Territorial Support Group killed Ian Tomlinson like Special Patrol Group killed Blair Peach?

You would have thought by now that top cops would know when it's wise to just shut up.

I say this because yesterday we were treated to the spectacle of none other than Ian Blair, former head of London's Metropolitan police (the City of London has its own police force - are far more civilised bunch altogether) telling us how misunderstood the police investigating the racist killing of Stephen Lawrence in south east London were. Well I'd hate to see what a deeply prejudiced racist and sexist police force looks like then. And in case you think Blair it out of step the new Met commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, got in his attacks on the anti-racists first with the absurd claim that there are 'only a few pockets of stupidity and bigoty left' when it comes to institutional racism in the police.

A glance back over a month or so of police-related headlines throws up some problem areas for the defenders of the peace.

Lets leave aside incidents such as the serial rapists that go undetected despite much evidence virtually presented to the police, and consider these four instead: the beating of Babar Ahmad, asked 'where is your God now?' as the Territorial Support Group went about its work - this same individual officers have been involved in another 60 similar incidents of violent assault on black and Asian people; the white and black van apartheid in a racist set up at a west London Community Support Officer station; the attack on protesters in the Hyde Park underpass in a January solidarity with Gaza demo; and finally the case of Charles de Menezes. These crimes - even if they aren't recognised by the state as such - bring together the inter connectedness between official racism (despite the diversity chat), police racism and public order.

Our examples show the way in which the police are always on the leading edge of whatever is the latest fashion in the racism of divide and rule, in the case of Babar Ahmad a vicious brand of Islamophobia.

The impulse for the constant regeneration of institutional racism, by the authorities in general and the police in particular, is social control. At root the state exists to maintain the power and rule of a minority fundamentally in an exploitative relationship with the majority.

So when our capitalist state feels challenged, as it certainly does at the moment, then the less consensual side of the state is revealed more sharply, most dramatically in recent times during the miners strike in the mid-80s, but also in smaller examples such as down the Hyde Park underpass this Janaury and, sadly, in more deadly ways as in the death of Ian Tomlinson on the recent G20 protests.

Doing a horrible job can make you a horrible person, leading to the retention problem that has always been a feature of police recruitment. You either join the 'canteen culture' and all its concurrent racism and sexism, or you leave. The modern and diverse veneer that the top officers keep polishing is perpetually tarnished by a grubby reality of oppressive policing.

And it is the Territorial Support Group (TSG) more than any other section of the police in the big cities that is also at the cutting edge physically, from the housing estates to the protests - as well as being on the ball ideologically in the Islamophobia stakes, as we saw earlier. They are the Special Patrol Group reborn. This was a similar police 'public disorder suppression formation' in the 70s made up of squads of officers that went around beating people up, especially on demos. They killed Blair Peach at an Anti Nazi League demo against the nazis National Front in Southall in 1979.

So the TSG squads on duty in the City of London will have readily assimilated the fodder of the media - that all protesters were likely to be 'violent anarchists', after all there had been a 'bomb plot' (actually more like preparations for a fireworks display)on the eve of the G20 protests.

In the 1970s the police were often sympathetic to the National Front and did their utmost to defend its intimidatory marches and violent racism, similarly wound up by politicians and media to take on the left-wing extremists. The state, at that time, made it a question of 'defending public order' but the anti-fascists won through mass mobilisation. At the start of the 21st century defending public order increasingly means defending the poor witch-hunted bankers and big business from the rest of us. Our rulers will want to keep hold of, if not expand, the arsenal of powers the police have been given to date.

Today the public order battle has seen the enmeshing of a raft of legislation to criminalise working class kids to 'fight crime', with the war on terror undermining detention without trial and a steady build up ever more draconian public order laws over the past decades, providing the people with seemingly overwhelming coercive powers.

But there has to be a certain level of consent in society on how, and upon whom, they use this monopoly of violence. As workers fighting for jobs are threatened with jail and bankers who have stolen billions retire to spend more time with their money it begs the question is the state the neutral arbiter between citizens or does it have a built in structural bias? I think you know what we think.

So in the end all that was needed to send the TSG attack dogs into a frenzy was the red blood of two weeks of media headlines reporting on apparently threatened violence.

As more people take to the streets over the coming months of this economic and social crisis the authorities will be doing there utmost to maintain social control, predicting as they have a summer of discontent and the media-inspired hysteria certainly helps maintain this 'state of fear'.. As in 1979 the police had been given a licence to kill. 'Violent anarchists' and 'Muslim extremists' - young male Muslims were targeted by police on the Gaza demos - become easy meat.

Ian Blair should keep a bit quieter because the similarities between the rush to get out a later discredited story in the Charles de Menezes shooting is what's happened in the case of Ian Tomlinson. New commissioner, same old tricks.

And it's all out of the Goebbels play book - get lie in early and often: 'police tried to help, protesters threw missiles, bottles', although Sky News may be changing tac on that.

Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson's tragic killings were both crimes waiting to happen. Enough is enough.