban Land Committees) in the shanty towns of Caracas recounted to me, ‘We worked with our community building solidarity and attempting to encourage reflection about the problems that we faced. We developed the programme of democratising the city, built on the idea of democratic control over our environments in order to create social justice for all, with access to, and control over, education, health, employment, community.’

Women are at the heart of the discussion, experiments and practices of creating the institutions, processes and ideas to construct such a dignified life.

Such politics impacts upon how women’s bodies are experienced and lived. Women have been at the forefront of struggles against marketisation and injustice- central figures in the uprisings of the Arab Spring, in protests against cuts across Latin America, in campaigns against the privatisation of water in South Africa- reclaiming both public space and the space of community as a site of collectivity, dignity and power.

This challenges the female body’s exploitation, objectification and commodified sexualisation. The body is not merely a site of pain, pleasure for others and exhaustion but is also an embodiment of the ability to create and defend life. Women who stand against the coercion and violence of the state in protest, women who sing and use their voices to bear witness to the violence of marketisation turn their bodies into sites of resistance and pride.

These practices re-make and re-invent broken solidarities, social bonds and collectivity. In the logic of their resistance is a reimagining of the political; away from the dominant script of power politics around great leaders, parties, the winning of elections and the occupying of the state towards a politics of everyday life, social relationships and self

Yet this politicisation is not tension free. Women now often carry a triple burden of paid, domestic and political work. Women are organisers in the community yet often still subject to oppressive and gendered power relationships in the private sphere. Women’s participation in movements is characterised simultaneously by inclusion and marginalisation.

However, the implications of the feminisation of resistance are far-reaching. It challenges traditions of western political thought ( reformist and revolutionary), resting as these do on a masculinist conceptualisation of the political that excludes or subordinates women, femininity, the private sphere and the body.

Such resistances compel us to stretch our understanding of what politics is, where is occurs, and what is stands for. It suggests that a reimagining of a liberatory politics and theory for our times must take women’s resistances seriously. Dialogue and solidarity between women in the Global South and Global North is an essential part of this process.

No longer can we allow the feminisation of resistance and women’s struggles to be at the margins of scholarly and political debate. Their energy, creativity and knowledges are breaking through the cracks of our bankrupt system of politics as normal. It is time we all took notice.

To read more about the feminisation of resistance see Interface: a journal for and about social movements, current edition, Feminism, Women in Movement and Women’s Movements http://www.interfacejournal.net/ of which Sara Motta is one of the co-editors.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, left to right, Salim al-Zanoun, head of Palestinian national council and Hamas’ supreme leader, Khaled Mashaal attend a meeting in Cairo (Photo: EPA)

Generally speaking, the inter-Palestinian “reconciliation talks” have become the new “peace process” – all process, no peace. But since the ongoing Egyptian revolution successfully dispatched ex-dictator Hosni Mubarak in February, there seems to have been a substantive shift. Egyptian revolutionaries also managed to sideline former military intelligence chief Omar Suleiman (remember him?) under whose auspices Hamas-Fateh talks previously took place, and whose strategy seemed to be to deliberately alienate Hamas. Indeed, negotiations were constantly sabotaged and, Considering the fact that Suleiman has been extremely close to US and Israeli spooks, this is no surprise (see various Wikileaks cables, including 08TELAVIV1984which sums it up nicely: “there is no question that Israel is most comfortable with the prospect of Omar Soliman”).

But with Suleiman out of the way things have changed. Hamas-Fatah negotiations in Egypt seem to have picked up pace. Reports surfaced from Cairo Thursday that a deal had been struck between Hamas leader Khalid Meshaal and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas. Hamas could join the Palestine Liberation Organisation for the first time. There was also talk of elections in the West Bank and Gaza (presumably to the Palestinian Authority’s legislative body), with a promise to form a unity government by the end of January.

Why is this so significant? Well, for a start, Hamas has never been a member of the PLO, the umbrella body of the Palestinian national movement. Moreover, PA legislative council member Mustafa Barghouti was quoted by Ma’an news agency as confirming that Hamas, Islamic Jihad and his more secular Palestinian National Initiative faction had accepted “interim” PLO leadership positions.

Of course, there are many good reasons to be sceptical, to which I will be returning presently. But I’m in a ‘glass-half-full’ kind of mood, so first the good news. There is no doubt that the rift between Hamas and Fatah has caused great damage to the Palestinian national movement and to the Palestinian people in general. Factional clashes have claimed the lives of far too many Palestinians. If the factions can at least come to a sustainable entente, this could be mitigated. There are enough Palestinian prisoners in the dungeons of the Israeli enemy without the mutual political prisoners held by both the PA and Hamas. The rifts between Hamas and Fatah were deliberately engineered and widened by American empire, aided by its European and regional allies.

Despite that, far more fundamental problems remain. Palestinians require far more than an entente between their supposed political and military leaders. The Palestinian liberation movement requires a unified strategy that will embrace all the diverse strand of resistance, rejecting the false dichotomy between armed resistance and peaceful popular resistance. No doubt influenced by the wave of revolution in the Arab world this year, at the end of November Hamas signalled that it would now focus on popular resistance, while still retaining the right to legitimate armed resistance. This is precisely the stance of the African National Congress during the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. A more inclusive PLO could help trigger a paradigm shift to more unified strategy against Israeli occupation and apartheid.

But we come back to those reasons for scepticism. Firstly, the idea that Hamas should join the PLO is not new. The Islamic Resistance Movement has shown willingness to join since at least 2005. This talk of “reconstructing” the PLO has also been ongoing for a long time – on and off since the PLO was sidelined by the formation of the PA in the early nineties. Secondly, both Fateh and Hamas are making these moves under popular duress.

Furthermore, direct comparisons with 2011’s popular Arab revolutions against dictatorial regimes are not possible, since there is no Palestinian state. Nevertheless, both Fatah and Hamas suffer from a democratic deficit. Hamas was the legitimately elected political majority to the PA’s parliament, but its term has expired. More fundamentally, many of its MPs were kidnapped by Israel, giving Hamas little incentive to continue its embrace of parliamentary politics, as Western governments claim to be seeking (in reality, they just want subservience). Although originally elected PA president, Abbas’s term expired in 2009. He has said he won’t run again for president, but who needs to run for president when no elections are allowed?

Thirdly, and more fundamentally, there is the issue of “security cooperation”. Under this malign, American-engineered pact, the armed militias of Mahmoud Abbas imprison and torture Israel’s political and military opponents, even clamping down on popular demonstrations. All the while, Abbas makes empty noises of support for popular resistance. But where are his actions? What is to stop him leading a peaceful demonstration of thousands against the Qalandia checkpoint, for example? After all, he’s had no problem “rallying” Fatah supporters for stupid political-sectarian agitation or attacking Al Jazeera offices (remember his childish response to the Palestine Papers?)

There is nothing else for it. For the PLO to genuinely earn back the mantle of the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people” two things must happen. Firstly, the Palestinian National Council, moribund for 15 years, must hold immediate elections open to the entire Palestinian population. Second, the PA must be dismantled. It was meant to be temporary anyway. Almost 20 years later, it is clear to everyone that it is a failed experiment. Scratch that – it has been extremely successful in achieving its real goal: co-opting the Palestinian political leadership into running Israel’s occupation by proxy.

Frankly, I am still very sceptical about this latest reported stage of the unity deal. But there is nonetheless a ray of light in all this. The Guardian reported Thursday that “Washington has indicated it will cut millions of dollars in funding to the Palestinian security infrastructure if the current leadership unifies with Hamas”. Given the track-record of the malign influence of American money, this can only be good thing. We live in hope.

The extremely vicious and disturbing racist language used by those suspected of murdering Stephen Lawrence has been rightly condemned by a range of newspapers and broadcasters. Just over a year after the murder, the suspects were recorded using the most depraved language while recalling past racial attacks they had engaged in, as well as threatening acts of the most destructive terror on peoples of African and Asian descent living in Britain. The re-emergence of this story into the mainstream press draws attention to the issue of hate crime in Britain, still a huge problem for many communities.

However, few, if any, of the news stories bothered to ask why an event which took place in 1993 is still being investigated 18 years after that fateful moment when Stephen Lawrence looked over his shoulder to hear a group of white men shouting “What, what N****r!” before attacking and stabbing him to death.

The Stephen Lawrence inquiry, and the subsequent MacPherson Report, did not primarily intend to draw attention to the hate crimes carried out by civilians against victims such as Lawrence and countless others. Instead, they were damning indictments of an institutionally racist police force, thus providing the evidence that Black communities had waited decades for to bring under the light how the UK police force in this country has engaged with people of African and Asian descent over the past decades.

Indeed, the press releases have described the investigation into Stephen’s murder as ‘a sequence of disasters and disappointments’. However, this passive language is often used when describing police corruption, discrimination or abuse, to create the impression of some kind of natural catastrophe, rather than premeditated collusion and endemic racism. As a result, few people are aware of the overwhelming evidence which led Lord Macpherson and his team to conclude that there can be no doubt that the Metropolitan Police Service is institutionally racist.

Statements from the Lawrence family about the way in which they were treated by police also reflect the experiences of many Black people criminalised by the law enforcement establishment. The treatment of Duwayne Brooks, who was with Stephen during the attack but had managed to get away and call an ambulance, was never asked by police if he had been attacked.

What he was asked, however, was whether he had been carrying a weapon, insisting that he knew who had attacked Stephen. Police also repeatedly asked Brooks what he and Stephen had done to provoke the attack which led to his friend being stabbed to death. They then asked him if he and Stephen had been harassing white girls outside the local McDonalds earlier that evening. They did not even allow Duwayne to travel in the ambulance with his dying friend.

Less than an hour after the attack, a carload of young white males drove past twice, cheering. They were identified as Jason Goatley and David Copley – both of whom were involved in an attack, two years earlier, that led to the murder of Rolan Adams. Also in the car was Kieran Highland, an influential member of an organisation called Nazi Turn Out. No attempt to pursue the vehicle or these individuals in connection with the attack on Lawrence was ever made.

Within days of Stephen’s murder, a number of anonymous witnesses cited two members of a knife-carrying and bullying gang, who had been involved in racially motivated attacks on other Black individuals in the past, as possible suspects in the stabbing of Stephen Lawrence.

Another witness visited the Lawrences’ home to tell them the names of people she saw washing blood off their clothes the day after the murder. And yet, these witnesses and a myriad of others were actively ignored by the Metropolitan Police.

The stories dominating headlines portrayed this failure as incompetence. Few recent reports have sought to re-address institutional racism at the root of the Lawrence tragedy, and fewer still the serious allegations of corruption and collusion between police and suspects.

The first issue with the investigation is that the Senior Investigating Officer at the time, Ian Crampton, took three weeks to make any arrests, despite numerous tip-offs including drop-ins at the station, phone messages, the aforementioned visitor to the Lawrence home and a note left on the windscreen of a police car.

Further to this, no e-fit or identity parades took place, despite Duwayne Brooks providing a detailed description of at least one of the suspects. Ian Crampton insists that this was a strategic decision, although no records show any reference to a discussion or indeed any reference to this ‘strategy’ being decided upon.

One of the prime suspects, 17 year old David Norris, is the son of a well-known criminal called Clifford Norris who, as the Inquiry confirmed, “is said to have become positively and corruptly involved” in the bribing and/or threatening of witnesses in the investigation of the stabbing of Stacey Crampton.

During the Lawrence investigation, Ian Crampton had also been pursuing another case: the murder of another man named Clifford Norris, an informant who claimed to be a relative of his infamous, better-known namesake. Needless to say, we can be certain that the Norris family were a group of people whom Mr Crampton, as the Senior Investigating Officer in the Lawrence case, was very much aware of.

What is worrying, therefore, is that Mr Crampton denies making any link at the time between David Norris, the prime suspect in the murder of Stephen Lawrence, and Clifford Norris, his father, who was suspected of bribing/intimidating witnesses in a previous case his son was involved in.

Although these events are suspicious enough, the introduction of another officer, identified only as ‘Officer XX’, into the frame deepens the likelihood of corruption even further. And makes police collusion with the organised criminals and racists attackers of Stephen Lawrence even more apparent.

Customs & Excise officers had been monitoring Clifford Norris for a number of months, due to his connections with the shipment and sale of criminalised drugs. During the surveillance, Officer XX was “seen on four occasions in company with one or both of the Norrises”, the prime suspect of the murder of Stephen Lawrence, and his father, drinking in London pubs. However, rather than this relationship being investigated, Sergeant XX was given a verbal warning, and was never subjected to a charge under the disciplinary code.

What the Inquiry finds next adds further weight to the suspicious nature of Sergeant XX’s involvement, as well as that of Mr Crampton:

“A connection between Sergeant XX and Mr Crampton was apparently known to his supervisors before this Inquiry, and emerged in the course of the evidence of Mr Crampton. It was discovered from the complaints file in connection with Sergeant XX that Mr Crampton had given reference to the Disciplinary Board which dealt with Sergeant XX in 1989. That reference is in the form of a written statement, setting out a ‘professional’ reference indicating that in Mr Crampton’s view the officer was to be commended for his work, and indeed for his honesty during the time when he served under Mr Crampton in 1987. At that time Sergeant XX was stationed in south-east London, and he was serving immediately under Mr Crampton.”

Eventually, Sergeant XX was disciplined for making false entries into his duty state (which is supposed to provide an account of his actions on a day-to-day basis). It was revealed that Sergeant XX was absent from duty when he was supposedly in court. This took place during the same period that he was caught in a number of London pubs having drinks with the Norrises. As Michael Mansfield QC, representing the Laurence family, asserts: “There is a matrix of quite exceptional coincidences and connections here which weave such a tight web around this investigation that only an ability to suspend disbelief can provide an innocent explanation”.

The MacPherson Report’s indications do not point towards a simple case of police corruption and collusion with criminal gangs. Instead, they show a close relationship between violent white supremacist groups that have been terrorising Black communities, and an institutionally racist police force. In addition to drawing inevitable conclusions about the shocking links between racist gangs in London and a police force that turned out to also be institutionally racist, we must also see these two manifestations of white supremacy as both intrinsically linked, and mutually re-enforcing.

Indeed, it is the system of white supremacy, in which we were all born, and which permeates our daily lives that inevitably, and systemically, that has led to gangs (both criminalised and state-backed) becoming involved in Stephen Lawrence’s murder and its aftermath. Only by addressing the power structures giving rise to both the overt and institutionalised racisms plaguing our communities can we fully address the issues which have led to a heinous murder, committed 18 years ago, still being contested as we speak.

Education thus takes a key place in the successful promotion of elite governance both on domestic and international planes of action; and although not well known, Edward Berman, professor emeritus at the University of Louisville, has written an important book that examines just this subject.

By briefly reviewing Berman’s study The Influence of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations on American Foreign Policy: The Ideology of Philanthropy (State University of New York Press, 1983), this article aims to publicise his vitally important, though oft neglected, ideas on the anti-democratic nature of liberal philanthropy.

While the history of elite governance is long and troublesome, in Berman’s book we are invited to study the honing of such management strategies from the early twentieth century onwards. Today of course the Gates Foundation is the most financially powerful philanthropic body in the world, but until its relatively late arrival on the scene, the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller foundations (the “big three”) had dominated the philanthropic arena.

Indeed, exporting the ideology of the capitalist state has been a key function of these foundations, a duty of care that fell securely on their shoulders as they “represented one of the few sources of unencumbered ‘risk’ capital available during the period from 1945 to 1975.”[2]

As Berman acknowledges, the interest shown by these foundations in creating and financing “various educational configurations both at home and abroad cannot be separated from their attempts to evolve a stable domestic polity and a world order amenable to their interests and the strengthening of international capitalism.” Their simultaneous promotion of elite governance and massive levels of worker exploitation consequently required the forging of a “liberal consensus” among the ruling class and their allied functionaries, which would actively pre-empt radical structural alternatives, and legitimise capitalism – by fostering public acquiesence to elite priorities.

To successfully facilitate the building of this consensus, the creation of right-thinking educational institutions was essential in generating a “worldwide network of elites whose approach to governance and change would be efficient, professional, moderate, incremental, and non-threatening to the class interests of those who, like Messrs, Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller, had established the foundations.”

Far-sighted elites evidently recognised the popularity of alternatives to capitalism, so in turn advocated progressive reforms which attempted to find the  “middle ground between the extremes of oligopoly on the one hand and socialism on the other, while encouraging an atmosphere congenial to increased levels of productivity.”[3]

This is not to say that the individuals who launched foundation “education” programs during the Progressive Era were not seriously concerned with improving the lot of the poor and downtrodden: just that many of these people with “a deep and abiding concern for the plight of the poor” failed to tackle the root cause of injustice, that is, industrial capitalism.

Therefore, as many “charity workers refused to recognise the roots of this mass misery, their palliatives focused more on attempts to reform the existing system and to adjust their clients to it, than to search for alternative organisational structures that might result in a more equitable society less destructive of the immigrants’ communities”.[4]

Many people, even during the Progressive Era, did however challenge the growing power of foundations to define the parameters of legitimate discussion, but the foundation world’s success in fending off such attacks has meant that today far fewer people are aware of the co-optive nature of liberal philanthropy. This is in large part because “[v]iewpoints and perspectives that support the position of the dominant class are funded by the foundations, while those that are seen to threaten that position are not.”

Books critiquing liberal foundations, tend not to fit comfortably within a society whose educational structures prioritise capitalist growth imperatives. Consequently, the strategic funding of certain causes enables major foundations “to legitimate particular viewpoints while simultaneously devaluing others.”[5]

Berman suggests that one of the key projects supported by the major foundations to evolve a consensus for US foreign policy elites was the War-Peace Studies Project, which ran between 1939 and 1945, and whose “conclusions… present in outline form the basics of United States foreign policy after World War II.”

Two “major recommendations” from this project were integral to the propagation of US global hegemony: the first “involved American financial support for and control of” the World Bank (which along with the International Monetary Fund “grew from seeds planted in War-Peace Studies Project recommendation P-1323 of July 1941”); and the second foresaw the need for the development of bilateral assistance agreements, currently operated by the US Agency for International Development.[6]

The ideology of liberal imperialism, that is “modernisation” theory, was “summed up succinctly” in W. W. Rostow’s book The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge University Press, 1960) – a book which was written “during a ‘reflective year’ away from his academic responsibilities, made possible by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation.” And as Berman observes: “An important aspect of this developmental model emphasized the role of the leadership cadres in the new nations.”

This meant that a new Third World elite had to be developed and courted by the foundation world via the use of educational exchange programs, “whereby students benefiting from their fellowships studied certain subjects at universities whose faculties could be counted on, minimally, to provide the ‘correct’ perspectives.”[7]

While an occasional ‘radical’ viewpoint (e.g., [Barrington] Moore or Robert Heilbroner’s) might be funded, generally through the Social Science Research Council, there was little chance that his isolated voice could be of consequence as it competed with the more numerous voices of developmental orthodoxy. (p.121)

Early programs bringing African students to the United States were organized in the 1920s by the Phelps-Stokes Fund and by the Rockefeller philanthropies International Education Board, the latter providing funding for bodies like the International Institute at Teachers College, Columbia University. “Such programs provide effective, but generally unrecognized, mechanisms to further the foundations’ cultural hegemony”; thereby “complement[ing] the cruder and more overt forms of economic and military imperialism that are so easily identifiable.”

Berman points out that subsequent contributions to this important side of the cultural cold war like the Congress for Cultural Freedom included the Ford Foundation’s Foreign Student Leadership Program, which was initiated in 1955 and “designated the National Student Association [which already “worked closely with the CIA”] as the agency responsible for the selection of ‘responsible’ foreign student leaders to participate.”[8] However, it is important to emphasise that:

There was no apparent coercion involved in these fellowship programs. The foundations have not overtly manipulated potential fellowship recipients. Such blatant methods are unnecessary because of the understanding on the part of fellowship aspirants that their identification with certain methodological approaches or areas of investigation or their demonstration of certain behaviors will serve to stigmatize them as ‘irresponsible’ among the funding agencies, thereby eliminating any possibility of receiving a grant. (p.95)

Foundations also played a major role in shaping academic research agendas in the United States (and overseas). Berman, for instance, explains how: “The Ford Foundation almost singlehandedly established the major areas-studies programs in American universities.”

Likewise, other foundation-backed educational institutions that worked closely with universities included the Institute of International Education, the African-American Institute, and Education and World Affairs (which was founded in 1961 with $2 million from the Ford Foundation and $0.5 million from the Carnegie Corporation). In 1971, Education and World Affairs “was absorbed into yet another foundation-created organization, the International Council for Educational Development, [a group] whose key officers were former Carnegie vice-president James Perkins and former Ford officer Philip Coombs.”

By way of supplementing and extending the influence of educational exchange programs foundations quickly moved on to provide direct support for “trusted” Third-World intellectuals, “enabling research to be conducted in Third-World countries on socially and/or politically sensitive topics that United States Policy makers considered important.” In some instances these researchers worked in the US but, more often than not, the foundations extended their philanthropic reach to the Third-World countries themselves by financing local research centers.[9] Research findings generated by such regional research networks were then used to better manage those in Third-World periphery states for the benefit of the imperial home state, or metropolitan center.

These networks serve to encourage the production and dissemination of ideas and data deemed important by universities and agencies in the metropolitan centers. At the same time, this arrangement helps to deflect Third-World researchers from concerns that these same agencies are less anxious to have investigated. This is a conscious foundation policy. (p.174)

Despite the evident success that foundations have had in shaping ideology in the twentieth century their power is “not monolithic” and they “do allow differing points of view to be expressed, although these never or only infrequently form the basis for policy.” Indeed, most of their power is simply derived from the fact that their hegemony remains unchallenged, even from anti-capitalist activists. Yet with the spread of the internet it is now much easier to break the  ideological clout of foundations, and while in the past many criticisms of foundations have been rendered inaccessible to most people, this is no longer the case.

Last but not least it is important to note that many of the organisations that regularly challenge the legitimacy of (for-profit) corporate power are in fact funded by foundations, and many such groups would actually cease to operate without foundation support. This problematic state of affairs has led some people to describe this domination of the non-profit sector by not-for-profit corporations as resembling a non-profit industrial complex.

Yet in spite of these serious obstacles it is vital that concerned citizens break through the humanitarian rhetoric shielding the foundation world from valid criticism, because as Berman concludes, if their motives are “repeatedly questioned by those for whom these were ostensibly designed… the influence of these institutions could be seriously challenged.”  Although powerful it is certain “that they are not omnipotent, nor is their continuing influence as purveyors of capitalist hegemony assured or unassailable.”[10]

Footnotes:
[1] Edward Berman, The Ideology of Philanthropy, p.6.
[2] Berman, p.38.
[3] Berman, p.16, p.15, p.16.
[4] Berman, p.19.
[5] Berman, p.30.
[6] Berman, p.43, p.50, p.51.
[7] Berman, p.67, p.93.
[8] Berman, p.3, p.94.
[9] Berman, p.102, p.137, p.173.
[10] Berman, p.178.

Kathleen Cleaver speaking at Black Panther Rally – 1969

I’m a big fan of style.

I like to be stylish, it’s true. But what I really mean is, I’m a great believer in the importance of aesthetics. Visual, textual, conceptual aesthetics; persuasion by elegance as well as argument.

Recently, I started thinking about the importance of style when I was given a free cinema ticket to see The Black Power Mixtape. Goddamn, I thought as I watched, even if I’d been an apolitical black man in 1970s America (humour me), I’d probably have been a Black Panther anyway just for the outfits. The film was brimming with footage of lean black men in leather jackets and berets, classrooms of kids chanting “Power to the people, right on”, and Angela Davis giving the most withering rebuttals you’ve ever heard, while shaking an afro as big as a bicycle wheel.

Inspiring activist material. Right on.

Style definitely has the power to turn people on to a movement. Anonymous, to take a current example, have got bags of style. They’ve got a cool logo. They’ve got cleverly edited, pop-culture-referencing video presentations. They’ve even got a mask taken from an Alan Moore comic book, FFS!

As a movement, Anonymous has been very good at appealing to the kind of people who have a strong sense of political discontent, but are more attracted to slick production values and punchy aphorisms (“We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us…”) than hand-painted banners and debates on the precise terminology of anti-capitalism.

It’s understandable. If there’s one area where capitalism excels, it’s providing us with a constant stream of new ways to spend our time and money. Shiny toys in shiny boxes, endless new trinkets or experiences to be bought. Which is why the excesses of consumer culture must be rejected, of course, but whatever alternative model we propose needs to be explicitly fun and colourful, because if it isn’t then where’s the attraction in the first place?

Capitalism will not be overthrown by hemp and beige, it will be overthrown by hot pink and neon. Not specifically hot pink and neon, but you get the idea. This isn’t to rule out the need for dedication and sacrifice, which will be essential to systemic change, but just to say that we should keep the lighter side of anti-capitalism in focus. They didn’t call it the Communist Party for nothing, right?

Once upon a time, I had the good fortune to live in Paris. When I was there I lost count of how many exhibitions I saw exploring some aspect of the May ’68 student movement. Its memory still permeates contemporary French culture, a celebrated and mythologised past that remains very much alive in the present.

But instead of just focusing on the political ramifications of the movement, many of the exhibitions explored its visual legacy: the distinctive pamphlets and block-printed posters, or collections of street photography from the time, black and white images of stoic yet playful students occupying streets, theatres, universities, convinced they were on the cusp of a new social order.

At the time, the spirit of radical freedom and rebellion translated into an unbridled output of creativity, and the movement would surely not hold the same allure for young French men and women today if it had not been so eminently photogenic. If the soixante-huitards were trying to embody the world they wanted, it was clear that this new world would be a stylish one.

So far, the Occupy movement has made a few strong contributions in terms of slogans: the tagline “We are the 99 percent” is instantly recognisable, and the prefix ‘Occupy’ has become a great piece of activist shorthand: Occupy Wall Street; Occupy LSX; Occupy the Tundra; Occupy Everything.

But considering how long it has been since the inception of the movement, it has yet to produce much in the way of striking imagery (besides the pepper spraying riot cop meme).

Personally, I’d like to see a cohort of radical artists and designers get on board to produce some memorable artwork that could spread around the internet (possibly just what Occupy LSX is aiming for with its plan to crowdsource a new logo). Sure, it’s a global movement, and staggering in its diversity, but having a single banner to march under has a powerful unifying effect.

Finally: let’s be clear, style can be a tool of revolution but fashion is counter-revolutionary. Style is a timeless, essential quality, while fashion is a transitory taste for styles which, of necessity, will change as rapidly as feasibly possible in order to maximise obsolescence.

I should also point out here that I basically stole this philosophy from Bruce LaBruce, everyone’s favourite alt-gay-revolutionary-pornographer, because right now he’s owning the Venn-diagram space where fashion, sexuality and radical politics overlap. And on the subject or Mr LaBruce, you should all really read this because it’s my favourite ever revolutionary manifesto (sorry Karl).

LONG LIVE STYLE!

LONG LIVE THE PURPLE RESISTANCE ARMY!

Transmission ends.

(Photo: joshushund)

Growth coalitions

Global cities are usually run by growth coalitions. The idea of growth coalitions comes from Clarence N. Stone’s work on city government in Atlanta. It has since been applied worldwide. Growth coalitions are the usual force behind global city formation. They typically consist of ‘entrepreneurial’ city-leaders such as mayors, local business leaders, members of the permanent state bureaucracy, and other local elite figures. Worryingly, growth coalitions seem largely immune to electoral competition. They stay in place and carry on as usual even when the party in power changes. Growth coalitions usually aspire to create a certain kind of global city or city-node.

The power arising from global cities does not easily diffuse from these cities. Rather, it is usually held mainly by actors within the cities. Far from using global city growth to help the hinterland, political elites are often ‘captured’ by growth coalitions. They end up further dispossessing the hinterland to help the global city. They also end up spending all their money and getting unsustainably into debt. It is commonly observed that global cities are prone to ‘fiscal crises’ – situations where the city can’t cover its expenses.

Global cities and the rest

There are only a handful of ‘true’ global cities, and a few more major regional hubs, perhaps a dozen or so in total (the list varies between sources). Yet for every one ‘true’ global city, there are a dozen more which either claim or aspire to have that title, and a dozen below them who claim or aspire to regional, functional or gateway roles.

A city such as Dubai cannot really claim global city status, as its share of corporate headquarters and trade flows is low (most Middle Eastern regional headquarters are, bizarrely, in London). Yet this does not stop Dubai from presenting itself as a global city, pursuing global city-like development projects such as Burj Dubai, or taking all the repressive measures needed to appear to be a global city (e.g. hyperexploitation of migrant workers without labour rights).

We see pathetic parallels of this model even in a city like Nottingham in the UK: the attempt to create a cluster of biotechnology companies, the big office-building projects near the city-centre, the plan to redevelop Sneinton Market, the immense overspending on redeveloping the city square. Of course, these developments largely failed: the city is now littered with empty offices. Nottingham is never going to be a global city. Yet the appeal of acting like a global city seems infectious to politicians and bosses everywhere.

With the model come the oppressive effects: the social cleansing of poverty and deviance, the hostile attitude to protest and to truly public spaces, the focus on appearance over substance, the policy emphasis on servicing capitalism instead of meeting social needs, the speculative borrowing and overspending by governments and councils, the corrupt or borderline-corrupt closure of elite coalitions.

Global cities and the decline of nation-states

Global cities have a big geopolitical impact, on two levels. Firstly, states seeking economic growth through global cities don’t have the independence that old nation-states had. They’re dependent on the whims of transnational capitalists. It’s therefore difficult for states to use their wealth to fund other objectives – for instance, to turn the economy over to total war. The state’s spatial insertion in global capitalism is different today. As a result, the state’s capabilities are altered. A state which faced war in its heartland would lose its trade advantages very quickly. It would be massively disrupted by enemy attacks.

The nature of global cities also impacts on more benevolent uses of state power. Global cities tend not to be used to generate revenue for things like welfare states, wage increases and development of other regions. Some of them run a deficit model to compete for advantages in attracting capital. Many spend their revenue mainly on infrastructure designed to attract capital (e.g. roads and policing).

Hence, now more than ever, economic growth does not translate into development. Wealth polarisation is noticeable in all global cities. While it is sometimes offset by high growth rates, the poor often become poorer, and are hardest-hit by crises.

It is no surprise, therefore, that financial and economic power have ‘bifurcated’ or diverged. Emerging economic powers such as China have difficulty turning economic power into military strength. This is very different from the imperial or Fordist era, when city power depended on state power. This is ironic, because states usually pursue growth for precisely these reasons. They want growth as a means to military strength, or as a means to development.

The result is that nationalist ideology is becoming less and less rooted in material conditions. The nation-state model is becoming increasingly distant from the real structure of the economy. Most nation-states are now hegemonised by global-city coalitions. State leaders come to represent the global city rather than the national economy. The UK is about London, the US is about New York and California, China is about the three zones around Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong.

Groupings such as the G20 bring together representatives of these states, who barter on behalf of global cities. In identity terms, global cities are often closer to each other than to their own peripheries. Yet many of these governments rule a huge hinterland much larger than their developmental areas. As in the days of classic colonialism, the rural poor of countries like China, India and Russia are largely unrepresented. So too are states without global cities, which have been pushed into a second-class status, excluded from international decision-making.

Of course, this process corresponds to growing nationalisms, which can also be explained as reactions to globalisation. Formerly included groups often want to restore an extended form of state nationalism to counteract globalisation.

This nationalist impulse is seriously weakening global resistance, since it pulls such resistance to the right. It is easily channelled into hostility to minorities and support for neoliberal governments. Over time, its socioeconomic basis may be being corroded. Nationalism may come to seem a fantasy to people growing up within neoliberalism, as it bears so little relation to their actual social conditions. Hinterlands may cease to identify with cities which exploit rather than support them. This may be already happening, but disguised beneath nationalist and populist language.

What’s wrong with global cities?

The global city model is the logical effect of a set of political priorities which place the wishes of capitalists above real social needs. While ‘investors’ are catered to like never before, the rest of the social landscape is in crisis.

Ultimately, the global cities model is short-term and unsustainable. In the rush to lure investment, global cities often sacrifice forward planning, ecological sustainability, sometimes even economic functioning. Successful cities like Shanghai and Beijing become overwhelmed by the symptoms of their success.

Workers can’t afford housing in the centre because of soaring prices, a direct result of global city status. But companies need workers. So millions of people trek for hours by car, bus, train, bicycle. Congestion and pollution follow. People are late for work; efficiency falls. Pollution puts off investors. Health problems raise local costs. Services like postage and education are overwhelmed.

Keeping the marginal poor at bay costs a fortune, in repression if nothing else. Eventually, workers start demanding a share of the wealth. And this is without considering the wider context of dispossession, impoverishment, climate change, and global discontent at an exclusionary, insecure and inegalitarian world order.

In addition, the reliance on external investments in a world of speculative and unpredictable capitalism leads to vulnerability. A booming city can suddenly be hit by an unanticipated crisis. Global city growth often comes from self-reinforcing bubbles. People buy land because they see land prices rising. Eventually, these bubbles burst. Many wannabe global cities have been left as economic wastelands by failed strategies or crashes.

All global cities have a sizeable number of precarians living either in or near them. Often, such people have been forced out of the central areas of cities by gentrification, as in Berlin, London and New York. In some countries such as China, entire regions around cities have become low-income suburbs. Global cities and related ideas are sometimes seen as a kind of self-colonisation.

This is emotionally and socially disruptive in relation to people’s lives. A paper by Tsung-Hyi Huang looks at experiences of global city formation as refracted in fiction. Effects include the demolition of traditional structures, widespread alienation, and a gap between sensory expectations and actual input. Stephen Flusty writes of the creation of increasingly hostile, use-specific forms of space designed to deter alternative uses. Class divisions have become increasingly visible with the rise of gated communities.

To create optimum conditions for capital flows, global cities are cleared of ‘noise’ or interference – often by repressive means. In virtually every global city, there is a continuing onslaught on the right to protest in global cities, on the presence of the urban poor, on everyday survival strategies such as street trading and begging, on shanty-towns and squatting, and on activities not conducive to a pro-capitalist image. The importance of image leads this process of closure in almost totalitarian directions: the existence of dissent and deviance must be concealed lest the appearance be falsified.

Virtually every global city has sharp income polarisation. Usually, there is a class of people who are dispossessed of legal status and all recognition of rights to the city. They might be undocumented migrants from outside the nation-state, unregistered internal migrants from other zones of the country, demonised ethnic groups, or shanty-town residents living on occupied land. Global cities often need this class to some degree, to provide subsidiary services and cheap labour. But the elite also fear them as a source of unrest and disruption. Global cities pull in more of the globally excluded than the elite are comfortable with, because of the way they concentrate money and resources.

The right to the city

The struggle for a ‘right to the city’ has long been theorised by authors such as Lefebvre. Cities have always been created largely to serve state or capitalist means. They have always been contested by residents, who seek to turn them into something more conducive to human life. Today this struggle seems to have been won by capital. Yet it continues to be waged in the incursions of protesters such as Occupy and summit protests into the heart of global cities.

It also continues to be waged in the day-to-day struggle in the ghettos and banlieues. These areas are in many ways colonies of the marginal within or near global cities. They are typically something in between autonomous zones off-limits to the state and occupied territories ruled by a constant paramilitary police presence.

In countries such as South Africa and India, slum-dwellers can bring cities to a standstill by blocking strategic roads which pass through the hinterlands. In less politicised contexts, informal economic actors, from ‘criminal’ gangs to street traders, seek to survive by taking part in the concentrations in global cities. States may have to make deals with gangs or social movements to avoid disruption.

The great vulnerability of global cities is their outward orientation. Heavily reliant on imported supplies, drawing on flows which have to be kept up at breakneck speed, and often using “just-in-time” production models (which leave little space to compensate for breakdowns), global cities become increasingly vulnerable to disruptions and shutdowns. They can be ransacked from the inside or blockaded from without. They grind to a standstill all too easily.

It is not only protests, strikes, revolts, and ‘terror’ attacks which have this effect. A road accident, an unexpected snowfall, volcanic ash, a fire along a motorway can be enough to cause gridlock. The disruption of supplies from half a world away by a foreign war or disaster can see high-speed flows impeded, with huge knock-on effects. And this is without considering economic crises, which since the 1980s, have occurred every few years.

An entire obsession with risk-management has emerged to handle the insecurity arising from these vulnerabilities. Yet it is often not enough to head off unforeseen problems. The system just doesn’t have the ‘redundancy’ or slack to handle small disruptions.

This is why global cities continue to suffer shocks like the current financial crisis. It is also their achilles’ heel, the point at which the neoliberal regime can most effectively be challenged.

You can also read part one of this essay: “Global Cities: the Rise and Rise of Capitalism’s Behemoths”.

It was later revealed the police’s claim Duggan had fired was a lie. The police had knowingly given false information to the IPCC, the public, and Mark Duggan’s family and friends. It is important this point is made, and made again, as almost all press reports have portrayed these lies as an unfortunate “mistake”.

Following the shooting and killing, police immediately removed the vehicle in which Duggan was travelling from the crime scene without explaining why this was done so quickly – contrary to standard murder scene investigation practice.

Despite this, police claimed a gun containing a single bullet was found inside a sock, inside a shoebox, on the other side of a fence, 10 to 14 feet away from Duggan’s body. Traces of Duggan’s DNA or fingerprints are yet to be found on the weapon.

As far as current public information indicates, the first point of communication the IPCC had regarding Duggan’s killing was when they were consulted by police before removing the taxi from the scene. The IPCC staff who spoke to police officers gave them the green light, but did not inform their commissioner, Rachel Cerfontyne, of that decision for another three months.

The IPCC are yet to explain why they allowed police to remove key evidence from the crime scene, or indeed why they chose not to inform their commissioner of this collusion until it was on the verge of becoming public knowledge.

Instead the IPCC had, from the start, adopted the (now known to be false) police story that Duggan had fired shots at officers. They released a press statement which (predictably) resulted in inaccurate headlines portraying a gun battle between a violent and highly dangerous African Caribbean drug dealer and Operation Trident officers.

This is not the first time the Police have given false evidence and false information to the IPCC. The most notable case was the killing of Ian Thomlinson, in which the Met lied about the cause of death to the IPCC until independent footage emerged disproving their statement.

Tony Murphy, solicitor and founding member of the IPCC has admitted that, systemically, “evidence is not being uncovered or properly analysed by unsupervised and inexperienced staff, who unquestioningly accepts the word of the police officers they are supposed to be investigating”. This claim is highly disturbing. However, cases such as the abuse of Babar Ahmad whilst in police custody show that even when presented with sufficient evidence, the IPCC still fail to pursue formal police accountability or prosecution.

After Ahmad was physically assaulted, racially abused and humiliated by police, both the Crown Prosecution Service and the IPCC claimed that there was insufficient evidence to press any charges against police. In fact, it was only after a prominent sustained public campaign that the investigation was forced back open, and the evidence presented by Ahmad was sufficiently analysed, leading to criminal charges being brought against officers.

Although solicitors do make up some of the IPCC membership, much of its staff are former police and customs officers, or serving officers on secondment. Most of the IPCC’s budget is provided by the Home Office. The Home Secretary appoints board members who, although without any police background, are in effect very close to government and, therefore, often at odds with the interests of victims of police brutality and misconduct.

The resignation this month of the Police Action Lawyers Group from the IPCC has highlighted the institutional power that police officers and their allies have in the IPCC. Having legal rather than law enforcement backgrounds, the PALG left after they felt their roles were ignored, thus making them virtually redundant within the commission.

Following the killing of Mark Duggan, the IPCC appointed three community activists from Tottenham to help inform their investigation, with the hope of bringing greater legitimacy to both the case and the commission as a whole. In light of the recent revelations of the IPCC’s unquestioning support for police actions and statements, two of the three members have now resigned.

Like the Police Action Lawyers Group, they feel they have little or no faith in the investigation, and the competence of the IPCC to carry out a genuinely independent review of police actions. The most obvious illustration of this issue is the fact the IPCC have been part and parcel of the delivery of disinformation and misconduct which the police have engaged in from the outset.

Investigating police abuse and corruption independently, by people from the affected communities, independent lawyers and respected community members has proved on numerous occasions to be the only way for oppressed groups to come close to attaining some recognition of justice.

The cases relating to Stephen Lawrance, Charles De Menezes and Babar Ahmad are pertinent examples of campaigns that have begun to uncover the corruption and discrimination institutionalised into our criminal justice system. With very limited resources, the campaigns for justice for Mark Duggan, Smiley Culture and others are still fighting for the evidence around these murders to be properly scrutinised in court.

The erosion of legal aid, and funding for community groups makes their task all the more difficult. All these campaigns are yet to achieve justice, and proper accountability for the lives lost at the hands of the police. But, without them, a state of fear and unregulated state violence will be allowed, and encouraged, to spread unchallenged.