The Socialist 6 January 2016

Fight the flood of cuts

2016: Crisis-ridden capitalism will meet with bitter mood of resistance

No retreat on resisting council cuts!

Fight the flood of cuts

Support junior doctors' and student nurses' action

Another black man shot dead by the police

UK's private rail fares six times public rates

Birmingham Labour to axe at least 1,200 jobs in £165m cuts onslaught

UK wage growth will be lowest since 1920s

NHS England chiefs block hospitals from publicising emergencies

What we saw: Sadiq Khan's promises on London transport

Them & Us

Floods, climate change and capitalism

Carlisle Socialist Party's action plan on floods

Profit system exacerbates flooding

Tories' hypocritical green policies pledge

Renationalise the water industry

No government majority as Podemos partially recovers

Union action needed to defeat attack on student nurses

Nationalise rail now! Rail workers strike around the country

Steel: public ownership needed as private buyers threaten pay and pensions

Condescending Tories savage Yorkshire fire service

Workplace news in brief

Dark comic book fantasy throws light on abusive relationships

"I chose to be involved in politics, Michael Crick"

Letters

A 'People's Budget' to defeat cruel cuts

Stop the closure of Calderstones hospital!

2015 marks best fighting fund total this century!

Eleanor Marx: celebrate a life of struggle for socialism

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Another black man shot dead by the police in London

Paula Mitchell

Twenty eight year old Jermaine Baker was shot on 11 December during an alleged attempt to spring two convicts from a prison van in Wood Green, north London. He was sitting in a car and friends say he was asleep.

The police killing of Mark Duggan in 2011 sparked riots. It would appear that the police on this occasion are trying to avoid a similar result, holding a community meeting and starting a homicide investigation.

At the big community meeting the police were called "murderers" and "liars". Anger was also directed at the press for the racist lies spread about Tottenham, where the Baker family lives.

Smears

The police and press like to get the smears in first. Papers like the Mail automatically called Jermaine Baker a gangster but actually the police have no evidence he had gang links. The police have arrested a different person for possession of what turned out to be an imitation gun found at the scene.

Tottenham MP David Lammy is expressing anger in his interviews to the press, but the reality is he himself was the brunt of it at the meeting, as the local community feel nothing has changed.

One family member said to the press: "Some people think nothing has changed, or things have got worse. It's like the police shoot first and ask questions later."

Promises of police wearing body cameras were made in 2011 but the officers concerned were not wearing them.

There is a long list of deaths of black people at the hands of the police in London. Campaigning for the victims and fighting against police racism and brutality - and for democratic community control over policing - will continue to be a necessity.

'Discos and drugs'

Sitting cabinet minister Oliver Letwin has been exposed for his racist advice to the Thatcher administration.

The Tory policy chief, then an aide, blamed black people for riots sparked by brutal police repression. "Lower-class, unemployed white people lived for years in appalling slums without a breakdown of public order."

Letwin even dismissed the idea of creating black capitalists, saying they would "set up in the disco and drug trade."

The National Archives recently published the confidential 1985 memo under the thirty-year rule.

This version of this article was first posted on the Socialist Party website on 18 December 2015 and may vary slightly from the version subsequently printed in The Socialist.

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2016: Crisis-ridden capitalism will meet with bitter mood of resistance