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As the Metropolitan Police is judged to be institutionally corrupt, Hardeep Matharu and Peter Jukes explore how some of the biggest problems still plaguing British policing are embedded in the soil of British colonialism
The day after the recent independent panel report into the murder of Daniel Morgan concluded that “institutional corruption” – a tendency towards cover-up – in the Metropolitan Police over 34 years has prevented his brother’s murderers from being brought to justice, Alastair Morgan told Byline TV that he believes “the police’s actions in this case are of an imperialist type”.
“I remember hearing a black QC talking about this at a meeting I went to several years ago and he was saying that, because Britain doesn’t have any colonies anymore, we are now the subjects of an imperial mindset – ‘oh, we can’t let the natives know that, that would be bad’,” he explained. “Any kind of misdeeds by the imperial state, or crimes, ‘it wouldn’t be good for them to know about this’. I think that mentality is still there.”
But how does Britain’s imperial past connect to the axe murder of a private detective in a pub car park in south-east London in 1987?
According to Alastair’s partner, Kirsteen Knight, who has spent the past 25 years joining his campaign for justice, the sense of British – or English – exceptionalism is key to the cover-up, and the failures of the authorities to dig deeper into the allegations of police corruption around the murder. Obsessed with a grandiose, but fragile, sense of national greatness, the British state is very bad at reflecting accurately on itself.
“There is this sense among the police and Government that somehow the country would collapse if we admitted that not all of our institutions were perfect and that mistakes were made,” she told Byline TV. “A lot of this is about the state not being able to look at its own image honestly. This sense of British police, the greatest police in the world – I’m not saying [the Met is] a bad police force, but there’s this illusion that it’s the greatest and an inability to question when things go wrong.”
For both Alastair Morgan and Kirsteen Knight, the current ‘culture wars’ and flag-waving is a further sign, not of patriotic strength, but of nationalist hubris and vulnerability.
“That kind of propaganda image of Britain, we’ve had it recently,” Alastair observed. “‘World-beating’. And Britain is very, very good at certain things. But this idea that we’re the best in the world at everything, ‘Global Britain’, is deceptive.”
Kirsteen agreed that this failure to take a calmer, more measured view was a “failure to confront reality” itself.
And that hidden reality not only pertains to Britain’s history of policing its colonies – but its post-colonial history of policing itself.
Colonial Policing in the Empire
Robert Peel, who founded the Metropolitan Police in 1829, established the tradition of ‘policing by consent’; that there must be public support for the police’s actions if it is to be effective – the core tenet that still underpins modern British policing. This is the celebrated root of the constabulary principle – contrasted with the Prussian model, characterised by secrecy, espionage and coercion. In its colonies, however, Britain was clearly not policing by consent.
In 1936, a sub-divisional English police officer in a town in Burma observed the dehumanisation of both the colonised and the coloniser at the heart of Empire.
“I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better,” he wrote. “Theoretically – and secretly, of course – I was all for the Burmese and against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters.”
The police officer detested the extreme behaviour the colonial dynamic demanded of him, including by its subjects. He “was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible”.
“With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny… with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism.”
When George Orwell wrote this account in Shooting An Elephant he encapsulated the unaccountable power handed to British colonial policemen in charge of populations with utterly different cultures and societies, very often in faraway countries that they knew nothing about.
Law and justice is frequently trotted out as a ‘pro’ in our culture war debates about the good and bad of the British Empire. But such a balance-sheet approach misses that policing and criminal justice was a key tool of control for colonial rule – without it, Britain could not have maintained such a vast empire for as long as it did. As the Indian politician Shashi Tharoor has observed, “the colonial ‘rule of law’ generally worked in favour of white settlers, elites and men. Racial discrimination was legal”.
The lawlessness and extremism in the British approach to its colonies – and the reframing of brutality as ‘morality’ that this made necessary – can be seen from the 1919 Amritsar Massacre in India (“it was a merciful though horrible act and they ought to be thankful to me for doing it – I thought it would be doing a jolly lot of good and they would realise that they were not to be wicked”, was how General Dyer described presiding over the deaths of hundreds of Indians) to the setting up of detention camps in 1950s Kenya to crush the Mau Mau rebellion.
To facilitate the British Empire’s ends, a culture of impunity went hand-in-hand with a policy of state-sanctioned secrecy – or ‘cover-up’, as Alastair Morgan would put it. The best example of this dual approach is perhaps found in what the British did next when the sun finally set on an empire which once covered a quarter of the world’s map.
In his book, The History Thieves, Ian Cobain explains how ‘Operation Legacy’ – the Government-authorised destruction and concealing of thousands of documents relating to Britain’s colonial rule as former colonies gained their independence – intended to obliterate any records that “might embarrass Her Majesty’s Government, members of the police, military forces, public servants or others”. “On the partition of India in August 1947, one Colonial Office official noted that ‘the press regularly enjoyed themselves with the pall of smoke which hung over Delhi during the mass destruction of documents’,” Cobain writes.
But this toxic mix of brutality, guilt and cover-up did not end with the withdrawal of Britain from colonial rule. For colonialism was not only a reality on the ground but a mindset to be played out – one which was brought home to the UK, both by former colonisers and the colonised, even as its grand imperial era was ending.
This trend was evident in the militarised policing of the Troubles from the late 1960s in Northern Ireland – which was part of the UK but was not a part of ‘Great Britain’, seen as ‘other’ and treated as such. Many of the counter-insurgency tactics deployed in Kenya and Malaysia were deployed on the streets of Derry and Belfast.
And that ethos of superiority and domination of restive natives also infected many of the greatest policing scandals of the late 20th Century in Britain.
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Post-Colonial Policing in Britain: Restless Natives
The police’s use as an arm of the state – to carry out its dirty work – from the 1970s embodied a political climate in which corruption within the ranks could flourish.
In return for removing the “enemy within”, sounding the definitive death knell for traditional industries, and breaking the collective activism of unions, Margaret Thatcher rewarded the police with a good degree of impunity. Although ‘operationally independent’ in theory, policing has always been vulnerable to this political corruption because of the importance of ‘law and order’ as a key pillar of the state – one which politicians do not want to come crashing down on themselves.
The colonial legacy of the profiling of ethnic groups could be seen from the 1970s in the use of the ‘Sus’ law against them and, together with discrimination and police brutality, gave way to race riots in St Pauls, Brixton, Toxteth, Liverpool, Handsworth, Birmingham and elsewhere during the 1980s. But the colonial mentality in policing was not only applied to working-class black and ethnic minority people.
In 1984, South Yorkshire Police violently beat striking miners – with Michael Mansfield QC, who represented three of the arrested miners, denouncing the police evidence in the case as “the biggest frame-up ever”. Two years later, the same police overreach was seen at strikes by Murdoch print workers in Wapping.
Then came Hillsborough.
Empowered by its actions at Orgreave five years earlier, South Yorkshire Police engaged in an elaborate cover-up of its wrongdoing at the football match at which 96 people lost their lives due to negligent mismanagement of extreme overcrowding. The force’s chief constable, Peter Wright, absolved his policemen of responsibility almost immediately, branding the Liverpool football supporters on the day as “animalistic”.
While an initial inquest into the deaths recorded the cause as ‘accidental death’, evidence emerged of a review and alteration process of the police statements of the day, in which