David Cameron should be proud of himself, it took Margaret Thatcher two years before her government faced rioting and yet his policies to throw us back into some Edwardian-style society and shut off opportunity for all of those people who are not already in the elite he moves in, meant he had his first riot just six months after coming to power. In addition, it was a political riot, one directed at the policies of the government, rather than, as with many riots in 1981, focused on local friction with police behaviour. The riot was not extensive, only 56,000 people (150% more than had been expected), primarily students protesting about the raising of fees for the young people reaching university age in the next few years. It was primarily focused on the Conservative Party headquarters in Millbank in central London. There were acts of vandalism and rioters got on to the roof of the building. However, overall 14 people a mix of rioters and police were hospitalised and 35 people arrested, which is very small scale compared to riots in London of the 1980s and 1990s. However, this may be just the beginning.
Interestingly, in contrast to the G20 protest last year, at which the police went in very forcefully and murdered a passerby, and even when compared to the original round of protests against student loans, famously in 1989 with mounted police riding down student protestors, some of whom later showed the hoof marks on their shins when they had been trampled by the horses and images of students being clubbed by batons, the police response was very low key. This has angered Conservative Party members as there was no police protection of their headquarters as the focus had been on the nearby headquarters of their coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats. I imagine this was due to the earlier protests outside the house of the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg. Police have been criticised for under-estimating the scale of the disorder and not bringing in a large enough force. They had, however, protected Whitehall ministerial buildings, which in the past have been a target.
I think there are a number of reasons for the nature of the response. First, the weather was terrible on the days either side of the riot, Wednesday 10th November. If it had been as bad that day I doubt we would have seen even 20,000 protestors and it is unlikely rioting would have started. However, it was sunny and dry. There is a clear correlation in the UK between good weather and rioting. The second thing is, after the criticisms the police received after the murder of Ian Tomlinson (a passerby not even a protestor) by a police officer during the G20 protests in April 2009, they are probably a little more careful and the aggressive policy of hunting out the protestors and breaking them up or even 'kettling' them was avoided. Perhaps the police saw students as being 'different' to the G20 protestors, though the bulk of them were ordinary people, not revolutionaries. On Wednesday the police reacted rather than being proactive. However, I think, at the next large scale protest they will being encouraged by Home Secretary Theresa May, who in effect, unlike with other constabularies in the UK, heads the Metropolitan Police, to take a more aggressive line and certainly to put a ring of officers around the Conservative Party headquarters.
There is another more mischievous explanation for the Metropolitan Police's reaction, particularly in leaving Conservative Party headquarters unprotected. On 20th October the government announced cuts of 20% in the police budget. I have not seen the figures for the reduction this is likely to mean for the size of the Metropolitan Police, but we can make some estimate from looking at other constabularies. The Greater Manchester Police employ just over 13,000 staff (this includes all uniformed and plain clothes police and all civilian workers in the constabulary), the West Midlands Police, almost the same. These two constabularies reckon they will have to shed 3,100 and 2,100 employees respectively, i.e. between 16%-24% of their workforce. Not all the losses will be uniformed officers, but some will have to be. If the same ratio of job losses is applied to the Metropolitan Police with a little over 52,000 employees then it means laying off something between 8,300 - 12,500 employees. Given that it is argued that Britain continues to face potential terrorist attacks which most likely would target London and with the crime rate always rising as unemployment climbs as it is at present, you can see why the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Paul Stephenson, might feel that it is the worst time to be cutting the police service so severely.
Thus, perhaps next time there is the risk of a riot, the Metropolitan Police will say, 'well we would love to be able to protect Conservative Party headquarters' but unfortunately the cut-backs mean we cannot spare the officers to do so'. This shows how the government's widespread cuts hitting at all parts of public service, are to a degree politicising sections of that service which normally would never come close to protesting. The last time the UK had a police strike was in 1918, but it seems we may be on the path to another one. Firefighters have struck more often, but usually on a localised basis, but already, only six months into Cameron regime we are seeing strikes of the nature that the Labour government of 1974-9 only experienced in its closing months.
Now, looking beyond the immediate issues of the likelihood of more rioting and the challenges for the police in dealing with it, are there bigger political moves behind all this? Of course, we know from the early 1980s, groups such as the Socialist Workers' Party (and back then Militant Tendency) believe that a revolution will only come about when the bulk of the population, even those who typically cannot tear themselves away from watching 'The X Factor' to even answer the door, are so angry with the government that they strike and riot. I have always felt this was a delusional policy, the British are far too passive a bunch ever to even protest on the scale we have seen in France over the past two months, let alone something more active. British society is incredibly divided and people tend to blame others on their level or specific groups like students, the unemployed, single mothers, immigrants, asylum seekers, ethnic minorities, gay people, people from the North/the South/Scotland/Ireland rather than the government. We have already seen the rumblings of race rioting which was another aspect of the 1970s and 1980s (and the 1950s and the 1910s...).
What I think is more likely is that there will be a counter-reaction by the state. A riot on the scale of the Poll Tax Riot of 1990 would play right into David Cameron's hands; it would be what the 11th September 2001 terrorist attacks were for George W. Bush, they gave him carte blanche to strip citizens of so many civil liberties. Cameron in many ways takes the policies of Margaret Thatcher and drives them in harder and faster. So, as Thatcher used the rhetoric of 'the enemy within' applied by dictators commonly to Jews, Socialists, Communists, also Catholics and Freemasons, and during the Miners' Strike of 1984-5 allowed police to pick up people driving around London simply on the suspicion that they were going to attend a coal mine rally, I can see this coming with Cameron, but even more harshly. I have often commented how Tony Blair's govenment steadily eroded civil liberties in the UK. Blair is the link in the chain between Thatcher and Cameron, advancing their agenda rather than reversing it; Major and Brown were barely hiccoughs in that process. If Cameron cannot fund a larger police force, then he will use legislation, he will encourage the public to inform on their neighbours (something we have been encouraged to do for a number of years now) and given the restriction on prison spaces, other limits to personal freedom will be introduced.
A sub-headline on 'The Guardian' frontpage of Thursday said 'Both sides warn of 'more to come''. Already 'sides' are being outlined. Winter is not the time for rioting, but come April and beyond, especially if there is a hot summer, then I think we will see disturbances that will make 1981 look tranquil in comparison, partly because this government has unsettled not only those usually at odds with the state, but also very quickly, those like the police and firefighters, who generally we loyal to the state but now feel they are being stabbed in the back. The government reaction, with the ground so well prepared by Blair, will be harsh, and with the cutbacks, will probably have to involve the military. I do not think Cameron is an idiot, he may be evil, but no fool. He must know that you cannot destroy the hopes of so many people and expect them to accept it passively. Thus, I believe, as Thatcher prepared well in advance for the Miners' Strike, he is readying to oppose civil unrest and use the opportunity to suppress civil liberties that little bit further. He believes he is right, because, as I increasingly believe with every passing day, he is bent on reshaping British society to something resembling the fixed hierarchical model of a hundred years or more in the past.
Showing posts with label police state. Show all posts
Showing posts with label police state. Show all posts
Saturday, 13 November 2010
Tuesday, 14 April 2009
Beating and Killing by Police Returns to the UK
People have been talking recently about the legacy of the Miners' Strike of 1984-5 and one aspect that we have been reminded of in the past fortnight is how it made it seem permissible that the police behave as if they were putting down a peasants' revolt when suppressing legitimate protest. Though we have moved on 25 years the attitude seems to have reawoken. The police have better surveillance equipment and a whole host of weaponry to suppress protests but they do not seem to have learned how to keep their tempers any better than they did in the 1980s.
Perhaps it is the new generation who feel they missed out on the exciting riots of the 1980s. It is always incredible when you talk to the children of police officers or immigration officers thinking of following their parents into the force at how already they are inculcated with the bigoted attitudes. I suppose we all learn from our parents, but never have I been so startled at how ingrained negative, violent attitudes are in these people. There is no reference to serving the public or protecting society, just to the chance to suppress people. In other contexts, such as those moving to football hooliganism it is condemned, but somehow violent police are exempt from such censure.
Commentators used to speak of how the television series, 'The Sweeney' (1975-8) encouraged police to drive fast and smoke and drink heavily and 'The Bill' (since 1983) police series has tried to encourage more responsible policing as you know every police officer and his/her family watch it religiously. However, it is clear that a culture is still running deep with in the police service which sees any protest no matter how peaceful as illegitimate and in need of being put down violently. If there is no violence present, the police try to provoke it, if they fail in doing that they simply wade in and beat people.
We have a new legitimacy for attacking protestors which was given to the world by the USA following the 11th September 2001 terrorist attacks in that country. The Bush government built up an attitude that we are in constant and sustained danger which permits them to do anything (as anyone who has had their suitcase opened when it was being loaded on to an aircraft out of the USA knows, they leave a nice slip of smiley people saying how necessary it was to break into your luggage and how you must understand this), notably abductions and torture. Such attitudes foisted repeatedly on the UK by its US ally which often feels we are not sufficiently paranoid, spread widely throughout society. In the USA people were even beaten up attending the celebrations are around Barack Obama's inaugural ceremony, because despite the change at the top, the hostile attitudes lower down the hierarchy have not changed an iota yet. In this kind of attitude, the UK police, feel as they have not done since the 1980s, that they have a green light to be violent and that they will get away with it.
In the weeks leading up to the G20 protests we were told how they were going to be violent and the police would have to act forcefully. As it turned out, of course, the violence came from the police, frustrated that they had not got the battle their bosses had promised. Of course the knock-on effect and presumably the one desired by broader government was to scare off legitimate peaceful protestors from doing anything of this kind again. Stamping on legal protest is accelerating very quickly in the UK. Yesterday 114 people were arrested before they even began protesting and were 16 Km away from the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station. They were said to represent a 'serious threat' to the power station. Anyone who, like me, has been inside power stations, knows they are not that easy either to get into (certainly beyond the reception) or to damage. If they were that vulnerable to protest, surely the security should be look at.
What these police do not understand is that real terrorists, not the part-time protestors they try to portray as terrorists, real terrorists would be in there and blowing up the place while the police were mucking around arresting middle-aged protestors many kilometres away. Real terrorists would not be as ineffectual as these protestors and it is alarming that the police do not recognise this. Of course, their real agenda is not really that bothered about protecting power stations, it is more about fostering a society in which there is no protest and we meekly accept all that the government and big private companies tell us, no matter how damaging it is to us and the wider world. Police officers and their families are just as prone to suffering from the consequences of global warming, the collapse of banks that have behave recklessly, GM crops, nuclear weapons and so on, as the rest of us.
The stepping up of the suppression of protesting in the UK has come in the past fortnight. As the days pass more and more evidence has come to light of how violent the police were at the G20 summit protests. Despite their predictions the most virulent assault by protestors was on a branch of the RBS bank which was broken into and ransacked. However, only a few out of the 124 people arrested were associated with that incident and it looks like charges will not be pressed against the rest. So why did the police go on the hunt around the different protestor encampments on 1st April and simply beating up people who had generally stopped their protests by the time the police had arrived?
I know the police like football hooligans get very excitable and are looking for 'action'. They had been telling protestors this throughout the day, clearly in a desire to raise the tension and hoping to provoke a reaction which of course did not come. As no full-scale riot had manifested despite what their seniors had promised, they had to work out their desire for beating people with truncheons. Certain units were even throwing people men and women through the air. At least 120 people have made complaints about the violence by the police. The units were involved were from the Metropolitan Police (which covers almost all of London), the City of London police (which is a weird tiny unit that only covers the financial district of London) and the British Transport Police (a new departure for them, they are not usually known for such violence but clearly wanted to get a look in at how to break arms with truncheons).
The police tried to keep journalists away and even detained six press photographers. What they forgot is that these days all of us have cameras and so there is stacks of footage and stills of the police brutality. This almost immediately showed how the police were lying about the murder of Ian Tomlinson. They said he had collapsed from a heart attack and that medics were prevented by people throwing bottles from attending to him. In fact video evidence shows he was clubbed and thrown to the ground by police and lay at their feet while he died. There is photographic evidence of a whole series of truncheon wounds and police dog bites. Ironically it is likely to be the legal system and its tariff of compensation for such injuries that is going to rein in police behaviour or at least bring them to account. The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) is moving very slowly on these cases but at least the officer who murdered Ian Tomlinson has been suspended.
While I have been speaking on and off about the creeping authoritarian state in the UK, I remain an eternal optimist that these things are isolated, that people will realise they have gone too far and will rein back in their or their officers' behaviour. However, we keep seeing incidents like the ones outlined here which show how quickly civil liberties are decaying. It is ironic when the media of China, so renowned for its suppression of civil liberties and any protest, starts reporting our behaviour in that direction. How can we complain of Chinese government behaviour when they can simply turn round and say 'well, we are only behaving as you did at the G20 summit'. Such behaviour as we are seeing from the British police has an impact far beyond the UK and leads to suffering not just of British citizens. Of course the bulk of police officers, feeling empowered in their bigotry by the paranoia around Islamist terrorists, have no concern for 'foreign types'.
We must only hope that the police involved in the violence of 1st April are suspended and their constabularies have to pay out again and again compensation for the injuries and the murder that their officers inflicted. Of course, I fear more likely that simply police will investigate police and will come back with 'no case to answer'. Whatever happens, the police and those others who want to choke off any protest will have won a great victory. In the future most protestors no matter how mild their protest is going to be, will think twice before setting off to make a legal protest for fear that they will be beaten, thrown about like a rugby ball or beaten to death by British police officers. Democracy in the UK suffered a terrible blow on 1st April 2009 from which it is unlikely to recover in the short term.
P.P. 19/04/2009 - Other things are coming to light connected with these two incidents that highlight further worrying trends. Ian Tomlinson was not a protestor, he was a newspaper seller who worked in the area of the demonstration and happened to have his hands in his pockets while walking home. This apparently was a defiant gesture sufficient in the minds of the police to warrant him being clubbed to death. You do not have to be a protestor to be killed by the British police, just happen to be going about your business when the police are in a mood to carry out a killing. Employers should withdraw all employees from areas where such activity is going on, they have a moral obligation to keep their workers safe. I am pleased to hear that the policeman who murdered Ian Tomlinson may be charged with manslaughter. I do not use the word 'murder' lightly, it was clear that there was predmeditation, the police went out to kill someone and so are little different to an American teenager driving through town shooting at people. I accept that they did not target Ian Tomlinson until the last murder, but they had a 'mind to murder' from the start.
We must watch this carefully to see he is brought to court. I feel we are at a real crossroads. If this incident is swept under the carpet then the police will feel they have a green light to do this sort of thing again; protests will be choked off because people will fear being killed by the police at them. If the police are at least called to order then hopefully they will think twice before going on the rampage as they clearly did at the start of this month.
The other alarming development is around the power station protest arrests. The 114 people were arrested over a period of 36 hours. This sounds very much like a Gestapo round up of the 1930s or 1940s. Again, I do not use the word 'Gestapo' lightly. The sweeping down on people, handcuffing, forcing them to face the wall and bringing no charges against them is very like the behaviour of an authoritarian police force. Interestingly one of the people arrested was asked if they were 'proud to be a terrorist'. Clearly the definition of terrorism has now become a catch-all term and can be used in any way people choose to define those they seek to eliminate. This is very like what Adolf Hitler said, 'I decide who is a Jew', i.e. that there was no set criteria, he could simply define a person as someone he wanted removed. It is clear that the police now feel in that position too. Of course we have long seen this at airports where anyone who makes a complaint is deemed to be acting in a manner like a terrorist. This suppression of complaint and protest is clearly now being widened throughout society. As I have noted, in this atmosphere, all of us have been empowered to cause trouble for neighbours who annoy us by simply reporting them as 'hoarding' chemicals such as common garden products or rotting kidney beans, that could be used as a bomb or biological weapon. There is an easy equation: 'people we do not like = terrorist'.
I have no sympathy with the Conservative Party at all but agree that the arrest of Shadow Home Affairs Spokesperson, Damian Green was again very authoritarian. What complicates the matter is that Boris Johnson, Mayor of London was trying to tip off Green about his imminent arrest anyway, because of knowledge Johnson had got through overseeing the Metropolitan Police. I suppose it is not surprise that as the state moves further and further away from accountability and democracy that people will increasingly use influence and corruption to protect themselves from state power, so exacerbating the spiral of the collapse of a healthy civil society until it becomes a 'gangster-style' society. This term is often applied to corrupt military regimes such as that of Chiang Kai-Shek in China before the Second World War. The Blarite party fostered nepotism and favouritism so helping to create a structure which is now coming to fruition.
We are at a crossroads and I just hope UK society takes the correct road.
Perhaps it is the new generation who feel they missed out on the exciting riots of the 1980s. It is always incredible when you talk to the children of police officers or immigration officers thinking of following their parents into the force at how already they are inculcated with the bigoted attitudes. I suppose we all learn from our parents, but never have I been so startled at how ingrained negative, violent attitudes are in these people. There is no reference to serving the public or protecting society, just to the chance to suppress people. In other contexts, such as those moving to football hooliganism it is condemned, but somehow violent police are exempt from such censure.
Commentators used to speak of how the television series, 'The Sweeney' (1975-8) encouraged police to drive fast and smoke and drink heavily and 'The Bill' (since 1983) police series has tried to encourage more responsible policing as you know every police officer and his/her family watch it religiously. However, it is clear that a culture is still running deep with in the police service which sees any protest no matter how peaceful as illegitimate and in need of being put down violently. If there is no violence present, the police try to provoke it, if they fail in doing that they simply wade in and beat people.
We have a new legitimacy for attacking protestors which was given to the world by the USA following the 11th September 2001 terrorist attacks in that country. The Bush government built up an attitude that we are in constant and sustained danger which permits them to do anything (as anyone who has had their suitcase opened when it was being loaded on to an aircraft out of the USA knows, they leave a nice slip of smiley people saying how necessary it was to break into your luggage and how you must understand this), notably abductions and torture. Such attitudes foisted repeatedly on the UK by its US ally which often feels we are not sufficiently paranoid, spread widely throughout society. In the USA people were even beaten up attending the celebrations are around Barack Obama's inaugural ceremony, because despite the change at the top, the hostile attitudes lower down the hierarchy have not changed an iota yet. In this kind of attitude, the UK police, feel as they have not done since the 1980s, that they have a green light to be violent and that they will get away with it.
In the weeks leading up to the G20 protests we were told how they were going to be violent and the police would have to act forcefully. As it turned out, of course, the violence came from the police, frustrated that they had not got the battle their bosses had promised. Of course the knock-on effect and presumably the one desired by broader government was to scare off legitimate peaceful protestors from doing anything of this kind again. Stamping on legal protest is accelerating very quickly in the UK. Yesterday 114 people were arrested before they even began protesting and were 16 Km away from the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station. They were said to represent a 'serious threat' to the power station. Anyone who, like me, has been inside power stations, knows they are not that easy either to get into (certainly beyond the reception) or to damage. If they were that vulnerable to protest, surely the security should be look at.
What these police do not understand is that real terrorists, not the part-time protestors they try to portray as terrorists, real terrorists would be in there and blowing up the place while the police were mucking around arresting middle-aged protestors many kilometres away. Real terrorists would not be as ineffectual as these protestors and it is alarming that the police do not recognise this. Of course, their real agenda is not really that bothered about protecting power stations, it is more about fostering a society in which there is no protest and we meekly accept all that the government and big private companies tell us, no matter how damaging it is to us and the wider world. Police officers and their families are just as prone to suffering from the consequences of global warming, the collapse of banks that have behave recklessly, GM crops, nuclear weapons and so on, as the rest of us.
The stepping up of the suppression of protesting in the UK has come in the past fortnight. As the days pass more and more evidence has come to light of how violent the police were at the G20 summit protests. Despite their predictions the most virulent assault by protestors was on a branch of the RBS bank which was broken into and ransacked. However, only a few out of the 124 people arrested were associated with that incident and it looks like charges will not be pressed against the rest. So why did the police go on the hunt around the different protestor encampments on 1st April and simply beating up people who had generally stopped their protests by the time the police had arrived?
I know the police like football hooligans get very excitable and are looking for 'action'. They had been telling protestors this throughout the day, clearly in a desire to raise the tension and hoping to provoke a reaction which of course did not come. As no full-scale riot had manifested despite what their seniors had promised, they had to work out their desire for beating people with truncheons. Certain units were even throwing people men and women through the air. At least 120 people have made complaints about the violence by the police. The units were involved were from the Metropolitan Police (which covers almost all of London), the City of London police (which is a weird tiny unit that only covers the financial district of London) and the British Transport Police (a new departure for them, they are not usually known for such violence but clearly wanted to get a look in at how to break arms with truncheons).
The police tried to keep journalists away and even detained six press photographers. What they forgot is that these days all of us have cameras and so there is stacks of footage and stills of the police brutality. This almost immediately showed how the police were lying about the murder of Ian Tomlinson. They said he had collapsed from a heart attack and that medics were prevented by people throwing bottles from attending to him. In fact video evidence shows he was clubbed and thrown to the ground by police and lay at their feet while he died. There is photographic evidence of a whole series of truncheon wounds and police dog bites. Ironically it is likely to be the legal system and its tariff of compensation for such injuries that is going to rein in police behaviour or at least bring them to account. The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) is moving very slowly on these cases but at least the officer who murdered Ian Tomlinson has been suspended.
While I have been speaking on and off about the creeping authoritarian state in the UK, I remain an eternal optimist that these things are isolated, that people will realise they have gone too far and will rein back in their or their officers' behaviour. However, we keep seeing incidents like the ones outlined here which show how quickly civil liberties are decaying. It is ironic when the media of China, so renowned for its suppression of civil liberties and any protest, starts reporting our behaviour in that direction. How can we complain of Chinese government behaviour when they can simply turn round and say 'well, we are only behaving as you did at the G20 summit'. Such behaviour as we are seeing from the British police has an impact far beyond the UK and leads to suffering not just of British citizens. Of course the bulk of police officers, feeling empowered in their bigotry by the paranoia around Islamist terrorists, have no concern for 'foreign types'.
We must only hope that the police involved in the violence of 1st April are suspended and their constabularies have to pay out again and again compensation for the injuries and the murder that their officers inflicted. Of course, I fear more likely that simply police will investigate police and will come back with 'no case to answer'. Whatever happens, the police and those others who want to choke off any protest will have won a great victory. In the future most protestors no matter how mild their protest is going to be, will think twice before setting off to make a legal protest for fear that they will be beaten, thrown about like a rugby ball or beaten to death by British police officers. Democracy in the UK suffered a terrible blow on 1st April 2009 from which it is unlikely to recover in the short term.
P.P. 19/04/2009 - Other things are coming to light connected with these two incidents that highlight further worrying trends. Ian Tomlinson was not a protestor, he was a newspaper seller who worked in the area of the demonstration and happened to have his hands in his pockets while walking home. This apparently was a defiant gesture sufficient in the minds of the police to warrant him being clubbed to death. You do not have to be a protestor to be killed by the British police, just happen to be going about your business when the police are in a mood to carry out a killing. Employers should withdraw all employees from areas where such activity is going on, they have a moral obligation to keep their workers safe. I am pleased to hear that the policeman who murdered Ian Tomlinson may be charged with manslaughter. I do not use the word 'murder' lightly, it was clear that there was predmeditation, the police went out to kill someone and so are little different to an American teenager driving through town shooting at people. I accept that they did not target Ian Tomlinson until the last murder, but they had a 'mind to murder' from the start.
We must watch this carefully to see he is brought to court. I feel we are at a real crossroads. If this incident is swept under the carpet then the police will feel they have a green light to do this sort of thing again; protests will be choked off because people will fear being killed by the police at them. If the police are at least called to order then hopefully they will think twice before going on the rampage as they clearly did at the start of this month.
The other alarming development is around the power station protest arrests. The 114 people were arrested over a period of 36 hours. This sounds very much like a Gestapo round up of the 1930s or 1940s. Again, I do not use the word 'Gestapo' lightly. The sweeping down on people, handcuffing, forcing them to face the wall and bringing no charges against them is very like the behaviour of an authoritarian police force. Interestingly one of the people arrested was asked if they were 'proud to be a terrorist'. Clearly the definition of terrorism has now become a catch-all term and can be used in any way people choose to define those they seek to eliminate. This is very like what Adolf Hitler said, 'I decide who is a Jew', i.e. that there was no set criteria, he could simply define a person as someone he wanted removed. It is clear that the police now feel in that position too. Of course we have long seen this at airports where anyone who makes a complaint is deemed to be acting in a manner like a terrorist. This suppression of complaint and protest is clearly now being widened throughout society. As I have noted, in this atmosphere, all of us have been empowered to cause trouble for neighbours who annoy us by simply reporting them as 'hoarding' chemicals such as common garden products or rotting kidney beans, that could be used as a bomb or biological weapon. There is an easy equation: 'people we do not like = terrorist'.
I have no sympathy with the Conservative Party at all but agree that the arrest of Shadow Home Affairs Spokesperson, Damian Green was again very authoritarian. What complicates the matter is that Boris Johnson, Mayor of London was trying to tip off Green about his imminent arrest anyway, because of knowledge Johnson had got through overseeing the Metropolitan Police. I suppose it is not surprise that as the state moves further and further away from accountability and democracy that people will increasingly use influence and corruption to protect themselves from state power, so exacerbating the spiral of the collapse of a healthy civil society until it becomes a 'gangster-style' society. This term is often applied to corrupt military regimes such as that of Chiang Kai-Shek in China before the Second World War. The Blarite party fostered nepotism and favouritism so helping to create a structure which is now coming to fruition.
We are at a crossroads and I just hope UK society takes the correct road.
Wednesday, 18 March 2009
Be Patriotic: Be Paranoid
Driving through Hampshire this week I heard the Hampshire police announcing the re-launch of an anti-terrorist hotline for members of the public to telephone in and report suspicious behaviour that they feel might be connected with terrorism. Given that the last terrorist attack in Britain (so excluding Northern Ireland which is part of the UK, but not Great Britain) was in July 2005, this seems to be an incredibly tardy response from the county which has the major port and rapidly developing airport of Southampton, the port and naval base of Portsmouth, numerous Army regiments housed across the country and the major Army base at Aldershot.
In 2006 Hampshire Constabulary set up its Special Branch Contact Unit and has been whining recently that no-one is calling its hotline and clearly felt that the public needs a new jolt of warnings about terrorism? Local authorities have been criticised by the Local Government Association and by the House of Lords Constitution Committee for abusing the powers they were granted under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) which gave them the ability to put members of the public under surveillance. Not finding any terrorists, local councils have used these powers to keep people under surveillance suspected of applying to schools from outside the catchment area or allowing their dogs to foul the highway or putting out their dustbins on the wrong day for collection. In total 794 bodies including 474 councils as well as health service trusts and fire service can use the powers and apparently across Britain there are over 1000 covert surveillance operations (it is important to note the use of the word covert here, because for example, the used of closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV) is overt surveillance) being mounted each month. The most criticised council is that of the town of Poole in Dorset (a county bordering Hampshire) which used the powers to monitor people for all kinds of suspected things in most cases they were found not to be breaking regulations, e.g. on school applications, let alone the law. Its representative Tim Martin admits that the council has put 50 such covert operations into effect since RIPA was introduced in 2000, though it is clear usage has stepped up in the past couple of years.
So being stymied in its development of our authoritarian society through the means of what previously seemed to be legal covert surveillance but is now being challenged, a new approach has been adopted which is to get people to start reporting their neighbours. The radio advertisement which has followed the announcement says 'if you are suspicious, report it'. It features the sounds of a busy nightclub saying that it is only like this because the bomb that would have been planted here was prevented by someone reporting the theft of chemicals which could have been used to make a bomb, presumably this means fertilisers, so there seems a danger thay any Muslim or Irish people shopping in a garden centre better watch out (though I advise not looking at the CCTV cameras, the reason why you will see below). It then follows with a sound of a busy shopping centres, saying that a bomb was prevented by someone reporting a person looking at the CCTV cameras in the centre. The two locations are probably intended to remind the listeners of real bomb attacks, such as the Bali nightclub bomb of October 2002 and the bombing at the Arndale Centre in Manchester in June 1996. The implication is however, that we are currently under constant threat of bomb explosions across Hampshire's town centres and it is only the hard work of the Hampshire Constabulary and its informants that is preventing carnage. Where is the evidence for this high level of threat?
Informants never need encouragement. I have worked for three branches of the civil service and every day in every office in which I have been employed we received about twenty letters from informants 'shopping' (i.e. reporting them to the authorities) their neighbours who they were sure were committing some offence. The usual accusations are that the person must be committing benefit fraud or not paying their tax. Certainly where I worked the number of genuine cases were less than 1% of the ones reported to us. If I worked for 5 days x 48 weeks per year, that meant that I saw say, on average 2000 informant letters per year and that was at just one office. In one job there were three offices of the same branch of the civil service receiving coming on for 6000 informant letters per year and I imagine the Inland Revenue offices, Social Security offices, Job Centres and the police all received similar volumes of information. These days with email it is probably even easier.
It is interesting to note what the suspicious behaviour Hampshire Constabulary want you to look out for and this comes from their website: observing security procedures and routines (such as the regular marches of regiments through Winchester, home to five regiments which seem constantly on parade?), taking photographs or video (a very unusual activity in historic Winchester and Portsmouth or the New Forest also in Hampshire and basically anywhere someone might be with their family), note taking (I will make sure not to amend my shopping list or do any train spotting in Hampshire and will advise all teachers not to send their children to do projects in town) and repeat visits to a location (so I will buy my newspapers and groceries for a different shop each week and not be a regular at any pub in Hampshire and suggest that people try not to go daily to their workplace if it happens to be in Hampshire). This is utterly ridiculous. What they do not add, but is assumed is that these things are suspicious if done by a man of Middle Eastern appearance or with an Irish accent. The ironic thing is, that in Hampshire the most active terrorists are people like the Real Countryside Alliance campaigning to reinstate fox hunting and Motorists Against Detection which burns speed cameras and are made up of the middle-aged, middle-class white males that both make up the senior ranks of Hampshire police and are presumably immune from such suspicion.
To add to the paranoia that there are terrorists lurking in every shopping centre, the Hampshire police are running a seemingly unrelated poster campaign asking 'Who's walking down your street?'. The poster tells you to keep an eye out for burglars and advises you that they may be of different age, ethnic, social or gender groups to what you might expect. So the implication is to spread the paranoia far and wide and not just suspect what young, white workling class man of being a burglar but also that elderly Asian woman too. How long is it before we have checkpoints at the end of each road where you have to show your identity card and explain why you want to walk down that street before being permitted to do so. Has no-one heard of the block wardens that the Nazis introduced to their residential areas?
Parts of the government has been trying, especially since the Bradford race riots of 2001, to try to bring communities, especially those of mixed ethnicity. Yet in one of Britain's largest counties we seem to have a policy which seems to be encouraging citizens to turn on their neighbours no matter what their background. As it is, British society is incredibly insular with people closing their front doors and only looking out surepticiously to spy on happenings in the street. This is why children get abused and the corpses of elderly people lay undisturbed for weeks. This approach is the wrong one, it will simply encourage vigilanteism and hounding of people who look a little different or are simply new or disliked or are just behaving in one of these ill-defined 'suspicious' ways. This kind of reaction does nothing to make our towns safer in fact it makes them inhospitable and dangerous. Yet, the urging of some, influential in British society, if we are not sufficiently paraniod and not reporting the suspicious people the authorities assume must be active in our towns (even though the police and Security Service cannot find them), we are being unpatriotic and of course it is a short step to lacking patriotism being seen as suspicious itself. I once read a science fiction short story in which everyone in a community reported each other to the authorities and the whole village was taken away, but I will simply return to the Del Amitri song, 'Nothing Ever Happens' (1990), which reached Number 1 in the UK: 'They'll burn down the synagogues at Six o'Clock/ And we'll all go along like before/ We'll all be lonely tonight and lonely tomorrow.'
P.P. 30/03/2009 - I notice from radio advertisements that the Hampshire initiative seems to have spread nationally very quickly. Also interesting to note is that the government has been saying that anti-G20 summit protests this week will be violent and police are saying they will have to use anti-terrorist legislation. This is an unsurprising public behaviour as agents provocateur. Clearly the government wants no protest so they are seeking to provoke a violent response and scare off peaceful protestors. Next time anyone wants to do some peaceful protesting they can say 'no, look what happened last time' and ban it. Despite the shift from Blair to Brown, the step-by-step move towards an authoritarian state in the UK is continuing. These tactics are not new and you can easily find examples from European, African, Asian and American history of the past 80 years of them all being used.
P.P. 23/07/2010 - Being unemployed I currently look through all kinds of vacancies that I would not normally have encountered; this is increased by the fact that I look for work right across the UK not just in my local area. I was struck when at my local Job Centre Plus by the three separate advertisements on their job search computer, posted by the University of Brighton. They were seeking recruits who have previously served in the Security Service, i.e. MI5, to work for the university at three locations in southern England, only one of which seemed to be Brighton itself, vetting their students. Clearly this university alone (or perhaps it is simply more open about the fact than the others) believes it runs the risk of having terrorists among its intake and thinks it needs skilled people to check them out. The salary seemed pretty desultory for the kind of skills they are seeking, but I guess that is an implication of cutbacks in higher education. The radio advertisements encouraging paranoia may not be currently running, but the outlook they have fostered seems to be living on in various corners of UK society.
In 2006 Hampshire Constabulary set up its Special Branch Contact Unit and has been whining recently that no-one is calling its hotline and clearly felt that the public needs a new jolt of warnings about terrorism? Local authorities have been criticised by the Local Government Association and by the House of Lords Constitution Committee for abusing the powers they were granted under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) which gave them the ability to put members of the public under surveillance. Not finding any terrorists, local councils have used these powers to keep people under surveillance suspected of applying to schools from outside the catchment area or allowing their dogs to foul the highway or putting out their dustbins on the wrong day for collection. In total 794 bodies including 474 councils as well as health service trusts and fire service can use the powers and apparently across Britain there are over 1000 covert surveillance operations (it is important to note the use of the word covert here, because for example, the used of closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV) is overt surveillance) being mounted each month. The most criticised council is that of the town of Poole in Dorset (a county bordering Hampshire) which used the powers to monitor people for all kinds of suspected things in most cases they were found not to be breaking regulations, e.g. on school applications, let alone the law. Its representative Tim Martin admits that the council has put 50 such covert operations into effect since RIPA was introduced in 2000, though it is clear usage has stepped up in the past couple of years.
So being stymied in its development of our authoritarian society through the means of what previously seemed to be legal covert surveillance but is now being challenged, a new approach has been adopted which is to get people to start reporting their neighbours. The radio advertisement which has followed the announcement says 'if you are suspicious, report it'. It features the sounds of a busy nightclub saying that it is only like this because the bomb that would have been planted here was prevented by someone reporting the theft of chemicals which could have been used to make a bomb, presumably this means fertilisers, so there seems a danger thay any Muslim or Irish people shopping in a garden centre better watch out (though I advise not looking at the CCTV cameras, the reason why you will see below). It then follows with a sound of a busy shopping centres, saying that a bomb was prevented by someone reporting a person looking at the CCTV cameras in the centre. The two locations are probably intended to remind the listeners of real bomb attacks, such as the Bali nightclub bomb of October 2002 and the bombing at the Arndale Centre in Manchester in June 1996. The implication is however, that we are currently under constant threat of bomb explosions across Hampshire's town centres and it is only the hard work of the Hampshire Constabulary and its informants that is preventing carnage. Where is the evidence for this high level of threat?
Informants never need encouragement. I have worked for three branches of the civil service and every day in every office in which I have been employed we received about twenty letters from informants 'shopping' (i.e. reporting them to the authorities) their neighbours who they were sure were committing some offence. The usual accusations are that the person must be committing benefit fraud or not paying their tax. Certainly where I worked the number of genuine cases were less than 1% of the ones reported to us. If I worked for 5 days x 48 weeks per year, that meant that I saw say, on average 2000 informant letters per year and that was at just one office. In one job there were three offices of the same branch of the civil service receiving coming on for 6000 informant letters per year and I imagine the Inland Revenue offices, Social Security offices, Job Centres and the police all received similar volumes of information. These days with email it is probably even easier.
It is interesting to note what the suspicious behaviour Hampshire Constabulary want you to look out for and this comes from their website: observing security procedures and routines (such as the regular marches of regiments through Winchester, home to five regiments which seem constantly on parade?), taking photographs or video (a very unusual activity in historic Winchester and Portsmouth or the New Forest also in Hampshire and basically anywhere someone might be with their family), note taking (I will make sure not to amend my shopping list or do any train spotting in Hampshire and will advise all teachers not to send their children to do projects in town) and repeat visits to a location (so I will buy my newspapers and groceries for a different shop each week and not be a regular at any pub in Hampshire and suggest that people try not to go daily to their workplace if it happens to be in Hampshire). This is utterly ridiculous. What they do not add, but is assumed is that these things are suspicious if done by a man of Middle Eastern appearance or with an Irish accent. The ironic thing is, that in Hampshire the most active terrorists are people like the Real Countryside Alliance campaigning to reinstate fox hunting and Motorists Against Detection which burns speed cameras and are made up of the middle-aged, middle-class white males that both make up the senior ranks of Hampshire police and are presumably immune from such suspicion.
To add to the paranoia that there are terrorists lurking in every shopping centre, the Hampshire police are running a seemingly unrelated poster campaign asking 'Who's walking down your street?'. The poster tells you to keep an eye out for burglars and advises you that they may be of different age, ethnic, social or gender groups to what you might expect. So the implication is to spread the paranoia far and wide and not just suspect what young, white workling class man of being a burglar but also that elderly Asian woman too. How long is it before we have checkpoints at the end of each road where you have to show your identity card and explain why you want to walk down that street before being permitted to do so. Has no-one heard of the block wardens that the Nazis introduced to their residential areas?
Parts of the government has been trying, especially since the Bradford race riots of 2001, to try to bring communities, especially those of mixed ethnicity. Yet in one of Britain's largest counties we seem to have a policy which seems to be encouraging citizens to turn on their neighbours no matter what their background. As it is, British society is incredibly insular with people closing their front doors and only looking out surepticiously to spy on happenings in the street. This is why children get abused and the corpses of elderly people lay undisturbed for weeks. This approach is the wrong one, it will simply encourage vigilanteism and hounding of people who look a little different or are simply new or disliked or are just behaving in one of these ill-defined 'suspicious' ways. This kind of reaction does nothing to make our towns safer in fact it makes them inhospitable and dangerous. Yet, the urging of some, influential in British society, if we are not sufficiently paraniod and not reporting the suspicious people the authorities assume must be active in our towns (even though the police and Security Service cannot find them), we are being unpatriotic and of course it is a short step to lacking patriotism being seen as suspicious itself. I once read a science fiction short story in which everyone in a community reported each other to the authorities and the whole village was taken away, but I will simply return to the Del Amitri song, 'Nothing Ever Happens' (1990), which reached Number 1 in the UK: 'They'll burn down the synagogues at Six o'Clock/ And we'll all go along like before/ We'll all be lonely tonight and lonely tomorrow.'
P.P. 30/03/2009 - I notice from radio advertisements that the Hampshire initiative seems to have spread nationally very quickly. Also interesting to note is that the government has been saying that anti-G20 summit protests this week will be violent and police are saying they will have to use anti-terrorist legislation. This is an unsurprising public behaviour as agents provocateur. Clearly the government wants no protest so they are seeking to provoke a violent response and scare off peaceful protestors. Next time anyone wants to do some peaceful protesting they can say 'no, look what happened last time' and ban it. Despite the shift from Blair to Brown, the step-by-step move towards an authoritarian state in the UK is continuing. These tactics are not new and you can easily find examples from European, African, Asian and American history of the past 80 years of them all being used.
P.P. 23/07/2010 - Being unemployed I currently look through all kinds of vacancies that I would not normally have encountered; this is increased by the fact that I look for work right across the UK not just in my local area. I was struck when at my local Job Centre Plus by the three separate advertisements on their job search computer, posted by the University of Brighton. They were seeking recruits who have previously served in the Security Service, i.e. MI5, to work for the university at three locations in southern England, only one of which seemed to be Brighton itself, vetting their students. Clearly this university alone (or perhaps it is simply more open about the fact than the others) believes it runs the risk of having terrorists among its intake and thinks it needs skilled people to check them out. The salary seemed pretty desultory for the kind of skills they are seeking, but I guess that is an implication of cutbacks in higher education. The radio advertisements encouraging paranoia may not be currently running, but the outlook they have fostered seems to be living on in various corners of UK society.
Wednesday, 30 April 2008
Police Road Blocks Around Christchurch
Last month I blogged what I felt was the likely timescale for the construction of a police state in the UK something the Blair government and now the Brown government seemed set on doing, for example through extending the period of detention without charge to 42 days. Maybe I was optimistic in how long all of this would take as today I encountered the first police checkpoint in the UK that I have been aware of since the Miners' Strike of 1984-5 when police had the right to stop anyone anywhere (including infamously in the Blackwall Tunnel in London, scores of miles from any coal mine) if they suspected them of going to a picket around a coal mine. What I encountered this evening trying to drive through Christchurch which I thought was in Hampshire, but it turns out is in Dorset, reminded me of the one-off TV drama 'Party Time' (1992) written by Harold Pinter and starring Barry Foster. It was set in the near future in which the UK is a police state and many of the guests coming to the party are delayed by police checkpoints. Time passes so quickly that it is odd to think that here in 2008 we are in fact in the 'near future' of people living in 1992, so I guess it should not be too surprising that some elements of that play have already come true. Pinter is an astute playwright.
Anyway, if you have to drive anywhere near Christchurch (and I only had to because an accident had blocked the main road I was taking West), my advice is do not. It may only be temporary but these evening there are police roadblocks on all of the main roads into the town and they seem to be stopping everyone. They are heavily staffed with ten officers at each checkpoint. I saw them with car boots open, they were clearly searching cars. When I questioned the officer he denied there was any terrorist activity in the area. That may be what they always say but more alarmingly, it may suggest that this is now 'normal' police behaviour around the town. I think I was particularly pulled over because people often mistake me for a Pole. Around 1 million Poles moved to the UK in 2006 and the number for 2007 was probably not much less. In the city of Southampton around 20 miles to the East of Christchurch with a population over 220,000, 10% of the people are now from Poland. There has not been any real racial tension, though I see a BNP (British National Party, a fascist party) candidates is standing in Bournemouth next door to Christchurch. This is outside the BNP's normal area of operations in East London and Lancashire, but may represent that they feel a way in there if there is racist behaviour going on.
Anyway, when the policeman spoke to me and heard my middle class English accent he let me go. This suggests that not only do we have roadblocks as normal behaviour in the UK now but that the actions taken at them (for example whether to search the car or not) depends on the nationality or ethnicity of the driver. So, I advise all drivers to stay clear of what seems to have become a mini-authoritarian state of Christchurch in Dorset and especially if you happen to be of East European origins (or, presumably, Middle Eastern extraction too given how obsessed the UK remains with al-Qaeda).
I always hope that when I see signs of the growing police state in Britain that they are an error, that Christchurch police had a slow day and decided to exercise their powers. Who can blame then when you find Poole Council (hang on, that is next to Bournemouth, is there some kind of testing ground for an authoritarian regime going on in South-West England) was using anti-terrorism powers to put surveillance on three families trying to get their children into a particular state school. Anyway, I hope these things are an error, but how many errors can you accept before you have to recognise that the police state is already here?
P.P. I did wonder why Christchurch should be the focus of such police activity and then I looked on the map and realised that it lies very close to Bournemouth Airport and in fact the road I had been diverted on to runs right to the airport. Furthermore, Bournemouth Airport (along with Prestwick Airport) has been one of the airports at which CIA rendition flights on their way to Guantanamo Bay have been stopping. So, though I still believe that the police state is creeping up on us quickly, in this case it looks like the British police were actually acting on behalf of the Americans. Presumably they suspected protests or something at the airport and were keen to keep people, that in their eyes looked suspicious, away from the location so as not to embarrass the Americans.
P.P. 16/08/2010: I have now found out that these road blocks are an annual event, we are told, simply connected with monitoring traffic flow. Apparently, they are not mentioned on local radio or television traffic reports so that people do not alter their route to avoid them. I also, found that I was in my rights to refuse to speak to them. Despite the presence of the police and their assistants wearing a kind of uniform and official badge, you are not at all obliged to talk to them, the best thing is simply to sit in your car with your window closed and simply look ahead. Wait until they have finished with everyone else and then simply drive on when the car in front of you does. In spite of these road blocks (and I will call them nothing else as they do block the road and prevent you driving on) being given an innocuous spin, I would ask why is one stretch of road, close to an airport used by the CIA checked year in/year out. What is so significant about Christchurch, Bournemouth even, that needs such attention? I could understand it better around Southampton, Portsmouth or Bristol, but two holiday resorts? Maybe I have been lucky and have missed out on such other road blocks around actually important urban centres. If you have encountered some let me know and we can start a list of the black spots and the time of year they are likely to have road blocks, for whatever reason we are told we need them.
Anyway, if you have to drive anywhere near Christchurch (and I only had to because an accident had blocked the main road I was taking West), my advice is do not. It may only be temporary but these evening there are police roadblocks on all of the main roads into the town and they seem to be stopping everyone. They are heavily staffed with ten officers at each checkpoint. I saw them with car boots open, they were clearly searching cars. When I questioned the officer he denied there was any terrorist activity in the area. That may be what they always say but more alarmingly, it may suggest that this is now 'normal' police behaviour around the town. I think I was particularly pulled over because people often mistake me for a Pole. Around 1 million Poles moved to the UK in 2006 and the number for 2007 was probably not much less. In the city of Southampton around 20 miles to the East of Christchurch with a population over 220,000, 10% of the people are now from Poland. There has not been any real racial tension, though I see a BNP (British National Party, a fascist party) candidates is standing in Bournemouth next door to Christchurch. This is outside the BNP's normal area of operations in East London and Lancashire, but may represent that they feel a way in there if there is racist behaviour going on.
Anyway, when the policeman spoke to me and heard my middle class English accent he let me go. This suggests that not only do we have roadblocks as normal behaviour in the UK now but that the actions taken at them (for example whether to search the car or not) depends on the nationality or ethnicity of the driver. So, I advise all drivers to stay clear of what seems to have become a mini-authoritarian state of Christchurch in Dorset and especially if you happen to be of East European origins (or, presumably, Middle Eastern extraction too given how obsessed the UK remains with al-Qaeda).
I always hope that when I see signs of the growing police state in Britain that they are an error, that Christchurch police had a slow day and decided to exercise their powers. Who can blame then when you find Poole Council (hang on, that is next to Bournemouth, is there some kind of testing ground for an authoritarian regime going on in South-West England) was using anti-terrorism powers to put surveillance on three families trying to get their children into a particular state school. Anyway, I hope these things are an error, but how many errors can you accept before you have to recognise that the police state is already here?
P.P. I did wonder why Christchurch should be the focus of such police activity and then I looked on the map and realised that it lies very close to Bournemouth Airport and in fact the road I had been diverted on to runs right to the airport. Furthermore, Bournemouth Airport (along with Prestwick Airport) has been one of the airports at which CIA rendition flights on their way to Guantanamo Bay have been stopping. So, though I still believe that the police state is creeping up on us quickly, in this case it looks like the British police were actually acting on behalf of the Americans. Presumably they suspected protests or something at the airport and were keen to keep people, that in their eyes looked suspicious, away from the location so as not to embarrass the Americans.
P.P. 16/08/2010: I have now found out that these road blocks are an annual event, we are told, simply connected with monitoring traffic flow. Apparently, they are not mentioned on local radio or television traffic reports so that people do not alter their route to avoid them. I also, found that I was in my rights to refuse to speak to them. Despite the presence of the police and their assistants wearing a kind of uniform and official badge, you are not at all obliged to talk to them, the best thing is simply to sit in your car with your window closed and simply look ahead. Wait until they have finished with everyone else and then simply drive on when the car in front of you does. In spite of these road blocks (and I will call them nothing else as they do block the road and prevent you driving on) being given an innocuous spin, I would ask why is one stretch of road, close to an airport used by the CIA checked year in/year out. What is so significant about Christchurch, Bournemouth even, that needs such attention? I could understand it better around Southampton, Portsmouth or Bristol, but two holiday resorts? Maybe I have been lucky and have missed out on such other road blocks around actually important urban centres. If you have encountered some let me know and we can start a list of the black spots and the time of year they are likely to have road blocks, for whatever reason we are told we need them.
Saturday, 8 March 2008
Next Steps in Constructing the British Police State
With the announcement this week that identity cards which had fallen from public attention in the past few months were not only going to be introduced but on a more rapid schedule at a cost over over £5 billion (€6.65 billion; US$9.95 billion) and the continued attempts to increase the time a prisoner can be held without charge from 28 days to 42 days indicates that the Blairite agenda of sweeping away civil liberties is continuing full force under Brown. The question is what can we expect next? Obviously opposition to identity cards and extended detention (which they want to extend to 90 days, 42 days is the 'compromise') has slowed down the programme, but given the government's desire to push it on it is likely to continue. Now, there are lots of examples of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes that we can look at for examples. Some of these are getting out of date now. The last fascist regime in Europe ended in Spain in 1975 and the last Communist states in Europe fell in 1991. However, even if we have to look back to the 1940s, it is really only the technology that has changed and not the way in which governments want to control people, so we can draw parallels. The Nazis did not have CCTV or retinal scans or computer databases (though IBM helped them number crunch the Holocaust), they still kept track of people as governments wish to today it just needed more time and effort.
In the past I have argued that the kind of state that Blair was seeking to construct resembled Vichy France 1940-3/4 or Corporatist Austria 1934-8 (i.e. before it was absorbed by Germany) in having a prejudiced state without democratic rights and with strong police powers but based on a Christian nationalist basis so lots of emphasis on the (Catholic) Church, national identity, hard work, sacrifice and the family. Blair used rhetoric from Vichy France and so I imagine this is still the model the government is aiming for. However, with the departure of Blair (soon formally to become a Catholic) and his replacement with Brown has shifted the emphasis towards a more Presbyterian, quietist rhetoric, but still aiming for the state attributes that were Blair's goals. This is unsurprising as Blair and Brown worked closely for over a decade and whilst they did not agree on everything, they cannot have had diametrically opposed views on what they wanted for British society.
Right, now by 2009 I anticipate we will have 42-day detention without charge and identity cards, already in place for foreigners and coming in for British people too. Already in 2008 you now have to wait 6 weeks to get a passport and will have an interview before being given one. This kind of thing will increase so that you will be checked up on more regularly by government bodies. The excuse is that it prevents identity fraud but there is no evidence it has reduced it at all. You will probably start being checked before you can get a national insurance number or a driving licence, not just whether you qualify but whether you are the 'right' kind of person. This legal shift from people being guilty because of what they do, i.e. commit a crime to being assumed guilty because of who they are, e.g. a foreigner or a 'subversive' is always characteristic of authoritarian regimes. The government has already revived the police power of 'stop and search', popularly known as 'sus'. They have also talked about curfews of 9pm for under sixteens. Before long it will be a crime to be out without your identity card leading to immediate arrest and then I envisage, taking slightly longer we will have curfews for adults too. The use of ASBOs (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders) is supposed to stop disruptive youths but they are often applied to mature and elderly people and now they are in place they will be used to stop people assembling in certain areas or meeting with each other. ASBOs seem ineffectual, but that is actually beneficial for the government as few people have noticed they actually curtail the right of individuals to the freedom of assembly or to go where they like in public areas.
The other noticeable thing is that universities are being asked to keep check on 'suspicious' students, especially from abroad. In fact this was already in place during the Cold War, it is now just becoming more overt. Lecturers have resisted this, but once they start seeing that the universities and the staff that get government funding are those that best comply with what the government is asking for on surveillance they will get in line or be forced to do so by their managers, desperate for funding. Such checks I envisage will extend through other sectors of society, next, I imagine will be the National Health Service, particularly due to how dependent Britain is on doctors and nurses from abroad, and the Civil Service. These three areas were the professions which the Nazis purged the Jews first.
Within, say, five years, appraisals in all jobs, and certainly those in the public sector, will include checking how loyal you are to the state and whether you are involved in 'subversive' activity. I also imagine that we will get something as they have in China where everyone has a file that goes with them as they move from job to job and in particular records any protests they have been involved in. Effectively it creates an automatic blacklist because if you go for a job interview and the employers see in your file that you are politically active they simply do not employ you. Nazi Germany had a similar work card system. Most people will keep quiet to keep their jobs, especially as the media is telling us we have to compete so hard for them especially with foreign workers and especially if you are a man. This builds up compliance and also increased resentment against people who are 'other', two things the government is keen to do.
One clear element of an authoritarian regime is its secret police force. Well, first there is the issue of surveillance. Already we are moving to bugged or wire tap evidence being used in court. The standard police already make use of such devices but clearly they are incredibly beneficial to secret police bodies. Whilst torture is banned in the UK there seems an increasing willingness to use evidence gained under torture in other countries notably the USA. Britain may find that like the Americans with Guantanamo Bay on Cuba, that there is a little bit of empire left which is strictly not Britain and where they can use torture without violating UK laws or maybe they will just leave it to the Americans to do it for them. The use of torture to gain evidence in the UK, I doubt will be here until late in the 2010s, especially as surveillance technologies are so sophisticated that they allow 'suspicious' people to damn themselves with their own words. Since the early 2000s all emails sent from the UK have passed through security service devices (surprisingly in the Clinton era this fact actually upset American businesses, but since 2001 they seem to have stopped complaining) and GCHQ in Cheltenham has long been tapping telephone conversations. It is always fun to wind them up by using buzz words that their computers are looking for in innocent conversations on the phone. Mobile phones and laptops are even easier to get a grip on, even a member of the public with a few hundred pounds can get enough equipment to start listening into you and parents now can subscribe to a service that allows them to locate their children by their mobile phone usage. In addition, bascially anything you see on a spy movie has been in use 5-10 years by the time you see it.
Back to the secret police. Well, we have MI5 (also known as the Security Service) as our counter-intelligence agency, which gets great PR from the televisions series 'Spooks'. If you look at the very complex police structure of Nazi Germany you find MI5 resembles most the SD (Sicherheitdienst, literally Security Service), but MI5 lacks the power of arrest they are just about intelligence gathering. Though I am sure they do not hold back from abducting the odd person here or there. Britain had Special Branch which was a part of the Metropolitan (i.e. London) police force founded in 1883 and throughout its history often focused on Irish terrorism, though in the 1960s and 1970s it also focused on trade unionists and political extremists. In 1992 MI5 out of work following the end of the Cold War took over much of its anti-terrorist work. Special Branch (600 officers) was merged in 2005 with the Counter-Terrorism Branch SO13 (500 officers) to create a new body, the Counter-Terrorism Command with extra officers to lift its number to 2000. Special Branch is assigned the intelligence gathering and the former SO13 part the investigative (and arrest part). This is similar to what happened in Nazi Germany in 1939 when the Gestapo and SD were merged in the so-called RSHA but kept their previous roles. The new CTC explicitly mentions that its roles now branded 'counter-extremism' includes monitoring political, animal rights, anti-globalization, and environmental 'extremism'. This has nothing to do with al-Qaeda it is just about keeping down protest. So while the UK does not have a Department of Homeland Security, it certainly already has its secret police force and in larger numbers than at the peak of the Cold War and Irish terrorist activity. I have forgotten the new UK Border Agency launched this week bringing together customs and excise and immigration units. It is going to be responsible for identity cards for foreigners in the UK and is aiming to increase its detention capacity as part of its year long programme. This is one irony of the UK's rush to become a police state, its prisons are currently full, so maybe they will have to concentrate people in camps in rural areas just like the Australians do when they intern asylum seekers in camps in the outback. The UK has just adopted the Australian system for regulating foreigners coming into the UK so it cannot be long before it adopts the Australian concentration camp system too (of course invented by the British anyway at the start of the 20th century for interning Boer families in South Africa).
Censorship, well, that seems already to be effectively in place given that we had to wait 10 weeks to find out about where Prince Harry was. The UK has always had its D-Notice Committee which sends out notices to British media blocking them from reporting various things and at times journalists have had their resources seized. The fact that so much of the media is in the hands of so few people and the BBC network is semi-state owned. I never understand when politicians call it left-wing, it is so pro-Establishment that it is painful, I think that is just a blind played by politicians who want overt censorship powers and it is interesting that authoritarian regimes do not like interesting programmes. Only Josef Goebbels, propaganda minister of Nazi Germany recognised that you just had to provide tacky entertainment to keep the masses happy and we seem to have arrived at that stage now with all the reality shows. George Galloway's failure to subvert the 'Big Brother' series by appearing on it demonstrated the inability to dent that power. However, control of the media is far tougher now even when you have the media producers on your side. China spends immense amounts of money policing the internet and Singapore has had to give up as it is too expensive. When you can log on and get news coverage from across the planet it is difficult to stop people seeing a different viewpoint. The Chinese do it by arresting bloggers and others who take a political line and by encouraging society to see it as bad to look at other sources of information (animated police characters come on screen when you connect to such websites). So establishing societal norms against accessing 'improper' information and arresting the most outspoken is probably the path the UK will adopt. It is helped by the fact that the UK has long been a country disinterested in politics anyway, few people vote or read political news stories, and that is actually in sharp contrast to the population of China which has a long history of political activism. Censorship and self-censorship and shoving meaningless news and programmes at us is already under way and is liable to keep increasing at its current steady rate.
The other element the government needs to put in place more actively if it is truly going to get the authoritarian state it desires is a mass movement. As noted above the British are apathetic so are reluctant to get involved. Various newspapers run bigoted, pro-military campaigns that attract short-term support, but unlike the Americans, the British do not adhere to mass movements even when scared and they forget the frights very quickly. Partly the problem with a mass movement is that British society is so fragmented with region, class, age, etc. and lacks common grounds that groups in places like the USA can coalesce around. We cannot even agree on St. George's Day let alone the flag and so on. Getting people together in the UK shows up the class differences which riles the British more than anything else. So, what I envisage is again that the British government will follow the Nazi model and have a whole series of patriotic groups, ones associated with teachers and nurses and truck drivers and mothers and young people and old people and so on. They can draw in groups that already exist, the scout movement in the UK already has a very patriotic agenda and I imagine we will see it increasing in size and support from the state. Something like a spin-off from the Countryside Alliance may become the rural arm and across the UK we will see more of these bodies becoming corporations of the state, seeming to represent the voice of their members but in fact constraining them to the line set by the government. Fascist Italy was very keen on this approach and even ended up with a part of its parliament at which all these different groups were formally represented.
The spin-off from the mass movement is to get a watcher on every street. Authoritarian regimes are fuelled by the so-called 'little Hitlers' you see in every country. These are the self-righteous busybodies who love to have some power over their neighbours and to police their behaviour. They are everywhere especially on residents' groups and pushing for ASBOs against people they take a dislike to. There are many on local councils too and most magistrates (the part-time judges at the British equivalent of police courts) fit this category. They think they are better than the rest of us and love getting official power from the state. They flourished during the Second World War when every Home Guard soldier and every ARP (Air Raid Precautions) officer fell into this category (excellently portrayed in the long-running TV series, 'Dad's Army' in all their officiousness) to the extent that Home Guard checkpoints slowed up the movement of the regular army as their officers could often not prove they were not German agents in disguise and would be arrested. Millions of Britons would relish the chance to become Anti-Terrorist Warden for their street and bully anyone they feel is 'different' or 'improper' with official sanction. Again, this was an approach the Nazis adopted with their block wardens (as Germans generally live in blocks of flats) and China does with its danwei work group system. People say that the British do not like behaving this way and policing their neighbours, that is utter rubbish. If like me you ever work in the post room of the local tax office or benefits office, every day you have to deal with letters from people 'shopping' (i.e. asking people to be investigated and arrested) their neighbours who they suspect of defrauding the government. Only a tiny fraction of these letters are ever accurate and most simply reflect jealousy of what the neighbour has or indignation at how they live their lives. So, Britain has got a ready made body of ATWs just waiting for the government to mobilise them. There was one minor attempt back in the early 2000s when the government sent round information about defending yourself from terrorism, but they did not really follow it up or get a movement behind it.
So, these are the next steps the UK is likely to take in building its police state. Many things like ASBOs are well established it just needs other elements to come together with them and suddenly they become much more powerful. Things that have been growing in recent years such as censorship and control over our movements will continue to do so quietly. We have already lost so many freedoms since 1997 that you do not realise until you sit down and look back that you can see the changes. Of course there is an injection of fear once in a while and the British need more of them because we forget our fears much faster than the Americans do. I predict some terrorist attack at a large event this Summer just to cap off the new developments with identity cards and show us why we would should yield to our fears and instead accept the warm protecting arm of our authoritarian government. Get out now and ramble through the countryside possibly bringing you near some base (driving through southern England last year, I pulled over to check my map and found I had inadvertently pulled into the entrance to the Porton Down chemical and biological weapons research centre, I did wonder why there was such a big fence and all the cameras), and meet up with your friends on a street corner one night, go into town without it being filled with people in military uniforms (do that one quick as the rules are being changed as we sit here), do all these things before you lose the right.
While researching for this posting I came across a useful site called Statewatch which monitors civil liberties right across the European Union. It has great resources on all of the issues I have covered here, go visit it at: http://www.statewatch.org/
In the past I have argued that the kind of state that Blair was seeking to construct resembled Vichy France 1940-3/4 or Corporatist Austria 1934-8 (i.e. before it was absorbed by Germany) in having a prejudiced state without democratic rights and with strong police powers but based on a Christian nationalist basis so lots of emphasis on the (Catholic) Church, national identity, hard work, sacrifice and the family. Blair used rhetoric from Vichy France and so I imagine this is still the model the government is aiming for. However, with the departure of Blair (soon formally to become a Catholic) and his replacement with Brown has shifted the emphasis towards a more Presbyterian, quietist rhetoric, but still aiming for the state attributes that were Blair's goals. This is unsurprising as Blair and Brown worked closely for over a decade and whilst they did not agree on everything, they cannot have had diametrically opposed views on what they wanted for British society.
Right, now by 2009 I anticipate we will have 42-day detention without charge and identity cards, already in place for foreigners and coming in for British people too. Already in 2008 you now have to wait 6 weeks to get a passport and will have an interview before being given one. This kind of thing will increase so that you will be checked up on more regularly by government bodies. The excuse is that it prevents identity fraud but there is no evidence it has reduced it at all. You will probably start being checked before you can get a national insurance number or a driving licence, not just whether you qualify but whether you are the 'right' kind of person. This legal shift from people being guilty because of what they do, i.e. commit a crime to being assumed guilty because of who they are, e.g. a foreigner or a 'subversive' is always characteristic of authoritarian regimes. The government has already revived the police power of 'stop and search', popularly known as 'sus'. They have also talked about curfews of 9pm for under sixteens. Before long it will be a crime to be out without your identity card leading to immediate arrest and then I envisage, taking slightly longer we will have curfews for adults too. The use of ASBOs (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders) is supposed to stop disruptive youths but they are often applied to mature and elderly people and now they are in place they will be used to stop people assembling in certain areas or meeting with each other. ASBOs seem ineffectual, but that is actually beneficial for the government as few people have noticed they actually curtail the right of individuals to the freedom of assembly or to go where they like in public areas.
The other noticeable thing is that universities are being asked to keep check on 'suspicious' students, especially from abroad. In fact this was already in place during the Cold War, it is now just becoming more overt. Lecturers have resisted this, but once they start seeing that the universities and the staff that get government funding are those that best comply with what the government is asking for on surveillance they will get in line or be forced to do so by their managers, desperate for funding. Such checks I envisage will extend through other sectors of society, next, I imagine will be the National Health Service, particularly due to how dependent Britain is on doctors and nurses from abroad, and the Civil Service. These three areas were the professions which the Nazis purged the Jews first.
Within, say, five years, appraisals in all jobs, and certainly those in the public sector, will include checking how loyal you are to the state and whether you are involved in 'subversive' activity. I also imagine that we will get something as they have in China where everyone has a file that goes with them as they move from job to job and in particular records any protests they have been involved in. Effectively it creates an automatic blacklist because if you go for a job interview and the employers see in your file that you are politically active they simply do not employ you. Nazi Germany had a similar work card system. Most people will keep quiet to keep their jobs, especially as the media is telling us we have to compete so hard for them especially with foreign workers and especially if you are a man. This builds up compliance and also increased resentment against people who are 'other', two things the government is keen to do.
One clear element of an authoritarian regime is its secret police force. Well, first there is the issue of surveillance. Already we are moving to bugged or wire tap evidence being used in court. The standard police already make use of such devices but clearly they are incredibly beneficial to secret police bodies. Whilst torture is banned in the UK there seems an increasing willingness to use evidence gained under torture in other countries notably the USA. Britain may find that like the Americans with Guantanamo Bay on Cuba, that there is a little bit of empire left which is strictly not Britain and where they can use torture without violating UK laws or maybe they will just leave it to the Americans to do it for them. The use of torture to gain evidence in the UK, I doubt will be here until late in the 2010s, especially as surveillance technologies are so sophisticated that they allow 'suspicious' people to damn themselves with their own words. Since the early 2000s all emails sent from the UK have passed through security service devices (surprisingly in the Clinton era this fact actually upset American businesses, but since 2001 they seem to have stopped complaining) and GCHQ in Cheltenham has long been tapping telephone conversations. It is always fun to wind them up by using buzz words that their computers are looking for in innocent conversations on the phone. Mobile phones and laptops are even easier to get a grip on, even a member of the public with a few hundred pounds can get enough equipment to start listening into you and parents now can subscribe to a service that allows them to locate their children by their mobile phone usage. In addition, bascially anything you see on a spy movie has been in use 5-10 years by the time you see it.
Back to the secret police. Well, we have MI5 (also known as the Security Service) as our counter-intelligence agency, which gets great PR from the televisions series 'Spooks'. If you look at the very complex police structure of Nazi Germany you find MI5 resembles most the SD (Sicherheitdienst, literally Security Service), but MI5 lacks the power of arrest they are just about intelligence gathering. Though I am sure they do not hold back from abducting the odd person here or there. Britain had Special Branch which was a part of the Metropolitan (i.e. London) police force founded in 1883 and throughout its history often focused on Irish terrorism, though in the 1960s and 1970s it also focused on trade unionists and political extremists. In 1992 MI5 out of work following the end of the Cold War took over much of its anti-terrorist work. Special Branch (600 officers) was merged in 2005 with the Counter-Terrorism Branch SO13 (500 officers) to create a new body, the Counter-Terrorism Command with extra officers to lift its number to 2000. Special Branch is assigned the intelligence gathering and the former SO13 part the investigative (and arrest part). This is similar to what happened in Nazi Germany in 1939 when the Gestapo and SD were merged in the so-called RSHA but kept their previous roles. The new CTC explicitly mentions that its roles now branded 'counter-extremism' includes monitoring political, animal rights, anti-globalization, and environmental 'extremism'. This has nothing to do with al-Qaeda it is just about keeping down protest. So while the UK does not have a Department of Homeland Security, it certainly already has its secret police force and in larger numbers than at the peak of the Cold War and Irish terrorist activity. I have forgotten the new UK Border Agency launched this week bringing together customs and excise and immigration units. It is going to be responsible for identity cards for foreigners in the UK and is aiming to increase its detention capacity as part of its year long programme. This is one irony of the UK's rush to become a police state, its prisons are currently full, so maybe they will have to concentrate people in camps in rural areas just like the Australians do when they intern asylum seekers in camps in the outback. The UK has just adopted the Australian system for regulating foreigners coming into the UK so it cannot be long before it adopts the Australian concentration camp system too (of course invented by the British anyway at the start of the 20th century for interning Boer families in South Africa).
Censorship, well, that seems already to be effectively in place given that we had to wait 10 weeks to find out about where Prince Harry was. The UK has always had its D-Notice Committee which sends out notices to British media blocking them from reporting various things and at times journalists have had their resources seized. The fact that so much of the media is in the hands of so few people and the BBC network is semi-state owned. I never understand when politicians call it left-wing, it is so pro-Establishment that it is painful, I think that is just a blind played by politicians who want overt censorship powers and it is interesting that authoritarian regimes do not like interesting programmes. Only Josef Goebbels, propaganda minister of Nazi Germany recognised that you just had to provide tacky entertainment to keep the masses happy and we seem to have arrived at that stage now with all the reality shows. George Galloway's failure to subvert the 'Big Brother' series by appearing on it demonstrated the inability to dent that power. However, control of the media is far tougher now even when you have the media producers on your side. China spends immense amounts of money policing the internet and Singapore has had to give up as it is too expensive. When you can log on and get news coverage from across the planet it is difficult to stop people seeing a different viewpoint. The Chinese do it by arresting bloggers and others who take a political line and by encouraging society to see it as bad to look at other sources of information (animated police characters come on screen when you connect to such websites). So establishing societal norms against accessing 'improper' information and arresting the most outspoken is probably the path the UK will adopt. It is helped by the fact that the UK has long been a country disinterested in politics anyway, few people vote or read political news stories, and that is actually in sharp contrast to the population of China which has a long history of political activism. Censorship and self-censorship and shoving meaningless news and programmes at us is already under way and is liable to keep increasing at its current steady rate.
The other element the government needs to put in place more actively if it is truly going to get the authoritarian state it desires is a mass movement. As noted above the British are apathetic so are reluctant to get involved. Various newspapers run bigoted, pro-military campaigns that attract short-term support, but unlike the Americans, the British do not adhere to mass movements even when scared and they forget the frights very quickly. Partly the problem with a mass movement is that British society is so fragmented with region, class, age, etc. and lacks common grounds that groups in places like the USA can coalesce around. We cannot even agree on St. George's Day let alone the flag and so on. Getting people together in the UK shows up the class differences which riles the British more than anything else. So, what I envisage is again that the British government will follow the Nazi model and have a whole series of patriotic groups, ones associated with teachers and nurses and truck drivers and mothers and young people and old people and so on. They can draw in groups that already exist, the scout movement in the UK already has a very patriotic agenda and I imagine we will see it increasing in size and support from the state. Something like a spin-off from the Countryside Alliance may become the rural arm and across the UK we will see more of these bodies becoming corporations of the state, seeming to represent the voice of their members but in fact constraining them to the line set by the government. Fascist Italy was very keen on this approach and even ended up with a part of its parliament at which all these different groups were formally represented.
The spin-off from the mass movement is to get a watcher on every street. Authoritarian regimes are fuelled by the so-called 'little Hitlers' you see in every country. These are the self-righteous busybodies who love to have some power over their neighbours and to police their behaviour. They are everywhere especially on residents' groups and pushing for ASBOs against people they take a dislike to. There are many on local councils too and most magistrates (the part-time judges at the British equivalent of police courts) fit this category. They think they are better than the rest of us and love getting official power from the state. They flourished during the Second World War when every Home Guard soldier and every ARP (Air Raid Precautions) officer fell into this category (excellently portrayed in the long-running TV series, 'Dad's Army' in all their officiousness) to the extent that Home Guard checkpoints slowed up the movement of the regular army as their officers could often not prove they were not German agents in disguise and would be arrested. Millions of Britons would relish the chance to become Anti-Terrorist Warden for their street and bully anyone they feel is 'different' or 'improper' with official sanction. Again, this was an approach the Nazis adopted with their block wardens (as Germans generally live in blocks of flats) and China does with its danwei work group system. People say that the British do not like behaving this way and policing their neighbours, that is utter rubbish. If like me you ever work in the post room of the local tax office or benefits office, every day you have to deal with letters from people 'shopping' (i.e. asking people to be investigated and arrested) their neighbours who they suspect of defrauding the government. Only a tiny fraction of these letters are ever accurate and most simply reflect jealousy of what the neighbour has or indignation at how they live their lives. So, Britain has got a ready made body of ATWs just waiting for the government to mobilise them. There was one minor attempt back in the early 2000s when the government sent round information about defending yourself from terrorism, but they did not really follow it up or get a movement behind it.
So, these are the next steps the UK is likely to take in building its police state. Many things like ASBOs are well established it just needs other elements to come together with them and suddenly they become much more powerful. Things that have been growing in recent years such as censorship and control over our movements will continue to do so quietly. We have already lost so many freedoms since 1997 that you do not realise until you sit down and look back that you can see the changes. Of course there is an injection of fear once in a while and the British need more of them because we forget our fears much faster than the Americans do. I predict some terrorist attack at a large event this Summer just to cap off the new developments with identity cards and show us why we would should yield to our fears and instead accept the warm protecting arm of our authoritarian government. Get out now and ramble through the countryside possibly bringing you near some base (driving through southern England last year, I pulled over to check my map and found I had inadvertently pulled into the entrance to the Porton Down chemical and biological weapons research centre, I did wonder why there was such a big fence and all the cameras), and meet up with your friends on a street corner one night, go into town without it being filled with people in military uniforms (do that one quick as the rules are being changed as we sit here), do all these things before you lose the right.
While researching for this posting I came across a useful site called Statewatch which monitors civil liberties right across the European Union. It has great resources on all of the issues I have covered here, go visit it at: http://www.statewatch.org/
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