An independent Panel report on the murder of Daniel Morgan has accused the Metropolitan Police of “institutionalised corruption” spanning over three decades.
Daniel Morgan was a private investigator who ran a firm called Southern Investigations, and in 1987 he was found dead in a pub car park with an axe embedded in his head. The killer attempted to make it look like a robbery by taking his Rolex watch, but didn’t take £1,000 in cash from an envelope in his pocket. He had been writing notes in the pub, but these were not found on his person.
In the weeks before he died, Daniel was working on an investigation into corruption in the Metropolitan Police. He planned to sell the story to a journalist at Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World. He was well-connected – one of his contacts was Alistair Campbell, Tony Blair’s future spin doctor. But the story was never published – Morgan was murdered before it could be.
Daniel’s business partner, Jonathan Rees, quickly became the prime suspect. He was closely linked with corrupt police officers in Catford, and witnesses say he told them Morgan would be murdered within the jurisdiction of Catford Police Station – which he was – and that it would be arranged or carried out by police officers. One of the allegedly corrupt officers, Sid Fillery, was put in charge of the investigation into the murder, and reportedly failed to properly interview his friend Rees in connection with the crime. Witnesses further stated that Rees planned to replace Morgan after his death with Fillery as his new business partner – which he did.
Weeks later Fillery was arrested in connection with the murder, along with Rees and two other police officers. None were charged at the time, and the inquiry stated that the investigation into them was badly mishandled: “Alibis were not sought for all the suspects. The search warrants associated with the arrests were seriously inadequate … Lines of enquiry were not followed through properly. Many of the opportunities which were lost were not retrievable.”
Despite five criminal investigations, an inquest and now an inquiry, no-one has been successfully prosecuted in connection with the murder. The police failed to investigate adequately, leaving the Morgan family to do so alone. The “Untold” podcast tells the story of the murder and subsequent investigation in great detail, and their work with the trade union movement was important in amplifying the story.
The Panel’s verdict was damning on every level of the Metropolitan Police, and vindicates Daniel Morgan and his family’s claims of corruption both at the time and since. In the 1970s and 80s the Met was half-jokingly said to employ more criminals than they caught – the inquiry describes a practice in one department where corrupt officers would leave a brown envelope full of cash on the desk of a newly promoted officer, and if they reported it then their promotion would be cancelled immediately. It also highlights claims that the CID department with which Rees and Fillery were closely associated was “the most routinely corrupt organisation in London”.
The use of informants was also scrutinised as part of the inquiry, as they were often used in a corrupt manner. Unfortunately the panel’s verdict on informants comes too late to impact the recent Covert Human Intelligence Sources (CHIS) bill, which gives informants and undercover police blanket immunity from prosecution for any criminal activity undertaken “in the line of duty” – including rape, murder and torture.
The Panel also raised concerns about the role of the press, particularly the Murdoch-owned News of the World, and its connections with corrupt police officers and organised crime. A warning letter sent by the Panel said that the News of the World was “linked to the criminality associated with the murder”. An early leak in the first investigation has been linked to an allegedly corrupt former officer turned journalist, John Ross, who is suspected of “inadvertently” informing the arrested suspects thus enabling them to destroy evidence. News of the World journalists have been directly accused of intrusive surveillance of DCS David Cook, who was involved in the second investigation into Morgan’s murder. The inquiry states that the “evidence suggests very strongly” that this was arranged by “former DS Fillery and [News of the World journalist] Alex Marunchak with a view to discrediting DCS Cook and/or to intimidate him”. There is also some speculation that the journalist to whom Daniel planned to sell the story about police corruption informed Rees and Fillery about his intentions. The Morgan family have accused Murdoch’s News International of failing to co-operate with the inquiry.
It should come as no surprise that a union-bashing, phone-hacking Murdoch rag would potentially be so closely linked to the murder of someone planning to expose police corruption – this would have threatened their cosy relationship with the bent cops. As disgusting as the phone-hacking scandal was, even hacking the voicemails of a murdered child was just the tip of the iceberg – their “dark arts” included computer hacking, covert surveillance, police bribery, bugging and more. The Government’s refusal to investigate this further despite the evidence uncovered by the Panel demonstrates their own rottenness, and that they are still in Murdoch’s pocket.
The Met’s decades-long failures in this murder, and its failure to co-operate with the inquiry itself were strongly criticised by the Panel. There was a lengthy delay caused by the Met failing to hand over crucial documents – the report was commissioned in 2013, and some documents were not handed over until March 2021. Cressida Dick, the current Commissioner of the Met, was directly responsible for that delay but despite this obvious failure – in a career full of similar disasters – she has already been backed by Home Secretary Priti Patel, and, shamefully, Labour Mayor of London Sadiq Khan.
The Morgan family have called for Dick to “consider her position” following these revelations. Given her track record of direct responsibility for the operation that caused the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, and presiding over the Met when a serving officer allegedly murdered Sarah Everard, and the met police then attacked women mourning her death, such calls are very understandable. This is not an organisation that can be changed by one resignation or sacking, however. Dick would be replaced by another senior officer who would continue to run things in the same way – rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic is not the answer.
The corruption addressed in the report spans decades, and the Panel specifically stated that the Met’s denial and concealment of its failings in respect of Daniel’s murder was “institutionally corrupt”. It will take more than the verdict of the Panel to change the Met, however – the Macpherson Report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence found that the Met was “institutionally racist”, and over two decades later it still is.
The “institutionally corrupt” Met, along with all other police forces, must be brought under democratic community control. Corruption and brutality should be dealt with properly by genuinely independent worker-led bodies, with Black, LGBTQ+ and womens’ organisations specifically represented alongside the trade unions. Riot police, Special Branch and undercover units should be disbanded.
To achieve genuine justice for Daniel Morgan and others like him, as well as for all victims of police brutality, we need to build a united working class movement to fight for the end of the capitalist system that the police enforce.
Further reading/listening:
The report of the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel
Untouchables: Dirty cops, bent justice and racism in Scotland Yard by Laurie Flynn and Michael Gillard
Untold: the murder of Daniel Morgan – a podcast looking at Daniel’s murder and the investigation into it
“No Justice No Peace” by Johnny Silvercloud is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 – picture credit
Around the world women and gender non-conforming people are rising up. Standing on the shoulders of heroic past battles for equal pay, laws against descrimination, the right to abortion, and others, today’s feminists are demanding something even bigger – an end to sexism. The mood on protests from London to Sao Paulo, from Cape Town to Melbourne, is that we won’t be satisfied with tinkering around the edges to ease the worst impacts of gender oppression – instead we declare this oppression is totally unacceptable and demand its obliteration.
Socialists recognise that inherent within this is the potential for revolutionary struggle – because to end sexism in all its forms requires fundamental system change. So it is essential that a discussion takes place within the feminist movement about what type of change is necessary. We argue the need for socialist feminism, which fights for the socialist transformation of society, mainly because of our understanding and analysis of where sexism and the oppression of women in general come from in the first place.
There is nothing natural about sexism or any form of oppression. Institutionalised inequality between different genders hasn’t always existed. For example, for the big majority of human history, people survived on the basis of hunting and gathering. Evidence suggests that in these societies men and women may have had different roles but these roles were not differently valued and so did not lead to different social status or standard of living. In fact there was not the possibility of significant material inequalities between any sections of these communities – because they could generally produce only enough for day-to-day subsistence and were unable to store any surplus in any case. They relied on the collective effort of the whole group to meet their basic needs.
The origins of women’s oppression
The development of agriculture allowed a surplus to be consistently produced and stored for the first time, which led to a transformation of every area of life and the way society was organised. Fundamentally this was a development which thrust human societies forward, freeing people from total subjugation to nature. But, as Frederich Engels, collaborator of Karl Marx, wrote in his seminal book ‘Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State’: “The lowest interests – base greed, brutal appetites, sordid avarice, selfish robbery of the common wealth – inaugurate the new, civilised, class society. It is by the vilest means – theft, violence, fraud, treason – that the old classless gentile society is undermined and overthrown. And the new society itself, during all the two and a half thousand years of its existence, has never been anything else but the development of the small minority at the expense of the great exploited and oppressed majority; today it is so more than ever before.”
The division of labour became much more complicated – not just hunting or gathering but agriculture, trade, shipping, handicrafts, money-lending. The population grew exponentially and began to live in areas more according to their trade than their tribe; while others migrated for work, meaning for the first time people living among peoples that were not their own. This changed the relationship of people to the land, which for the first time was claimed for ownership, and bought and sold. There were conflicts, war and slavery in the quest to produce and control more land and resources. The men in (initially elected) positions of power – traditionally mainly ceremonial, spiritual and sometimes military – were increasingly making decisions about the use and division of resources. More and more these leadership positions, along with material possessions, were passed to the nearest blood relation, establishing the earliest form of noble families. These families began to group together on the basis of their wealth and privilege, forming a class which gave itself legislative advantages and saw the means of producing wealth as their own property.
Women tended not to be in leadership positions because of the importance of the military aspect of the role – meaning particular strength was prized – even more so as securing the best land and resources became more important. Due to the physical nature of agricultural work as well as it requiring being far away from the domestic setting for long periods, women tended not to do the bulk of this labour either. And at the same time the growing importance of inheritance – of titles and wealth – meant the need to be sure of bloodlines and parentage. This led to the development of various mechanisms to control women’s bodies and sexualities, and their subordination to men in the developing nuclear family structure, as well as in society at large.
Gender oppression under capitalism
Society has clearly changed a lot in the millenia since most of these developments. But neither the division of society into classes, nor the systematic oppression of women, have been overcome – they have only been developed by each form of class society since. In some ways capitalism has brought about changes that counteract some of those described above. The myriad of jobs needed for a modern capitalist economy, as well as the development of services like childcare, and mass production of machinery to make domestic tasks easier, should theoretically mean that women workers can participate fully in production. We have won the legal right to equality, particularly in many Western countries.
And yet, even in relation to these rights, inequality remains rampant. Worldwide, 25% of parliamentarians are women. Women are paid 63% of what men earn. Capitalism benefits from gender oppression. It benefits economically through the unpaid labour women do in the home – thought to be worth £140 billion a year to the UK economy, for example – and the criminal underpayment of billions of women, particularly concentrated in low paid sectors like retail, hospitality, care and health. The system also benefits from the commodification of women and LGBTQ+ people’s bodies – through advertising, cosmetics and ultimately the sex indsutry. And it benefits from propagating divisive ideas that prevent the maximum unity of working class and young people in fighting for systemic change.
It isn’t only because of these material benefits that the oppression of women persists though. When the dominant form of society has changed throughout history, it hasn’t done so in a total break. Remnants of the old remain within the new. The oppression of women that emerged as a byproduct of the development of private property became a fact deeply embedded into every aspect of human life – it developed its own dynamic. That’s why, while gender oppression has its roots mainly in women’s role as childbearers as described above, the resulting ideas from it impact all women and LGBTQ+ people.
This has of course been influenced by the stage and needs of capitalism, but throughout its history, the system and its political representatives have reinforced gender oppression in a myriad of ways: paltry, if any, laws against gender violence and harassment; underfunding female-dominated jobs and services; propaganda from politicians about the responsibility of individual families to prevent anti-social behaviour; limits on trans people’s rights to self identify their gender, and access health services, etc.
Where do individual’s attitudes come from?
But how does this systemic inequality and sexism impact on sexism at an individual level? Of course many people – increasingly so in fact – consciously reject this oppression and are repulsed by attacks from the capitalist establishment. But even then, none of us can totally free ourselves from the impact of capitalism on the way we view the world. 32% of people in Britain think that men need more sex than women, a third think physical violence has to occur for rape to be rape, and a third of men (and 21% of women) think it would not usually be considered rape if the woman had flirted on a date. These are totally unacceptable and wrong ideas which are slowly becoming more uncommon – but their continued prevalence, despite legal changes and vibrant movements asserting the opposite, shows that changing attitudes is not a simple matter. The ideas we hold – and behaviours that flow from them – reflect the type of society we live in. So while it is absolutely correct to challenge every individual instance of sexist behaviour, ultimately significant shifts across society – which must be our main focus – require us to fight for bigger changes.
The main factor that changes ideas people hold is their lived experience. In 1987 48% of people in Britain said that they agreed with the statement “a man’s job is to earn money, a woman’s job is to look after the home and family’ – in 2017 it was just 8%. One of the biggest reasons for this transformation of attitudes was the influx of women into the workforce. The proportion of women in the UK in full time employment increased from 29% in 1985 to 44% in 2017. Mainly, this was driven by the needs of capitalism, but of course the relationship between reality and ideas is two-directional. In simple terms, more women in work changes attitudes towards women working, which contributes to more women wanting to work, and so on. That’s why it is important to fight for legal rights and material resources that women need. Lack of childcare, jobs, pay, healthcare and so on can hold (especially working class) women back from being able to play the role in society they might otherwise like to, which in turn impacts on attitudes towards women. In turn, those attitudes are partly stoked by the establishment in order to justify the lack of resources and opportunities.
The impact of struggle
Another central element of the experience that can change attitudes is struggle. Mass movements against oppression can force very rapid transformations. For example, surveys have found a significant reduction in both explicit and implicit racist attitudes among white people in the US since the start of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013. Similar studies have found a reduction in dismissive attiudes towards sexual assault since #MeToo and one even reported that 51% of men claim to have changed their behaviour as a result of that movement. These movements have brought into popular consciousness a discussion about oppression, prejudice and inequality, and made people – especially but not only those who have actively participated in the protests – see things differently.
Struggles over other issues, where people of all genders fight side by side, can also have a transformative effect. During the 1984-85 miners’ strike, many women participated in a key way, despite not generally working at the mines themselves – raising money, speaking at meetings, organising solidarity events. The shared experience of this heroic battle changed many of the men’s views of their partners, sisters, etc – and it increased women’s confidence to demand better treatment too. This is a key point for socialist feminists – working class unity and mass struggle is an essential part of the battle against backward ideas.
But as explained earlier, even these movements have not been enough to anywhere near eradicate sexist ideas, which still have a huge impact on all of our lives – through sexual harassment and abuse, intimate partner violence, pregnancy discrimination, sexist dress codes at school or work, and many other ways. That’s because the system that underwrites these ideas remains intact. To really have the opportunity to end sexism once and for all, we need to fight to end capitalism.
The example of the Russian revolution
In 1917 the Bolshevik party led the Russian revolution to overthrow Tsarism and put in its place a real workers’ democracy. They undermined the material conditions for sexism. And they changed the law – at a time when women in most other countries were still struggling for the vote, the Bolsheviks legalised divorce and abortion on demand and abolished marital immunity for rape (75 years earlier than in Britain!). They introduced equal pay for equal work, 16 weeks paid maternity leave, and the right for nursing mothers to work no more than four days a week and to have regular time off for breastfeeding. They set up day nurseries, public laundries and restaurants to relieve the double burden of employment and housework facing most women.
That’s not to say that these changes eradicated sexism – the old ideas didn’t disappear just because laws were changed. A popular Russian saying at the time was that ‘a hen’s not a bird and a woman’s not a person’. The Bolsheviks had to have big campaigns after the revolution on things like language and culture, trying to break down the hangover of backward ideas that still existed. Big efforts were made to involve women in decision making. In 1918, a national women’s congress was organised which discussed a range of issues, including sexist language. The congress voted to ban the word ‘baba’ (meaning something like ‘peasant woman hag’). Campaigns like these were necessary to stop cultural backwardness cutting across the progress of the revolution.
The opposite was true when the revolution went into retreat in Russia. Attitudes were hugely thrown back and in fact the Stalinist regime fostered and propped itself up with reactionary ideas. Many of the material gains were undone too – for example abortion was made illegal again in 1936.
The early experience of the Russian revolution shows just a hint of what could be achieved by socialist change, which would not immediately end all sexist ideas and behaviours, but would lay the basis for doing so. Today Socialist Alternative is active in all battles against the horrific oppression experienced under capitalism. But as socialist feminists we know we need to instill into these battles a programme that can win a socialist society, which would open the door to ending all oppression and exploitation and offering a future of plenty and freedom for all.
In recent months we have seen the so-called refugee crisis re-emerge as an issue being discussed in the British press. Last summer, the Tory government attempted to whip up xenophobia by highlighting the hundreds of asylum seekers and migrants crossing the channel. Of course, this ignored the millions of people flying into the country legally, with only those most desperate attempting to cross from Calais. Asylum seekers and refugees were once again being scapegoated – used as a political tool by the ruling class in attempts to divert attention away from the failings of their capitalist system and divide the working class.
There is a fraught relationship between refugees and migrants and the capitalist system. On the one hand, capitalists love access to migratory labour to super-exploit. On the other, they love weaponising the issue of immigration to divide workers and distract from their own responsibility for a lack of decent jobs, homes and services.
Now Priti Patel has launched (potentially wildly illegal) new plans for the handling of asylum seekers coming to the UK. These have rightly been greeted with outrage and condemnation, with even some right-wing politicians opposing the plans, along with the United Nations. Patel is proposing a system that for the first time categorises asylum seekers as either legal or illegal. This is before their claims have been heard and resolved. Services offering support to refugees will only have the ‘right’ to deal with those claimants arbitrarily deemed to be legal asylum seekers. What is more, Patel argues that any asylum seeker deemed to have passed through a ‘safe’ country on their way to the UK should be immediately deported back to said country, despite there being no clear legal basis for this.
Asylum seekers in the UK are increasingly forced to live in prison-like conditions while they face an extraordinarily long wait to get their decision from the UK. Old army barracks which have been described by former soldiers as not fit for human habitation seem to be the new norm. Napier camp recently faced a mass outbreak of Covid, almost certainly made worse by the fact that people were being forced to live in spaces not fit for purpose, living and sleeping right next to one another.
Often quoted to justify this inhumane policy is the EU’s Dublin Protocol. When this came into effect in the late 1990s, its basic principle was that those fleeing persecution should claim asylum in the first country they arrive in.
And often, this is the case. Over 80% of the world’s refugees live in the world’s most economically deprived nations, often their neighbouring country. Nearly half of Lebanon’s population is made up of refugees and not one European nation comes in the top ten global homes for asylum seekers. As imperialist wars and their ongoing consequences have devastated the Middle East, an increasing number of refugees have been forced to flee, with many attempting to reach safety in Europe. Responding to this, the Dublin Protocol has been through many agreed changes. This culminated in 2013, with the statement that the country in which an asylum seeker is processed is where they shall claim asylum. This made more sense than the original basis of the protocol but is a widely abused idea: asylum seekers are regularly processed in various European countries then packed onto trains to their neighbours.
2015 saw the complete and total breakdown of any idea of international capitalist collaboration during a period of crisis. Whilst Germany accepted over one million asylum seekers that year, other EU countries took dramatically different approaches. Eastern Europe attempted to shut its doors, whilst even the governments of countries like Denmark and Sweden began adopting the language and policies of the far right with regards to refugees and asylum seekers.
The ‘mainstreaming’ of far right rhetoric by traditional pro-capitalist (and even some former Social Democratic) parties, has had repercussions in the UK and Europe. Such politicians have used anti-migrant propaganda in their attempts to shore up a social base in the context of mass disillusionment with neoliberal austerity politics. This gives confidence to the actual far right, who have frequently targeted hostels and hotels where asylum seekers are being lodged, threatening those who have already fled persecution along with honest workers who are doing their jobs at these facilities. As Hope Not Hate noted:
“Britain First […]activists stormed into a hotel in Birmingham, currently being used to house refugees and migrants. Cameras in hand they walked down the corridors, banged on room doors and confronted residents when they opened. Similarly, BF leader Paul Golding went to Epping and harassed migrants at a hotel there which has already been the target of For Britain activists in recent months”
Patel’s new proposed policy can be seen as a kind of political extension of this far right violence. It is clearly vital that a movement is built that can defend refugees and asylum seekers against these attacks. But what can we do to better understand and try to tackle this issue now?
Firstly, Solidarity
We have to recognise that asylum seekers and refugees are members of the working class. The ruling class has always relied upon migrants to further its economic interests and boost profits. Whether it be Latin Americans travelling to the United States to provide labour on farms or in restaurants, or women from the Philippines migrating to Britain to work in care or for the NHS, international capital loves to exploit migrant labour.
Even Germany’s apparent openness in accepting one million refugees in 2015 must be seen through the prism of an ageing population and German capitalism’s need to expand and protect its reserve labour army. Employers often seek to use migrant workers in order to undercut wages or undermine existing trade union agreements, creating division between workers of different backgrounds. The fact that asylum seekers are denied the legal right to work in the UK only increases the chance that they will be forced to work in highly exploitative situations – often receiving less than the minimum wage, for example.
Instead of treating this highly exploited group as ‘outsiders’ or seeing them as competition, the workers’ movement and trade unions must instead fight to expand and broaden job security and trade union representation to all workers – demanding the trade union agreed rate for the job is paid to all and fighting to secure decent wages and conditions for every worker. If all members of the working class have access to well-paid, secure employment, including for those fleeing persecution, then the sense of resentment and mistrust the capitalists aim to foster can be undermined. After all, a worker who happens to have been born in England has far more in common with a member of the Syrian working class than with a British Billionaire. This can allow a shift in focus to the unjust and corrupt nature of the capitalist state.
The outpouring of sympathy and mass protests that followed the incredibly tragic death of the toddler Aylan Kurdi, whose body washed up on the beach in 2015, showed that there is huge potential to build movements in solidarity with refugees. Such a struggle must demand that refugees are really made ‘welcome’, including by being given the right to work, access to decent housing, help and support to learn English if this is required, and so on. With fresh attacks being planned by the Tories as outlined above, we need to once again take to the streets in defence of refugee rights.
Fighting capitalism, war, and environmental destruction
As socialists, we recognise that there is an intrinsic link between the destruction of the planet and human lives through the greed of capitalism.
The misery that imperialist wars and their consequences bring for the world’s poorest across the globe is horrifying. War is currently the main driver of people having to flee their homes and seek sanctuary elsewhere. And this is likely to be vastly dwarfed by a looming human catastrophe of capitalism’s making: environmental degradation.
The destruction of the environment in the pursuit of never-ending profits will cause a catastrophe that has the potential to spare no one, and yet the ruling class internationally can still not see beyond a short-sighted pursuit of profit that ruins the natural environment. We are starting to witness the effects of this as sea levels rise and volatile weather becomes increasingly normal across the globe.
In the coming years, this is likely to only get worse. More and more land will become inhospitable. If there is a presumption that we have a refugee crisis now, one can only begin to imagine what we are likely to face in the future.
Capitalism means war. Only by ending capitalism can we end class exploitation. And by ending the profit system, we end the economic conflicts of interests which drive conflicts over access to markets, land and natural resources which force so many refugees to seek safety and shelter elsewhere in the world.
As well as exploiting working-class people the world over, capitalism creates insoluble social problems. And because capitalism is a system of class exploitation, it is in the interest of all workers – whether they were born in Britain, are refugees, or are workers living elsewhere in the world – to fight to abolish it.
Only by ending the private ownership of the world’s key resources, as well as the central means of producing wealth, will we be able to establish a global social system where production takes place directly and solely to meet human need. Socialism will be based on co-operation, not on competition and conflicting interests. This is because it will necessarily be based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution, on production to meet human need not private greed. A democratic plan for production combined with solidarity across borders, would pave the way for a society without war, to end environmental destruction, and to prevent people being forced to leave their homes agains
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