That seems to be the message behind the Independent Police Complaints Commission’s decision not to prosecute 11 officers involved in the Menezes murder. Can’t say that this decision comes as a great surprise: from the very first the Metropolitan Police and its political masters did its best to sweep its “mistake” under the carpet, in the process slandering an innocent man. It was clear all along that nothing would ever happen to the people who helped kill Jean Charles de Menezes. Like I said last year, the police in Britain can get away with murder.
Not just the police either. The failure to punish anybody for the murder of Jean Charles, or even to take responsibility for his death, is part of a broader pattern of evasion of duty in Blair’s Britain. Blair’s government has been an unmitigated failure with everything they’ve touched, where they’ve not been criminal: just in the last week there have been the election cockups in Scotland, the revelation that MI5 had the July 7 bombers but let them go and only today there was the story that the government’s latest miracle IT system, the socalled medical training application service was rubbish and going to be scrapped. Yet few if any government ministers have had to face the consequences of such failures. At worst, it seems, they are banished to the shadows for a bit before recycled back into new jobs to fuck up, like Mandelson or Blunkett.