Luton generates a neo-fascist group

It’s no surprise to me, as someone who was mostly dragged up in A Town Called Malice – sorry, Luton, ‘jewel of Bedfordshire’ (aka Crappest Town in Britain 2004 [1]) – that something like the neo-fascist streetgang called the English Defence League has come out of the place, born of the knuckledragging fans of Luton Town Football Club who, now that the club’s been relegated out of the Football League, have no ‘firms’ to fight anymore, so are looking for a scrap elsewhere, and angry jihadists are just the job.

According to the Independent on Sunday:

“The EDL, originally formed by football supporters in Luton, claims to be a non-violent group campaigning against Muslim fundamentalism but is alleged to have links to former hooligan networks and known British National Party agitators. It was formed in March in reaction to barracking by Muslim protesters at soldiers from the Royal Anglian Regiment parading through Luton on their return from Iraq.” [2]

Luton is that kind of town, where a low-level racism is so pervasive that it’s part of the miasmic atmosphere of the town, whose inhabitants have the political consciousness of jellyfish. It’s not that Lutonians are, on the whole, actively hostile to non-whites, it’s more that they take racism as such a fact of life that they really don’t understand that it’s racist to talk of, say, going down the “p*ki shop”, or carrying out a bit of “p*ki-bashing”, or getting a takeway from the “chinky”. It’s in such a fetid sea that the real racists and fascists swim so freely and occasionally, as has happened with the EDL, pop their heads above water. Not that most of the EDL will be fascists – they’ll be too stupid to understand the term. They just know that they don’t like “darkies” and “mozzies” and that they like a good ruck. They’ve probably practiced on matchdays, as they parade through Bury Park, where the Kennel – sorry, Kenilworth Road – is located, abusing and intimidating the Asian residents on the way.

As a (now armchair) Watford fan, I quite literally got it in the neck growing up in Luton, and saw first-hand genuine Loo’n ‘ooligans in their natural habitat. On a Monday at school after a Saturday’s ruck, they’d boast about making the opposition “run”, beating up some hapless kid who happened to be wearing oppo colours, doing a bit of “p@ki-bashing”, bricking houses in Bury Park, and so on. Knuckledragging scum you’d think, yet many were in the top form at school and came from ‘respectable’ middle-class backgrounds – I could name quite a few former classmates in A1 who were, frankly, violent psychopaths and virulent racists. The nature of Luton fans hasn’t changed much since those days, with Watford fans in particular getting vicious treatment at home matches, so I for one had little sympathy for the club’s rapid decline into the football conference – if, as I believe, a club is its fans, for better or worse, then LTFC deserves its demise.

I was determined to leave that dump, and after a false start I finally escaped in ‘84 oop North. The best thing to come out of Luton is the M1 going Northbound.

References

[1] Luton was famously voted Crap Town of 2004, and with good reason. See Luton voted Britain’s worst town. BBC News Online, 27/9/04

[2] Anti-islamists target Palestinian rally in central London. Independent on Sunday, 13/9/09

Links

Wikipedia: English Defence League

‘Terror’ comes to Nottingham

The tentacles of the Security State reached into Nottingham University last week, when a postgraduate student and a staff member at the university were arrested and held without charge under the Terrorism Act 2006 [1], until their release six days later, when one was re-arrested in connection with immigration matters. They were accused of possessing “extremist material” by downloading an “Al Qaeda terror manual”. The plain facts of the case are now known:

1. The “terror manual” was, and still is, a document openly available on a US Government website and contained no ‘terror techniques’. The document is available on the US Military’s Air War College website as a translated and edited version of a training manual found in Manchester during a search of an Al Qaeda member’s home.

2. The postgrad student who downloaded it is undertaking a PhD in Islamic terrorism. According to a Times Higher article:

“Mr Sabir’s lawyer, Tayab Ali of McCormacks solicitors in London, told Times Higher Education that as preparation for a PhD on radical Islamic groups, Mr Sabir had downloaded an edited version of the al-Qaeda handbook from a US government website. It is understood that Mr Sabir sent the 1,500-page document to the staff member – who was subsequently arrested – because he had access to a printer. Mr Ali said: “The two members of the university were treated as though they were part of an al-Qaeda cell. They were detained for 48 hours, and a warrant for further detention was granted on the basis that the police had mobile phones and evidence taken from computers to justify this.” [2]

3. The cops were alerted by a member of clerical staff:

“A spokesman for Nottingham confirmed that the police had been called after material was found on the computer used by a junior clerical member of staff. “There was no reasonable rationale for this person to have that information,” he said. “The police were called in on the basis of reasonable anxiety and concern. In response to that, the police made a connection with a student who, we understand, was impeding the investigation and arrested that person.”” [2]

4. When the arrests took place, the cops stormed the campus mob-handed, stopped and searched students, and were still at it the day after the arrests:

“Secondly, Dr. Greatrix [University Registrar] claims that this was a low-level investigation. This claim, however, does not stand up to scrutiny. Students had their bags searched by uniformed police before entering the Trent Building the day after the arrests. The student and member of staff that was arrested was held from Wednesday May 14 until Tuesday, May 20 without charge, in spite of the fact that Rizwaan Sabir’s supervisor and personal tutor both confirmed to the police that the document they had downloaded and printed was legitimate research material on Friday, May 16. The homes of the two men were raided; they had their computers impounded and they have still not been returned; the family of Rizwaan Sabir was ejected from their home during the police’s search; several colleagues in the School of politics were interviewed for hours by the police. A low-key investigation would have resolved this matter within hours by contacting the relevant members of staff at the School of Politics and International Relations; indeed, a low-key investigation, to use Dr. Greatrix’s term, would have been conducted by the university itself, without any police involvement at all.” [3]

5. The document was passed by the postgrad student, Rizwaan Sabir, to the staff member, Hicham Yezza (an ex-postgrad student) because Sabir wanted to print it out and didn’t have enough print credits to do so on his own account, whereas Yezza, as a staff member, would have easy access to a printer.

6. Both men are entirely innocent of any wrongdoing and have zero to do with terrorism.

This has led to an understandable and righteous furore at the University, with staff getting up tight about academic freedom, students getting uptight about personal freedom and political repression, and foreign students getting very uptight about being targetted by the spooks on account of having dusky skins, as there certainly seems to be a strong ethnic element to the treatment by the cops of the detainees. A demonstration by students and staff will be taking place tomorrow (28th May) by the main campus library to protest against the arrests, in favour of academic freedom, and against the threatened deportation of Hicham Yezza.

That Yezza is being threatened with deportation smells of an act of spite by the cops, who have come out of this looking like complete idiots. They’ve held two guys for six days – imagine yourself in that position! – without charge, turned their homes and their lives upside-down, on sod-all evidence other than the download which even thick cops should have been able to track to a US government website – er, you do know what server logs are, don’t you, boys? It really feels like they’re trying to pin something on them just to give their bungling a fig-leaf of respectability. That Yezza would be deported to Algeria, a country not known for its tolerant attitude to political dissent, but well known for its love of torture and killing political opponents, plainly doesn’t bother the cops one little bit – the point seems to be to save face.

Students also feel that the arrests were part of a campaign against student activism:

“During questioning, the police regularly attempted to collate information about student activism and peaceful campaigning. They asked numerous questions about the student peace magazine ‘Ceasefire’, and other political student activities. The overt police presence on campus, combined with increased and intimidating police presence at peaceful demonstrations, has created a climate of fear amongst some students. Many saw the operation as a message from the police that they are likely to arrest those who have been engaged in peaceful political activities. There is widespread concern in the community that the police are criminalising peaceful activists using terrorism legislation, such as the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005.” [4]

The university has signally failed to support either man, and has covered itself in dishonour by its craven acceptance of the police line. Its only comment has been an email to staff, which accuses the THE article [2] of inaccuracy but otherwise says very little using a lot of words (reference [3] is a response to this statement). The main campus union, UCU (nèe AUT) has come out in support of the detainees, but only reluctantly and tepidly, saying that it wants to work “constructively” with the university to safeguard academic freedom, and maintaining that it has to support both the arrested staff member and the clerical staff member who shopped him so can’t stick its neck out in public comment. It’s been students and academic staff who’ve really been enraged by the whole affair and have brought it to public attention, and thanks to them the business is rapidly becoming a national cause cèlèbre – had it been up to UoN and the UCU the whole thing would have been quietly swept under the carpet.

As for the University, even if all questions of morality and ethics are put to one side, this story is going to hurt the institution financially. The university is absolutely dependent on overseas students from outside the EU, and in particular from SE Asia and China – it even has campuses in Malaysia and China. If word gets around that foreign students are being narked to the cops then they may well choose to go elsewhere, taking their very lucrative course fees with them. The uni has a lot of PR to do to repair the damage that this incident will cause.

Postscript

The demo on campus was well-attended, maybe around 300 at a guess despite it pouring with rain, and although mostly students there were a significant number of staff present. Wisely, the cops stayed away, though undoubtedly there were spooks in the crowd. An amusing fact that came up is that the ‘training manual’ is openly available on Amazon, a snip at $15. So much for illicit “extremist material”…

References:

[1] Two Nottingham terror arrests. Nottingham Evening Post, 16/5/08

[2] Research into Islamic terrorism led to police response. Times Higher Education, 22/5/08. See also the comments on the THE story which, for a change, are enlightening and reasoned.

[3] Comment on university communication on recent events. Statement by 3 academic members of staff, published on Nottingham Indymedia on 27/5/08.

[4] Terror law arrests at Nottingham: Statement by students and staff. Published on SACC website, 21/5/08.

Further reading:

Nottingham Uni detainee innocent but still facing deportation. Nottingham Indymedia, 23/5/08.

Al Qaeda download sparked my arrest. Nottingham Evening Post, 23/5/08

Terror arrest ‘cock up’ – MP. Nottingham Evening Post, 26/5/08

Student tells of his despair in ‘terror’ inquiry. Nottingham Evening Post, 23/5/08. The comments on this story from locals really show how stupid, ignorant and bigoted some Notts people are. No change since the days of the 83-84 Miner’s Strike, then… ;-\

Psst! Got any fags under the counter?

Another day, another ‘control measure’ to ’safeguard the nations health’. This time the State is going to ban the display of cigarettes in shops in England in order to “stop children from taking up smoking” [1], so soon fags will become ‘under the counter’ goods with all the accompanying sleazy connotations. This follows on from a similar recently-announced ban in Scotland [2].

The State and politicians should have the courage to state openly that their intention is to stop smoking altogether, rather than lie that these measures are taken to benefit non-smokers or to save the children (shades of South Park and “think of the children!”). The ban on smoking in public places was always about public health and NHS expenditure, and it was a blatant and shameless lie that it was intended to protect non-smokers from passive smoking – had that been the real issue, then it would have been simple enough to work out ways, such as airlocked rooms, to allow people to smoke indoors.

The forthcoming ban on cigs being on display such that smokers have to ask for them to be brought out from under the counter is plainly aimed at stigmatising them and has nothing at all to do with children picking up the habit – under-18s can’t buy fags legally anyway, and the idea that an adolescent would be subject to hypnotic allure simply by seeing cig packets in the newsagents is the stuff of absurdist satire.

People who smoke have been subject to a systematic (quite literally) long-term project to demonise and dehumanise them, such that they’re not only seen as prey to a ‘filthy habit’ but, worse, are portrayed as threatening other’s health through exposure to cigarette smoke and imposing a “burden” on the NHS. It’s a matter of time before smoking parents with children are forced to smoke outside their houses, for fear of child abuse. Another inevitable measure is smokers being forced to pay for health treatment, or threatened with the withholding of treatment until they give up smoking (though that has its own ramifications – see Physician, heal thyself) . You can even see pet owners who smoke being investigated by the RSPCA for animal abuse. Ludicrous? No, just a logical extension of current policies and principles.

Many would say “serves them right”, and would support any measure, however draconian, to eradicate smoking and smokers. That such an attitude is gaining ground in society, and that smokers are seen by many as being on a par with child abusers, is an indication of the success of the stigmatisation project.

It would be far more honest for the State to ban smoking altogether. it would fail, of course, and would lead to the criminalisation of millions of people, but that doesn’t stop it banning other recreational drugs, such as cannabis  and E, which turns millions of citizens who just want to chill out into criminals who can be locked up.

Oh, and you non-smoking drinkers who raised a glass to the pub smoking ban? You’re next, you smug gits. Already the regime is making noises about “binge drinking”, banning outdoor drinking, ‘alcohol awareness’ advertising campaigns (such as are appearing on TV already), and raising taxes to punitive levels, and with good reason as the arguments used to stigmatise smoking – the damage to society and public health – apply in Spades to alcohol, which is demonstrably more damaging to personal (liver failure, heart disease) and societal (violence, alcoholism, work absenteeism) health than smoking. Now that the anti-smoking argument has been enthusiastically accepted by the State and its cheerleaders, the chattering classes, anti-drinking will follow as surely as night follows day.

[1] Cigarette ban proposals welcomed. BBC News Scotland, 25/5/08

[2] Tobacco display ban plan unveiled. BBC News Scotland, 21/5/08

[3] The last gasp: Health Secretary signals new smoking curbs. Independent, 26/5/08

Exploiting murder

It’s predictable, I suppose, but no sooner had two serial killers (Steve Wright, Mark Dixie) been convicted than the top cops’ ‘executive committee’ in Scotland (i capi dei tutti capi), ACPOS, called for DNA samples to be taken from everyone arrested, not just those convicted, and kept on the national DNA database for ever [1]. This is currently the law in England, which is handy as cops can arrest you for anything – ‘obstruction’ is a useful catch-all used regularly against political protesters – then drag you to the copshop, take your DNA for the database, then shove you out of the door again uncharged. Result. In Scotland, though, samples taken from arrestees can only be stored if the person is subsequently charged with a crime. That’s not great, from a freedom viewpoint, but was a measure passed by the McNewLabour administration back in 2007[2]. Still, at least the cops have to go through the legal aggro of filling out paperwork and launching a formal prosecution before they can keep your DNA on file, which is a disincentive if their mighty and continual whingeing about “paperwork” is to be believed. Of course, ACPOS argues that a DNA database would enable such serial killers to be caught earlier, because both Dixie and Wright were nabbed after DNA matching of samples taken from them when they were previously arrested for unrelated crimes. This argument begs two points, one minor, one major:

1. DNA matching is not the only, or even the main way, of catching and convicting perps. As numerous crime novels, TV series, true crime stories, and TV crime programmes, make plain time and again, most perps are nicked through ‘old-fashioned’ policing. Cops managed to nick killers long before DNA matching came along, and often the only reason they didn’t nick them in time (such as in the Yorkshire Ripper case) was sheer bloody incompetence and stupidity.
2. There is no item of information about a person that a cop would not consider to be ‘relevant to the investigation’.

The second is more disturbing. Yesterday it was mass fingerprinting, today it’s DNA, tomorrow it’ll be retinal scans, the day after it’ll be real-time 24/7 information on your whereabouts. The gathering of any item of personal information can be justified on the grounds of helping to prevent and/or solve crimes, and in the case of murder to save victims’ lives. This emotional blackmail is obvious and crude, and crudely exploitative of those who have been murder victims and their families and friends. It taps into people’s fears and insecurity, and if the ‘nothing to fear, nothing to hide’ principle is widely accepted, as seems to be the case in England, the blackmail is hard to argue against. The logical conclusion of the principle, though, is a world of ‘Total Information Awareness’, which is currently vividly and frighteningly illustrated in the near-future drama The Last Enemy on BBC1, where the State has complete knowledge of all individuals in real time. Or, if you want to be really dystopian and fascistic, a Judge Dredd world where cops are the law, and can search your home and ransack your life at will.

The Scottish government, to its credit, has resisted some of the more authoritarian measures being implemented in the nascent police state south of the Border, and polls of the Scottish population regularly show a greater concern for civil freedoms, and cynicism towards the Security State, than is to be found amongst the Sasannaich. It would be depressing if it were to accede to ACPOS demands as that would set a highly unwelcome precedent, that any information about anyone, crime suspect or innocent, is fair game to gather and keep. Accepting that principle would be highly dangerous for freedom in Ingerlan’s civilised neighbour.

[1] Call for DNA retention law change, BBC News Scotland, 23/2/08

[2] New powers to store suspects’ DNA, BBC News Scotland, 1/1/07

Even the dying are deported

We’re familiar with people being deported despite being under the threat of death if they return ‘home’, which is bad enough, but it really does take some doing to deport someone who’s actually dying, yet this is what’s happened to a Ghanaian woman whose visa ran out:

A Ghanaian woman who came to the UK five years ago and became a student is being flown back to the African country, despite being terminally ill.

Ama Sumani was taken by immigration officers from a Cardiff hospital where she has been receiving dialysis for a year after cancer damaged her kidneys. [1]

How low can you get? How can people who take decisions like this carry on a normal, human life? I’m sure the civil servants who make decisions like this are (mostly) human and are capable of compassion in their personal lives, yet when they come to work any compassion, solidarity and empathy for other humans goes out of the window. It must take a degree of doublethink and compartmentalisation that is beyond you and I. That, and complete unaccountability. Lives may be irreparably ruined and people may be killed because of what they do, but they’ll go happily into an index-linked retirement and live out their days untouched by their own actions.

Yeah, I know, responsibility is diffused in bureaucracies, and the ultimate responsibility rests with politicians who make the laws, who themselves would blame the electorate for voting for them in the first place, but someone, somewhere has to be responsible and accountable. Bureacracies may be machines of State, but they’re machines composed of human beings who ought, at the least, to feel some shame for what they’re part of. Or maybe they don’t even realise, viscerally, that there’s a real person at the end of the chain of decisions – maybe being part of the machine means that you don’t see people, you just see names on paper, abstractions that have no corporeal existence. Or maybe, if you do have a conscience and sense of responsibility, you don’t get appointed to posts where such decisions are made, or you quit the bureaucracy in shame and disgust.

[1] Cancer patient loses visa battle, BBC News online, 9/1/08

Liberty in Scotland

According to a story on today’s BBC website, Scotland is freer, or rather less unfree, than England by some margin. The group Privacy International apparently scored Scotland higher than the UK as a whole:

The UK as a whole scored 1.4 on the report’s scale – the worst of any European country. But Scotland fared much better, with a rating of 2.5.

The report quoted a SNP MP:

Mr Wishart, the MP for Perth and North Perthshire, said: “This report highlights how people’s civil liberties are safer in Scotland – particularly after the Scottish Parliament voted to oppose ID cards just last month.”

The last bit of which came as news, though welcome news, to me. Sadly the Scots don’t have control over such ’strategic’ home policy, in the same way as they’ve no sway over immigration policy, despite the fact that Scotland is crying out for more people to arrest the decline in its population. The privacy rating isn’t surprising as I’ve always considered Scotland to be a civilised country compared to its barbarian neighbour to the South.

It’s about time that the country obtained its long-awaited, and much-needed independence, of which it was so mendaciously cheated back in the 70s when the independence referendum was rigged by the Callaghan regime and the true income from North Sea Oil was deliberately concealed. When independence eventually arrives, which I’d hope would be in the next decade before England’s rapid decline drags the Scots down with it, I want to be sure to be on the right side of the Border.

Civil Liberty praise for Scotland, BBC Online, 6/1/08

The road is real life, really

If you were walking on the pavement and your way was blocked by a slower pedestrian, would you shout abuse at them to force them to move aside? Would you stand right behind them breathing down their neck until they moved aside? If another pedestrian moved in front of you without giving notice, would you curse and swear at the top of your voice and give them the finger? The answer, for most folk, would be a plain ‘no’ – you might curse under your breath, you might say ‘excuse me’, you might even shout ‘coming through’, but you wouldn’t display naked aggression unless you were an irredeemable bampot with serious ‘anger management issues’. Aside from all the strong social constraints on aggression and violence, you’d fear getting a mouthful, or even a mouthful of fist, from the object of your anger.

Why, then, when you’re behind the wheel, do you feel free to honk, shout abuse, tailgate, flash lights, and generally be nakedly aggressive? Because being in your metal box insulates you and alienates you from the world. Other cars aren’t driven by real human beings, but are just obstacles, frustrations to be disposed of by any means necessary. So you’ll drive up someone’s arse on the fast lane doing 90 in your Beamer (funny how so often it’s a Suit in a Beamer giving you grief, eh?) with your headlights on full beam, until they move aside and you whizz on to the next blockage. Or you’ll tailgate someone doing the speed limit on an urban road. Or you’ll flash your lights angrily at someone who pulls out in front of you. Or you’ll shout abuse at someone who’s not indicated properly at a roundabout because he’s delayed your entrance onto it by a half-second. Or you’ll give the finger at someone who’s dithering on lane changes in an unfamiliar area.

You know who you are. You’re the sort of person who normally wouldn’t say boo to a goose, or would decry with moral indignation the levels of crime and violence in society, or would deplore today’s lack of civility and respect towards others. Yet put you inside a metal box powered by volatile hydrocarbons and you suddenly became the pure selfish individual, driven (literally) by naked self-interest, divorced from society, because you feel you’re entering a Hobbesian war of all against all, where clubs are trumps. How many of you have fantasised about having weapons to wipe other incompetent/dangerous/irresponsible (unlike you, naturally) drivers off the road with the flick of a switch?

Yet, if someone you’ve given the finger to suddenly screeches to a halt and gets out of the car to confront your aggression, you shit yourself and leg it, then if you escape unscathed you bang on later about ‘road rage’ and how dangerous the roads have become when such nutters are loose. Even though it was you who provoked the violence with your own aggression. What’s surprising is not that people get out of their cars to have it out with drivers who’ve been abusive, but that so few people do so given the levels of aggression on the roads. If someone shouted abuse in your ear when you’re walking along the pavement, you’d turn round and shout abuse back and maybe even twat them one, yet just because you’re inside a car you think that you can aggress against others without any comeback. I’ve got news for you, pal – other drivers are people too, just like you.

Why all this ranting? Because I’ve had it with drivers who drive with their balls and not their brains. It’s no coincidence that most abuse, tailgating and aggression comes from men behind the wheel, for whom masculine identity and testosterone are an integral part of their ‘identity’ as a driver – just witness some of the witlessly macho ads for cars shown on TV, or that TV nutter Jeremy Clarkson getting a hard-on over a sports car and talking of it as if it were some pneumatic bimbo off a top shelf mysogynist fantasy mag (though if it were a bimbo it would be the only way an ugly emotionally-stunted toad like him would ever score). I’ve thought for a long time now that male drivers should take testosterone-reducing pills before getting behind the wheel, because it’s their hormone and machismo problems that maim and kill other people.

Not that women drivers are immune from being aggressive, but at least to them the car isn’t an extension of their being, an existential part of their gender identity – most women view cars, rightly, as vehicles to get them from A to B in reasonable comfort. Even they, though, can fall prey to the false separation from the world that the metal box provides, and start to view other drivers as obstacles rather than real people.

The principle is simple: do inside the car as you would do outside it, in real life. If you’d never shout abuse in real life, don’t do it in the car. If you give the finger, then if you’re an honest person you should be prepared to fight it out if it comes to it – if you carry out an action, you should bear responsibility for the consequences. If you’re not prepared to back up your aggression with violence, then don’t be aggressive in the first place. Piece of piss.

"Illegal" protest – a PS

Further to my previous recent blog entry on the Camp for Climate Change, State repression of, two letters appeared in The Independent on Saturday 25/8/07 which are worth quoting in full, in case they ‘go off’ on the Indy site:

Heathrow police act like the bad guys

Sir: Last Sunday, I witnessed, on the climate change march at Heathrow, what can happen when innocent members of society decide to express their concerns to the government. I was not at the camp; I was not one of “the activists”. I am a middle-class mother and teacher. I have participated in many demonstrations before, most recently the anti-Iraq war protest.

As I approached the family march, I was surprised to be told by police that if I came any further I would not be allowed to leave. I joined the march. We were predominantly women and children, yet we were surrounded by many police, with their vans in front and behind. We were forced to crawl along at a snail’s pace and took four hours to complete a distance of probably less than two miles. No one, not even the children or pregnant women were allowed to take a toilet break. It felt as though we were being marched to a prison camp.

But the most shocking aspect was the attitude of the police. I believe the police are the good guys, there to help and protect us. I brought my children up to respect and trust the police. I think all my efforts may have been undone by what my children witnessed. With only a couple of exceptions, the police were aggressive, rude and inhumane.

My friendly advances were dismissed in a rude belligerent fashion. It felt like they were just waiting for the opportunity to lay into the crowd with their truncheons.

I did wonder if they were trying to provoke us. I am proud to say the behaviour of the marchers was exemplary. And I will not be put off. I will continue to stand up for what I believe in, at all costs. But I will live in fear for my daughter who was camped out with the activists.

Andrea Farndon

Godden Green, Kent

Sir: As grandmother of an environmentalist in the Climate Camp, I followed the media reporting with interest. What soon became apparent was the discrepancy between what some newspapers reported and the experience of those taking part.

The event was a huge success, bringing a vital issue to the attention of the country in an entirely peaceful way. Heathrow passengers were not delayed and direct action was taken without violence by the environmentalists. But they were harassed by 1,800 police, who did everything they could to turn a peaceful protest into a criminal action. They failed, in spite of free use of truncheons resulting in several injured campers.

This unnecessary use of force cost some £7m. If a real terrorist incident had been committed in London while the police were busy strong-arming protesters at Heathrow, how would the emergency services have coped?

Surely the police authorities must see how their response to the obvious harmlessness of the Climate Camp makes them look foolishly obsessed, and alienates ordinary citizens?

Jane Power

London N16

Spy in the Sky

Today’s Grauniad reported that the cops were using an automated drone to spy on crowds at the V Festival. According to the report, the drone is almost inaudible above 30m, and so small as to be practically invisible. So there’s just no getting away from the all-seeing eye of the law, it seems. How long before the cops suggest building surveillance into new buildings, Big Brother style, on the grounds that if you’ve nowt to hide, you’ve nowt to fear? Not long, I expect.

Another little wrinkle of this drone is that it can spray a fine mist containing marker DNA, which invisibly marks ’suspects’ so that they can be picked up and identified later. Talk about being pissed on from a great height…

"Illegal" protest

There’s been much made of the “illegal” nature of this week’s Climate Camp protest outside Heathrow, by the right-wing Press, the government, and of course the cops. In an act of serious OTT-ness, the British Airways Authority sought to ban up to 5 million people, including members of subversive groups such as the National Trust and RSPB, from travelling to the environs of the airport [3]. They still succeeded in obtaining an injunction against members of the protest group Plane Stupid from travelling to the area – an injunction, mind, which in law should be based on the high probability that a criminal act would occur if it weren’t granted, so effectively the protesters were branded as criminals before they even had the chance to take any action, and their movement – supposedly, free movement and free assembly are keystones of ‘democracy’ – curtailed on the basis that they might cause a bit of a fuss. Ho hum.

Whether or not the protest is “illegal” isn’t clear to me, but then I’m no Brief. What is clear is that the State is determined to treat the protest with as much repression as it can get away with, seeing as the camp is in the media spotlight. By all accounts, at least those not carried by the barking Right press, the protesters are a pretty meek, mild and moderate bunch. There are no hardened anti-globalisation activists, no Black Bloc, no Wombles, and the very clear emphasis has been on nonviolence. Not one of the protesters has acted violently towards either person or property, unless you consider supergluing yourself to doors as ‘violent’. The slogan of the protest has been “We are only armed…with peer-reviewed science”, which hardly counts as insurrectionary. On the whole, despite lurid warnings from the cops about the camp being “infiltrated” by “anarchists” [1] bent on causing trouble [2], they were a pretty peaceable and moderate bunch, and with the participation of locals they were less dog on a rope than Afghan on a designer lead.

Yet still the cops threw everything they could at them. As is now common practice at protests, cops shoved cameras into people’s faces [4]. They stopped and searched people under the newly-passed anti-terrorist laws, despite NuLabor apparatchiks (sorry, MPs) promising loudly during Commons rubber-stampings (sorry, ‘debates’) that such laws would only be used for, well, anti-terrorist purposes, and wouldn’t be indiscriminately targetted at anyone whose faces the cops didn’t like – so much for that wee assurance, eh? There were twice as many cops at the camp as protesters, and they harassed protesters as a matter of routine, sometimes physically attacking them garbed in full riot gear. And this is against a protest in the public eye, for a cause many people sympathise with. Imagine what the State does to less public protests for less cuddly causes, such as ‘animal rights extremism’.

All this for a non-violent protest with some headline-grabbing but far from destructive direct action. No doubt the cops and State and barking Press will go on about how the protesters could carry out ‘legal’ protests, but what can you now do, legally? If you want to demo, you have to give the cops at least a week’s notice and let them vet your route – if you go on to the streets without such notice, you’ll be nicked. The cops can tell you where and when to demo, and you’d better be careful what banners you carry or what you say or they’ll nick you for behaviour likely to cause ‘distress’ to the public, and this was before the recent raft of anti-terrorist legislation [5][6]. That’s if they allow the demo at all – the cops have the power to ban demos on the nebulous grounds of ‘public order’. And if you do demo, you’ll be corralled and controlled and surveilled, and woe betide you if you deviate from the planned route as you may well find yourself up against vanloads of riot cops itching for a scrap.

There are no legitimate means of mass demonstration these days, let alone any kind of direct action. The sorts of ‘People Power’ [TM] that brought down repressive regimes elsewhere, and were lauded by the West as prime examples of liberty in action, are completely illegal here – you simply couldn’t have tens of thousands of people gathering spontaneously on the streets, let alone camp there as happened in Prague and Kiev. The only legitimate protest you can now make, and that heavily circumscribed by laws on ‘glorifying terrorism’, is in writing, but the State doesn’t mind that because nobody cares – there are millions of blogs and web fora and newsgroups out there, so what does it matter if a few ranters bang on about this or that? They’ll never be noticed, and even if they are they’ll never have an effect, but at the same time this ‘freedom’ to write is held up as proof that this is still a liberal democracy that preserves ‘traditional liberties’. Put simply, writing doesn’t scare the State and the ruling classes – it’s people on the streets that scare them, and this has been so for centuries.

What ought to worry many is that, if there are no legitimate outlets for protest, then any protest, no matter how mild, is illegal and liable to State suppression. A simple corollary of this, for the protester, is that you might as well be hung for a sheep as a goat – if you’re going to get your skull cracked for being peaceful, why not go the whole hog and start throwing rocks? This is the lesson from countless oppressive regimes in history, one of the most recent being the repression of legitimate protest in N Ireland which kick-started The Troubles. The State will know this only too well, and is trying, through the exponential increase in surveillance and police powers, to so control and surveil its population that it can nip any protest in the bud. This is a dangerous, high-stakes game that it’s playing, and one in which there will be more and more ‘innocent casualties’…

In the meantime, if you want to carry out a legal protest … go abroad to a country where civil liberties are written into constitutions. Italy and France come immediately to mind, or Spai. Not that that’s ever stopped cops breaking heads (just look what happened at the Scuola Diaz in Genoa years ago) but it does put a rein on them, and does mean that they might be held accountable for their actions. Right now, over here in our Green and Pleasant Land, cops can shoot unarmed civilians at point-blank range without any fear of comeback. The killers of Jean Charles de Menezes, though known, will never be held to account, and neither will their commanders. Similarly the cops who burst into the house in Forest Gate and shot and wounded two of its occupants, who were completely innocent of anything other than being Muslim, will enter a long and happy retirement without a stain against their careers. When cops can get away with murder, and can lock up people for any reason or none, at any time, for up to a month, then they can do most anything they want. This is a very, very dangerous time to be a protester who ventures away from the keyboard and into real life…

Indymedia Climate Camp site
[1] Police: ‘Heathrow camp infiltrated by anarchists’, Guardian Unlimited, 16/8/07
[2] As an armchair anarchist myself, in my wilder youth an activist, the idea of anarchists “infiltrating” anything is a hoot. A prime characteristic of anarchists is their openness to declare themselves as such – you want infiltration, go to the Trotskyites for lessons. Or to the sewer Press, who “infiltrated” the camp with a few of their jackals during the protest looking for tasty copy.
[3] ‘Bullying’ BAA seeks Heathrow protest injunction, Guardian Unlimited, 1/8/07
Camp for Climate Action
[4] For photocops being photographed in their turn, see the Indymedia report on a demo outside a Heckler & Koch plant in Nottingham on 24/7/07.
[5] Airport rebels take on police, Observer online, 12/7/07
[6] Protest as harrassment, George Monbiot, 22/2/05
[7] Protesters are criminals, George Monbiot, 4/10/05