I have been asked many times why I decided to make a film about Sean Rigg. The answer is simple – it was impossible not to. I have a history of making films with a collective called Migrant Media and all of those films follow the struggles of families and communities against injustice and human rights abuses. In 2001 we released a feature documentary called ‘Injustice’ that looked at the deaths of a number of young black men in police custody. The film became very controversial when police officers attempted to suppress it, claiming it was libelous and eventually, after a long battle, the film made an international breakthrough when CNN picked up the story. ‘Injustice’ went onto a cinema release, won many festival prizes and helped to force a reform of the investigation process into custody deaths. Since then we have been filming a follow up to ‘Injustice’ which is due for completion next year, but the Rigg case demanded a film of its own, purely because of the resilient campaign that Sean’s family undertook for justice. After spending some time investigating the IPCC it became clear to us that the organisation has utterly failed in its duty in the Rigg case, the question is why?

Without going into great detail, the IPCC investigation was shoddy to say the least. Incompetence, or perhaps complicity, led to fatal errors in the investigation, too numerous to mention. The initial involvement of the IPCC was to put out a press statement – later retracted after complaints from the family – that Sean had died in Kings College Hospital and had only passed through the police station. In August this year, four years after Sean’s death, this attempt at deflection ended in public humiliation for the IPCC when the jury took the unprecedented step of striking out the hospital name from the record. Instead they marked down the place of death as ‘Brixton Police Station’ – that was clear to anybody who saw the CCTV footage which showed the last moments of Sean’s life ebbing away as he lay on the custody cage floor with officers surrounding him. The damning inquest verdict was only possible because of empirical analysis of endless hours of CCTV footage by Sean’s siblings Wayne, Samantha and Marcia. The inquest exposed the actions, and ensuing lies, of the police officers involved in this horrific case because of the tenaciousness of the Riggs and their legal team, led by barrister Leslie Thomas and solicitor Daniel Machover. This has now led to new charges being considered for perjury against two of the police officers in the case who openly lied in court. Whether there will be any further charges to officers in relation to Sean’s brutal death remains to be seen, but if it had been left in the hands of the IPCC this case would have been closed long ago.

‘Who Policies The Police?’ raises deep questions about the proximity of the IPCC and the police but it also offers some answers. When people watch the film they are shocked at how poor the IPCC investigation into Sean’s death was, but sadly this is very typical. The IPCC was formed after the PCA (Police Complaints Authority) had been thoroughly discredited because of a lack of independence in its investigating police misconduct and wrong doing. The Rigg case is one of many others we have filmed since 2003, in its early days the IPCC indicated some improvements but these were minimal and the situation today is that the IPCC is untenable. The answer as to whether it is worth saving and how it should function rests in the hands of the Rigg family and the families of many hundreds of others that have died since the IPCC was created. My perspective on what is needed is that, whatever its name and whoever staffs it, the organisation must be able to undertake robust and rigorous investigations, as in these cases we are dealing with the most serious abuses of power by police officers, and they need to be dealt with in a proper manner. Officers that commit serious crimes need to receive serious punishment, including going to jail. This is a minimum requirement for the bereaved and will also bring about a reduction in custody deaths. There can be no more effective deterrent than a prison cell to a police officer that uses violence instead of using their brain. The current ‘get out of jail’ card that officers carry in their pocket needs to be taken out of the equation.

Over the four years since Sean’s death, and while we were making the film, the family of Sean Rigg became investigators because the IPCC failed to do the job. It cannot be right when members of the public are forced to undertake the role that state bodies like the IPCC is tasked to do. The families of those that die in police custody simply want a proper investigation in the way that we all would if somebody we knew died, but because the police are implicated, involved and – in some cases – responsible for these deaths, the rules change, collusion seeps in and evidence is tainted. It’s clear that there are many people in the community that could do a more thorough job than the existing IPCC commissioners and investigators.

There has been a very sustained period of criticism of the IPCC from its handling of the investigation into the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005 to the more recent Mark Duggan case last year. Currently there are a number of reviews, internal and external, of the IPCC partly brought on by the Rigg inquest which exposed what amounts to criminal negligence in its handling of the Rigg investigation. The new IPCC head, Anne Owers, has launched an offensive, but it’s unclear to what purpose. Evidence is being gathered and many individuals and lobbying groups are making submissions. The IPCC has entered a period of chronic public and political scrutiny brought on by it’s own unforgivable lack of vigour and an inability to perform its functions in an independent manner. In the meantime deaths in police custody, and their investigations, are continuing under its remit.

‘Who Policies The Police?’ is an investigation of the Rigg case but it’s also a much wider exploration of the issues involved, and the use of experimental techniques and poetry allow a more personal, and political response. The film is now making a contribution to a much larger debate and a number of media organisations have been forced to wake up and look at this issue.

‘Injustice’ took seven years to make; this film was made over a four-year period. We normally follow a method of process journalism where we spend time with characters and stories, get involved and also move the story along. This dedication leads to powerful results but it’s also a very time consuming form of filmmaking that requires political commitment, a rare commodity in the media world.

Despite the huge respect and international success of our work, our position, approach and style is very out of favour with UK broadcasters, and since we made ‘Injustice’, which the BBC and Channel 4 still refuse to transmit, we have had to finance all of our own work, as the broadcasters refuse to commission us. No wonder deaths in police custody have gone unabated for the last forty years; television has rarely brought it up in any sustained way. There have been a handful of programmes since we took the groundbreaking steps with ‘Injustice’ but they have not been challenging or critical enough. Is it sour grapes with Channel 4 on our part? Perhaps so, but we have a right to be angry given their cowardly refusal to screen ‘Injustice’ which is surely now in the national interest given the revelations about police misconduct in and after Hillsborough. If only our broadcasters would show the same courage that the Riggs have, as well as all the other campaigning families, support groups and legal teams, then perhaps we could feel a little prouder of them.

‘Who Polices The Police?’ is showing on the Migrant Media film site at https://vimeo.com/user6137135

‘We are all products of our environment’. The tagline of Ben Drew’s (aka musician Plan B) debut film suggests viewers might expect a realistic, polemical account of life on the periphery of Britain’s underclass. Ill Manors, however, fails to interrogate the antagonistic oppressive political system that ushers in the social ills featured, including the illicit drugs trade, gun and knife crime, and prostitution. The film represents a missed opportunity and is a frustrating watch: at this point in time, it could and should have made a potent political impact.

In his essay ‘Narrate or Describe’, philosopher Georg Lukacs clarifies the distinction between naturalism and realism in literature. Naturalism is detail-oriented, but shows no grasp of the social dynamics of the life it is portraying. Realism explores social relationships within a narrative structure that allows contradictions within the fictional world to build into revealing action. Ill Manors fits firmly in the naturalism corner: is it pure description.

The film, set over seven days on a council estate in Forest Gate, features six interweaving stories about eight characters connected to the drugs trade.

The action revolves around Aaron (Riz Ahmend) and his best friend Ed (Ed Skrein), who have both been raised in foster care. The two become embroiled in a vicious moneymaking scheme to retrieve a stolen phone that begins with prostitution and ends, shockingly, with the sale of an abandoned new-born baby. Set to a soundtrack of urgent hip-hop music, which gives backstory to the characters, we see Forest Gate inhabitants trying to succeed, survive, and liberate themselves from their circumstances, with tragic consequences.

Drew recently told The Guardian that his characters ‘act the way they do because of the shit that happened to them that wasn’t their fault’. Yet, while the surface details of the world feel accurate, the acting is strong and the narrative structure and themes interesting, Ill Manors ultimately represents a crisis of working class morality, as opposed to a critique of ineffective political agendas. It is ‘gritty’ drama in a social vacuum.

Notably absent are the political institutions marginalising the working class every day. The characters seem to exist in a context untouched by austerity cuts. There’s no interaction between the kids and the authorities at school and viewers are left wondering about teachers’ attitudes to their students. Unemployment is not even touched upon, and there’s little sense of characters being embedded in the socio-political climate that forces entry into the drugs trade. Shamefully, the setting fits nicely into a particular political ideology that already regards council estates as natural habitats for theft, drug dealing and abuse, benefit fraud, youth delinquency and financial improvidence.

The characters’ living environment is not enviable, but this language of realism neglects the distinctive injustices faced by those trapped in marginalised, crime-ridden housing estates. Instead, it emphasises some of the ills these people face while ignoring other, more lasting harms; substandard housing, class discrimination, and police harassment and abuse motivated by racial animus.

Drew is not the first, or only filmmaker to offer a problematic portrayal of working-class existence. But his approach comes at a significant cost. The exaggerated behaviour of a demographic, regarded by some Conservatives as the genesis of social problems, will distort the genuine political issue of social exclusion. Worse, by staying above the fray of socio-political and ideological conflict, the film seems to have commanded guilty yet unequivocal applause from liberal sectors.

Worryingly, the film is being held up as the article of faith by commentators seeking to contextualise social problems. Camila Batmanghelidjh, the founder of Kids Company suggests in The Observer that Ill Manors is ‘an incredibly accurate portrait’ of the lower reaches of British society. Decca Aitkenhead in The Guardian confidently states that, ‘social commentators are already talking about its political significance, and reviewing last year’s riots through the prism of its lens.’ However, it is impossible to subscribe to either assertion when considering the films semantics.

Ill Manors provides voyeuristic material to an educated, liberal and middle-class audience. Cinematically and conceptually, the film shifts energy and intention away from thinking via visible political and institutional frameworks and into the socio-cultural domain. This is where social inequality is defined by delinquent behaviour, cultural abstractions and financial improvidence. The approach to the various social issues, which now fall under the derogatory label of ‘the underclass’, encourages us to believe that the worst social injury these people suffer are self-inflicted.

Film is more than just a visual experience. It has the capacity to affect political imagination. This is why we find filmic political engagement so compelling. But in order to achieve this, we need to look to the details of political institutions and public policy. The important opposition is between government and society, not the individual and his or her moral or cultural code. It’s clear that Drew is trying to create a consciousness, but effort alone is not enough.

What is needed is solid political justice, not intellectual handwringing over the behavioural aspects of the supposed underclass. The narrative message that personal (mis)behaviour determines life’s opportunities smacks of the pervasive Tory discourse of meritocracy. Such arguments reduce lived reality to a conflict between the working-class and their behavioural decisions. The landscape of social inequality in Coalition Britain is much more complex than that.

You can find the official website for Ill Manors at: http://www.illmanors.com/#scene-0

This is an important victory for all those campaigning against the systemic nature of corporate tax-avoidance. An estimated $11 trillion is stashed away in tax havens by the world’s richest (more like the 0.001 per cent than the 1 per cent) to avoid paying tax to national governments. Indeed the Goldman Sachs tax deal is a tiny drop in the ocean of corporate tax avoidance, as a new film produced by UK Uncut’s Daniel Garvin about the impact of the cuts and the alternative shows.

The Missing Billions is a 24-minute documentary interposing hard-hitting facts and figures of tax evasion and the UK coalition government’s cuts with narratives from those affected – from a disabled campaigner describing the devastating reality of cuts for the most vulnerable to those fighting to save public services in their communities. It underlines the unpalatable reality of living in a society governed by a political elite that spends £850 billion bailing out the banks and then forces the public to pay for it.

But it is not all doom and gloom. The Missing Billions highlights both the very real alternative and the struggle that is being fought against the cuts. It demonstrates how, if there was the will from the political elite, there is certainly a way to avoid cuts to public services. In the film John Christensen, of the Tax Justice Network, explains how tax havens represent a fundamental contradiction of globalised capitalism – whilst corporations and the finance industry operate in a deregulated global economy, tax systems are enforced nationally. Thus, multinational companies gain ever increasing profits whilst paying ever diminishing tax bills. In just 24 minutes this film outlines how rather than imposing austerity governments could crack down on tax avoidance and evasion.

The outcome of UK Uncut’s legal case against the £20 million tax avoidance of Goldman Sachs will set a precedent for future legal action against tax evasion. To understand the significance of this case everyone should watch this brilliant new film.

You can watch The Missing Billions here http://vimeo.com/44017057

Visit www.ukuncutlegalaction.org.uk to read more about the campaign, donate to support their legal costs or to order hard copy DVDs of the film.