Criminalising Dissent

Last Saturday I took to the streets with my friend Daisy to demonstrate against police brutality and for the right to protest. The march was in memory of Ian Tomlinson, the newspaper seller who was assaulted by police during the G20 protests in London on 1 April and died minutes later. He wasn’t a demonstrator. He was just on his way home, hands in pockets, walking away from the police. You must have seen that video by now:

Here’s a video of the Ian Tomlinson march (you can see me and Daisy at 5:45)

The Tomlinson case is a symptom of a wider malaise in British society that I find deeply troubling. One of the many disturbing things about this case is the way the police were quick to issue a statement not only denying any contact with Tomlinson, but saying they and paramedics were blocked from offering assistance by missiles from protestors. This is untrue. Police stood back and did nothing after the assault. Medical students offered assistance. Police blocked the ambulance.

This week, there have been further developments:

• A second post-mortem revealed that Tomlinson died of internal bleeding, not a heart attack
• More  complaints against police brutality that day are now under consideraton - around 150 so far
• More video evidence has emerged, of police assaults on people at the climate camp, and on a young woman.

Had video evidence of these assaults not come to light, would the police have got away with it? Would a second post-mortem have been requested? And would the many other stories of police brutality that day now be under investigation? Probably not. But ordinary citizens captured plenty of video and photographic evidence that day, which is now being sifted by human rights lawyers. Thank Buddha for YouTube and Flickr and cameraphones.

One of the most shocking images of the day is of a baton-weilding police medic. Read that phrase again: Baton. Weilding. Police. Medic. What exactly does HE do? Beat people up and then offer them medical assistance? Is that the New Labour equivalent of paying a man to dig a hole and then paying him to fill it in again?

At least the IPCC appear now to be taking the G20 violence seriously, after a woefully slack start. But this is only one aspect of the problem with protest.

The UK is the most surveilled country on Earth, with one CCTV camera for every 14 people. Our only defence seems to be to film them back: inverse surveillance, or sousveillance. Apologists for the surveillance society typically say: “if you’ve nothing to hide, what’s the problem?” That works both ways, and the number of police officers concealing their faces and/or badge numbers that day suggests they knew they were breaking the law.

However, the new Counter-Terrorism Act 2008, which came into force two months ago, also criminalises the photographing of a police officer - at least according to some interpretations. If that’s true, it’s just as well there was such an outpouring of law-breaking on 1 April. Other laws that make it harder to exercise our basic democratic right to peaceful protest in the UK  include the Serious Organised Crime and Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005, which introduced unprecedented restrictions on expressing political dissent in public, including the right to protest near Parliament.

Then on Monday this week, 114 people were arrested on suspicion of planning an environmental protest near Nottingham. At the more ludicrous, tabloid  - and Kafkaesque - end of the spectrum, a man in Oxfordshire was arrested, bundled into a car and held for seven hours the same day because he had an ornamental pig in his front garden.

Garden ornaments are not a crime. Protest is not a crime. Thinking about protesting is not a crime. I THOUGHT about attending the protest at Scotland Yard this week. Does that mean I should have expected Tom Cruise to come crashing through my window in a Minority Report style pre-cog bust?

The problem with these anti-terror laws is that they are too often used against ordinary citizens, such as by local councils to snoop on whether you’re putting your bin out on the right day (thankfully this was put under review this week).

The police have even used these powers to arrest and threaten with life imprisonment an opposition MP who might have embarrassed the government. What is this - Zimbabwe? Turns out the anti-terror squad searched his emails using “Shami Chakrabarti” as a key word. When the head of Liberty, our largest and most respected civil liberties organisation, becomes an anti-terror trigger word, there is something deeply wrong with our governance.

Thanks to digital TV, we’re now all experts on sharks and Nazis. We’ve seen “The Nazis: A Warning from History”. And yet we seem not to be heeding that warning. We’re not so much sleepwalking in to a police state as striding, eyes-open, into a world of ID cards, hypersurveillance, and ever diminishing civil liberties. A world of fear and paranoia where we are encouraged to inform on our neighbours and any form of dissent is criminalised. A world where the government can read every email, text or comment on a social networking site.

It’s so insidious we’re not even aware of it. Or, worse, we are - but we don’t care, so long as the only Big Brother we have to worry about is the anaesthetising soma of reality TV.

I don’t believe there’s a great conspiracy, laid out like the Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism - even though it feels like it sometimes. This situation arises from apathy. A negligent neorealist drift into what seems the easy answer to modern global terrorism. Yet by subjugating ourselves to a police state we are doing the terrorists’ job for them. I also don’t believe all the police are alike - there seems to have been a noticable change in mood on 1 April when the paramilitary night shift came on duty. But by handing the police more and more powers in new draconian anti-terror legislation, it changes not just the law but the culture of law enforcement, to the point where legitimate protest and terrorism are blurred.

Of course the police want more powers - it makes their job easier if they can arrest and detain people without charge, outllaw protest, and avoid accountability. The threat of terrorism tempts governments to hand them extreme powers, on the assumption that they will only ever be used in extreme circumstances. But history is littered with examples of this very idea going horribly awry and leading to unintended consequences.

The police are public servants, there to protect us - not instruments of state control, there to beat and intimidate us if we express our disagreement with government policy. I hope this IPCC investigation proves a watershed moment in the encroaching police state, makes us more watchful, encourages us to rethink our relationship with those who govern us, and guides us back to some core principles of liberal democracy.