The most remarkable aspect of William Hague's ill-judged outburst against the Macpherson report was his complete obliteration of what happened to Stephen Lawrence, what happened to the Lawrence family in their struggle for justice and finally what happened to the police who failed so abysmally to prosecute the killers. (Nothing). Hague has wiped out all three shameful events and replaced them with the charge that the Labour-instigated Macpherson report is instead the chief culprit. Macpherson, claims Hague, undermined police morale and law and order on the streets: accused of institutional racism, police fled the service, new recruits were hard to attract. The government admits Macpherson dealt a severe shock to the police. The truth hurt, but it was necessary and accepted by senior police officers. Police numbers, they say, are no longer declining. However Macpherson has entered Tory demonology as another liberal cause of crime.  Undeterred, the government yesterday moved to implement one of Macpherson's most important recommendations. A new genuinely Independent Police Complaints Commission will be in place by 2003. As campaigned for vigorously by Liberty and Inquest (and the Guardian), over the last 20 years, the police will no longer investigate themselves in serious cases. This is what Macpherson said: "Since PCA inquiries, certainly in major cases, are   conducted with or through other police forces, the perception is that such investigations of police by police may not be seen to result in independent and fair scrutiny and that justice is not seen to be done". Now at last it will be. No doubt the Tories will see this as yet another unwarranted assault upon the good name of the police, so it is worth recording some of the most serious recent cases.  Since 1990 there have been 548 deaths in police custody. Liberty and Inquest know of no police officer who has ever been prosecuted let alone jailed in relation to any of these events. All of them were investigated by the police themselves. These cases have taken years of dilatory investigation, ending with no police officers in court. Often officers slip off to early retirement on full pensions, signing themselves out with "stress" or "disability" before disciplinary action can be taken. Macpherson reported that at least five officers would have faced disciplinary charges, "but such charges could not be pursued because the officers had retired". He recommended new terms of employment to allow disciplinary proceedings to be brought after retirement, something that still waits to be done.  The many shocking cases that prompted this reform include that of Shiji Lapite. He was stopped by police for "acting suspiciously" and subsequently died from asphyxia as a result of a neckhold. The inquest jury was told that while caught in a   fatal neckhold, one officer bit Lapite in the chest and another twice kicked him in the head as hard as he could. Lapite suffered 36 separate injuries, his voice box fractured during strangulation. Yet despite an inquest's verdict of "unlawful killing" there was no prosecution of any of the officers. The man's family took the case up to judicial review, where both the PCA and the crown prosecutor admitted their decision in the case had been "flawed". After that an inquiry into the CPS's handling of police cases ordered all serious police cases to be sent to a central unit - yet still no prosecutions have ever followed.  The files of Liberty and Inquest are packed with such cases: some become famous such as Harry Stanley - the man shot dead for carrying a table leg in a bag - others just add to the statistics of those dead in prison or in police cells, often restrained by six or eight officers, often killed by lethal neckholds - but no one ever to blame. The reason they become famous cases is because they drag on forever, with no just or satisfactory resolution, leaving families in a constant state of public protest.  Dealing day in and day out with the mad, bad and violent inevitably causes some police officers to fly out of control. All police forces will have some dangerous officers or just some very frightened ones. What matters most is how bad cases are handled - transparently, fairly and fast. It matters for the reputation of the police, as well as for the victims. The idea that letting daylight into the police, as Macpherson did, somehow undermines them, lowers their morale or lessens their authority is the exact opposite of the truth. The better they deal with their own miscreants, the more they will be trusted and the more support they will get back from the communities they police. Often complainants just want an explanation and an apology - too rarely given.   Dealing well with complaints (there is a huge disparity between best and worst police forces), will presumably be dismissed by Hague as more of that "paper-work" that keeps bobbies off the beat. But "paper-work" is often what keeps bobbies on the beat. Managerial efficiency includes keeping a stern eye on absenteeism. The Met have cut their sickness rates from an average of 14 days per officer a year in 1996-7 down to only nine days a year last year. That saving is equivalent to an extra 500 officers on the beat.  As the election approaches, Labour is worrying about how to get across the fact that crime has fallen, not risen as people always imagine. Polls show people think their own neighbourhood is safer than   it was, but they still think crime "out there" is rising. Hardly surprising since everything they see and read tells them it must be so, local and national press as ever full of crime horrors, Crime Watch pumping it out every week, crime drama making violence seem to lurk everywhere. So far Labour has tried to seize popular support with strings of new laws, more crackdowns, more quick fixes. Child curfews and the like have little measurable effect on crime, but it all helps inflame fear of crime, now rebounding on Labour.  Jack Straw and Tony Blair have used law and order as a cheap vote-getter every bit as cynically as the Tories. It is the issue, after all, that created and defined New Labour. That killer leaked prime ministerial memo said it all: "The government needs something tough with immediate bite which sends a message through the system. Maybe, the driving licence penalty for young offenders. But this should be done soon and I personally should be associated with it." Those five short sharp law-and-order and fraud measures in the pre-election Queen's speech show Labour just as eager to use and abuse fear of crime for its own political ends. But at least yesterday, in introducing a genuinely independent police complaints procedure, here is Labour doing the right thing for the right reason, even if it does give William Hague another chance to accuse them of weakening police morale.