What Farage wants to turn back the clock to

In the early seventies I had a clerical job at County Hall in London. During a lunch break one day, I nipped out to the shops and got stopped by two plain clothes coppers. My long hair had aroused their suspicions and their hope of improving their arrest rate on the off-chance I had some wacky backy on me.

“What you got in that bag?” demanded the older of the two, whilst his younger oppo, who looked like a plod learning the job, stood pen and notebook at the ready in the expectation he’d be writing down evidence of a good collar.

Brandishing the only item in my bag, I declared “A book, officer. Dialectical Materialism by Henri Lefebvre.”

“OK, you can go” said the older one somewhat disappointedly. His rookie companion seemed much relieved to be spared the task of having to spell dialectical materialism, or Henri Lefebvre for that matter.

I wondered if I’d have got off so easily had I been a black youth. A search might have indeed “discovered” possession of illegal substances. It was not unknown for corrupt officers (and there were plenty in the Met then) to plant drugs on people to bump up their arrests, and courts invariably found for the police in the absence of any witnesses.

Blatant

In the 1970s the attitude of the police towards black people wasn’t just dire, it was worse. One of the most blatant cases at that time centred around Emmanuel Quaye and his family In Lewisham. It certainly wasn’t exceptional, and showed just how bad members of the black community were treated then.

Bill Quaye, as he preferred to be called, was a fitter with British Rail. Originally from Ghana, he’d been living in Britain for twenty years, and had married an English woman, Ellen. They had two teenage daughters.

When two WPCs turned up at the Quaye home after their younger daughter had been arrested, accused of stealing a purse and assault, they demanded to search the house. Bill, standing up for his rights, refused them entry because they had no warrant.

After the visit, the family went to the police station to see their younger daughter Susan and were met by a certain Sergeant Ferguson. Bill Quaye’s insistence that a warrant was required earned a response from Ferguson, who was apparently smelling heavily of alcohol. “That law is for Europeans, not blacks like you.” Bill accused Ferguson of obvious racism, who responded “Warrant or no warrant, we are going to turn you over like you’ve never been turned over before.”

The Quayes got home that evening and saw seven cop cars outside their flat. Bill was arrested, beaten and kicked to the ground outside his own front gate by five or six coppers. He was then bundled into a police car, throttled by one officer, and told “You’ve really got it coming to you now, black bastard.”

It was much the same at the station, with Bill forced to strip on the pretext he was being searched for drugs and left naked in a cell for two hours! Kathleen Quaye, the elder daughter, in her mid-teens, was subject to verbal and physical abuse, being called a “black c**t” and slapped and punched by Ferguson.

Par for the course. When it came to court the magistrates believed pretty much everything the police said, maintaining as they usually did that police would never lie. The court cleared Ferguson of all allegations made against him and instead fined Bill and Kathleen for assault.

I forget now how we became aware of this dreadful occurrence, but together with another comrade from Lewisham International Socialists [forerunner of today’s SWP], now sadly no longer with us, I visited the family to see if we could help. We were staggered to learn that Bill was a member of the Communist Party - quite influential in that part of London at the time - and they’d done bugger all about it!

We wrote up the story for Socialist Worker, the local CP got off its arse, the National Council for Civil Liberties got involved, and an article appeared in the Sunday Times. The charges against the Quaye family were overturned, although I’m pretty sure no disciplinary measures were brought against Sergeant Ferguson and his merry band of racist coppers.

South East London had numerous instances of police malfeasance. The Maxwell Confait case and the notorious murders of Stephen Lawrence and Daniel Morgan were notable ones. Corrupt association between local coppers and the criminal fraternity were certainly evident in the latter two.

Has the behaviour of the police become “better” since then? I doubt there were any black officers in the Lewisham force in 1971. The first black person to join the Met was Norwell Roberts, in 1967, almost two decades after Windrush. When he turned up for duty at Bow Street Nick, after completing training at Hendon, his reporting sergeant’s welcoming words were “look you n*****, I’ll see you never pass your probation.”

Roberts suffered thirty years of constant racial abuse, harassment and persecution from his “colleagues” during his coppering career.

Institutional

Many more ethnic minorities are in the police nationwide nowadays. But that recruitment doesn’t solve a racism problem that is essentially institutional. The almost universal racism within police fifty years ago has gone, but racist attitudes are still prevalent.

Only last year a BBC Panorama programme exposed widespread examples of racism and misogyny at Charing Cross police station which resulted in ten of its officers facing misconduct hearings. A decade earlier two officers were sacked after sending racist text messages calling for the burning down of Lewisham “along with all the spades.”

The far right would have us believe the laughable fantasy claim that the police are somehow biased against “white people”. That certainly doesn’t stack up with overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Official statistics show black people disproportionately more likely to be stopped, searched and arrested. Arrests more than two times more. Stopped and searched over four times more. Strip searched, over eight times more.

Two major inquiries - Macpherson in 1999 and Casey in 2021 - have adjudged the police as being institutional racist, despite the efforts of previous Tory governments to deny this is the case.

By propagating that the police are somehow “anti-white”, Farage and his crew are seeking to turn the clock back to the days of blatant police racism. They don’t want racist officers to be disciplined and thrown out of the force. Hence there pushback against what they term “DEI policies”.

The intent to emulate Trump’s attacks on black people was obvious when Farage exploited the Henry Nowak case, describing George Floyd as “a career criminal”. The far right would very much like to have the police behave pretty much like ICE does in the States.

If “two-tier policing” does exist, though, it’s very much in favour of the rich against the rest of us. Nobody has been held criminally liable for the Grenfell Tower fire or the Post Office scandal. Neither has any of those who robbed the taxpayers over fake PPE during COVID. The water company CEOs who pump sewage into the rivers could do with going to prison too!