British lynchings a trend

By Joseph Petticrew

To the West Mercia Constabulary the death, last June, of Harold 'Errol' McGowan was a simple case; he had died by his own hand - a suicide, they ruled. But the matter was not quite that simple to the murdered man's family, in particular his nephew, Jason McGowan.

Jason was convinced that his uncle had been murdered by persons motivated by racial hatred, that his uncle's death by hanging was but one of a series of such attacks which have occurred in England throughout the decade. After all, Harold had been the constant victim of race-based attacks for nearly two years before his death.

In the throes of his own investigation into his uncle's death, Jason himself left out from a New Year's Eve gathering shortly before midnight, 31 Dec., 1999, never to be seen alive again. His body was found hanging from a road railing on the first day of the new century. Unbelievably, the same police authorities which had ruled his uncle a suicide now ruled that Jason, too, had taken his own life.

The community of Telford, from which the two men came, was soon beset by several protests against the police ruling; how could they have ruled both deaths as suicide? The McGowan family was beside itself, not only from grieving its two lost members, but also from the apparent lack of concern issuing from the authorities. The protests also pointed to the still outstanding cases of the murder of people of color - of which there are many - throughout England. It is also common knowledge in these communities that such vicious, race-based crimes have escalated greatly in the last decade. Bearing all this in mind, the McGowan family has asked for Scotland Yard to investigate not only the murders, but the local authorities who handled the initial investigation as well.

Certainly the entire affair might have remained a local issue were it not for the fact that the behavior of the West Mercia Constabulary represents, more than anything, a general trend of national proportions among British police forces. Again, this is a truth known throughout most communities.

Prior to the McGowan murders, the case receiving the most public attention was that of the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence in the Greenwich section of London. Much of the public sentiment concerning the often completely inadequate police investigation into race-based murders - pointed out in detail in an official government inquiry known as the Macpherson report - centered on this notorious case of official inaction.

Not all the crimes which have been classified as race-based have been committed against black people. Apparently there is a close connection in the actions of many British racist groups, epitomized by the neo-nazi organization, the National Front, which tend to associate anyone belonging to a "race" other than Anglo-Saxon as being, by definition, foreign to the "true" people of England. An example of this is the 1992 murder of Navid Sadiq, murdered during a robbery attempt. When informed that he had caused serious injury, his assailant was reported to have said: "Good. I hope they die. My name is Conroy, good English name that. What am I going to get for doing a couple of Pakis? I am Anglo Saxon." This bravado was mirrored in the 1992 murder of Donald Palmer in South London when one of his attackers taunted the dying man's wife with: "We are the National Front!"

The Institute of Race Relations, a British-based anti-discrimination, anti-fascist lobby, has documented 33 separate cases of race-based murders in England since 1991. A common thread in most of these is the authorities' seeming disregard for the obvious causes of the murders. In many of these cases, they were practically forced, by public demand, to consider the racial nature of the attacks, and in many instances only after offering ridiculous scenarios for the deaths. There is, for instance, the notorious case of Michael Menson, a young Black man from North London who was burned alive in 1997. The initial police investigation concluded that his death was a suicide!

The new buzzword among the British authorities is "institutional racism." And policies are coming forth daily which lend the appearance that the government and the police are deeply concerned over its obvious prevalence. It has been suggested, however, by many concerned citizens that the government's talk is nothing more than empty rhetoric, that their policies are meant more for show than as a viable solution to a dire problem. Recent events - particularly the abysmal showing by the police in the McGowan case - more than bear out this conclusion; they make it almost inescapable.