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"The country's biggest force, the Metropolitan police, is to lobby the attorney general… because officers believe that large sections of the population have become increasingly politicised"
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The Great Climate Swoop

October 18, 2009 By: fotdmike Category: General

Ratcliffe-on-Soar, Nottinghamshire, 17-18 October

Hmm. Couldn’t manage to be at this one but have been keeping an eye on events there courtesy of the Climate Camp website, Twitter (#swoop), Indymedia etc.

Two interesting little snippets caught my eye, from the Notts Indymedia timeline

October 17, 2009 19:33 – Reports arrive that, contrary to the Police’s press release, the policeman who collapsed went dizzy from overheating, fell over and hit his head on somebody’s knee on the way down. There was definitely no violence involved in that incident. The innuendo in the police press release is ridiculous.

And a bit earlier…

October 17, 2009 18:02 – Injured protester’s ambulance took about an hour, cop’s took about 3mins.

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Strange experiences in the land of the Peasants’ Revolt

September 05, 2009 By: fotdmike Category: Individual Freedoms, Police State

Just returned (well, not strictly true, returned Wednesday afternoon actually) from a week-long stay at Climate Camp which this year was at Blackheath, London (that’s the Peasants’ Revolt connection by the way).
And in the time I’ve been back I’ve been trying to sift through umpteen photos and do a bit of a write-up of the week that’ll be posted elsewhere.

And in my spare time (yep, all five minutes of it) I’ve been trying to think about the totally bizarre experience of attending protests that haven’t been trashed by the cops.
More specifically, protests that the cops stood by and watched unfold… and didn’t try to disrupt. One could almost be fooled into thinking that they’d actually tried to facilitate them!
And apart from a few minor scuffles most of these protests concluded without any untoward incidents.

Hmm. There’s a moral there somewhere.

As I say, I’ll probably be commenting a bit more on this elsewhere (most likely a TawNews article)

Meanwhile I’m slowly uploading (batch by batch) pics from the week to this set on Flickr.

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Just in case you missed it

April 17, 2009 By: fotdmike Category: Human Rights, Police State, Politics, Press Bias, Terrorism

My, hasn’t it been a busy few weeks in the State’s campaign of “keeping the People down”.

Most of it, admittedly, sparked off by the death of Ian Tomlinson during the G20 protests at the beginning of this month. And the revelations about the Met’s attempts to cover up the real facts (with, it has to be said, a little help from the IPCC, the supposedly “independent” Police Complaints Commission) after the style of the de Menezes cover-up.
The initial lies about police attempts to “help him” being thwarted by protesters. And the lies about the cause of death (resulting from a really hasty post-mortem examination conducted by a right dodgy-seeming pathologist). Ok. Conceivably, just conceivably, those “lies” could be (if we’re really charitable) attributed to a desire on the part of the cops to keep the public informed in a timely fashion. And undoubtedly that’s the spin they’ll eventually put on it. But I think not somehow. Speaks to me much more of a panicked response of attempting to hide their own wrongdoings.

That we have the mainstream Guardian to thank for most of these revelations sticks in my craw a little bit. But hey, if one of the mainstream platforms hadn’t picked it up in truth its unlikely to have received the widespread attention it so rightly deserves. Or that “attention” would have painted a wholly different picture.

Anyway, that whole sorry mess led on to some serious questions being asked about the ubiquitous police tactic of “kettling”, whereby a whole bunch of folk are herded into a confined area for a number of hours and, not being allowed to leave, are periodically subjected to various forms of cop nastiness.

Then, just to keep things interesting, another cop gets suspended for assaulting a woman simply because (so it would appear at the moment) she didn’t immediately “obey his order” to move back, and was a bit mouthy in protesting against the violence of the… er… cops.
Well, excuse me whilst I indulge a momentary apoplectic episode.

If we really did live in an ideal society where the cops policed “by public consent” as they so often claim, then perhaps there’d be a reasonable expectation for members of the public to “obey police orders”… not immediately perhaps (after all, the public aren’t exactly highly disciplined and trained to react instantly to a command), but in a reasonably prompt fashion. If we lived in an ideal society. But we don’t. And we certainly don’t live in one where policing is by public consent. Not where that policing so frequently goes so far over the top that the legality of police actions has to be called into question.
So, obey police orders instantly? You’ve gotta be joking. And your reward for not doing so? Your punishment for not being submissive, obedient, responding to the cops with Pavlovian automaticity? A back-handed slap across the face! What does that say about 21st century British policing techniques then?
To my mind it speaks volumes about the systemic police attitude of arrogance and disdain exhibited toward the public at large… the public whose “consent” they invoke whenever it serves their purposes. ‘Scuse me, but someone should point out to them that “consent” elicited by violence isn’t actually consent at all!

Sticking with the G20 protests for the mo’, we then stumble across the much less reported story of the police raids on two convergence centres in London, one of which being rampART (the squatted creative centre and social space). And, surprise surprise! More tales of police brutality and unprovoked violence.

Hard on the heels of all this excitement there’s then that bizarre “pre-emptive” police raid in Nottingham where 114 people are arrested for… er… having a meeting! And a school gets unnecessarily trashed in the process. Local MP Alan Simpson had a few choice words to say on the matter (quite right too) but so far it appears that few connections have been made (not in the mainstream media at least) between this and the previously quoted examples of repressive policing.
Connections that, if made, could well point to the serving of a political agenda rather than a straightfoward “law & order” one. Hmm.

As I said, a busy few weeks. Shame that the real message of the G20 protests appears to have become lost somewhere in the furore though.

And in the midst of it all I happen to spot another (entirely unrelated… probably) interesting little article. One that really deserves far more attention than its likely to receive. About Barack Obama releasing “four top secret memos that allowed the CIA under the Bush administration to torture al-Qaida and other suspects held at Guantánamo and secret detention centres round the world”.
The most interesting thing about it is the revelation that he (Obama) doesn’t intend to pursue prosecutions of those involved, claiming its a “time for reflection, not retribution”. Well well well. So despite all the promise that a glittery new American administration held forth, the reality is its just more of the same old bullshit. And with it bang go their attempts to try to “reclaim” (as if they ever had any) their “moral authority”.

Interesting times we live in.

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Surely this can’t be real?

March 28, 2009 By: fotdmike Category: Human Rights, Police State, Politics, Rants

This is absolutely bloody unbelievable. In fact, I’m having difficulty believing it actually says what I’m reading! Have I inadvertently stumbled across some spoof site I ask myself.

So what is it I’m reading? An article in the Guardian, “Fears police tactics at G20 protests will lead to violence“, all about, well, the upcoming G20 protests in London.

First there was all that nonsense a few weeks ago with the cops warning of a “Summer of Rage” (see here and here).
There’s little doubt in my mind all that rubbish was a rather clumsy attempt on the part of the Met cops to deter legitimate and peaceful protesters who have no truck with violence from attending the various G20 “events” that have been publicised and, instead, deliberately seek to attract the troublemakers and those who fancy “a bit of a bundle”.

And now, only days after the release of the Human Rights Joint Committee report on the policing of protest, in which the cops are criticised for heavy-handedness, for misusing “anti-terror” laws against protesters, and for failing to engage in dialogue with protesters, we have utterances such as “”up for it, and up to it” dripping from the mouths of the cops following their warnings to protest groups that “the main day of protest, Wednesday, 1 April would be ‘very violent’”.
And just how the hell can they make assertions like that with such assurance unless they’re gonna be the ones starting in with the violence?

Surely it would be more appropriate for the cops to try to defuse potential “trouble” than come out with such provocative comments?

Or perhaps they actually want violence in order to justify the huge budgets they seem to squander on policing protests?

And, again despite that recently-released report recommending against the inappropriate use of “anti-terror” laws in the context of protests, apparently the Met’s Commissioner has “refused to rule out the use of anti-terror legislation”.

And all of that within the first three paragraphs of the Guardian’s article!

Barely had I recovered my composure from reading the foregoing when I start choking over the next load of tripe, in reference to the events being staged by Climate Campers. I quote:

“Last night Scotland Yard denied that it had received any communication from the group and said it had been looking forward to hearing from them.”

What an utter load of bullshit! When will the cops begin to realise that the only thing achieved by coming out with crap like this is to undermine their own credibility even more.
Well, I’m totally confident that the lie will be given to that by the Campers when they reveal the history of their repeated attempts to start a dialogue with the cops.

One has to ask, precisely what agenda is it that the cops are playing to? Seems to me its bugger all to do with “facilitating protest” as the cops so often claim they’re doing.

Clearly just another cop lie.

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Scary synchronicities!

February 23, 2009 By: fotdmike Category: Individual Freedoms, Police State

Now here’s an intriguing little synchronicity…

At the start of this week I penned a bit of blurb (well, quite a long bit of blurb actually) about the coming into force of Section 76 of the Counter Terrorism Act 2008.
The piece turned out rather longer than I’d planned or anticipated cos I got a bit sidetracked and spent quite some time fitting this new bit of legislation into a rather larger context. The whole of which I put up on the front page of TaW under the title “Britain 2009″ (archived copy here).

Toward the end of this rather lengthy piece my imagination begins to run riot (read the article and you’ll get the pun!) and I enter the uncertain realms of prediction country with the following…

“Climate Change and the Economy.

Either of these has the potential for being the ‘Issue of our Times’.

Either of these has the potential for impacting upon society to such an extent that our very way of life could be fundamentally and permanently changed, and that of our children, and of our childrens’ children.
Moreover, the probability is that this fundamental change to our way of life would not be generally perceived as a positive one, and could easily escalate to detrimentally impact the very infrastructures of society, such that we witness a serious breakdown in many of the normal services and facilities we have come to take for granted.

It doesn’t require stretching the imagination too much to see how such a breakdown could lead to a dramatic increase in petty crime… to muggings, burglaries, theft, looting etc.
But it could also lead to massive civil unrest, that could so easily tip over into real and violent rioting.

However, such riots might not be ‘typical’ in the sense of being a more extreme form of something like football hooliganism.
It seems to me rather that they would bear a much closer relationship to the hitherto peaceful protest, where people come together united in a common cause and with a belief in the justness of that cause.
The difference being though that the ‘protesters’ would be far more ‘fired up’ and, key to my entire reasoning, probably a helluva lot more of them, simply by virtue of the fact that these ‘impactful events’ won’t just be affecting a few hundred, or even a few thousand, people.

We’re talking here about an entire nation! Indeed, not just one nation, but a similar situation manifesting in virtually every industrialised nation of the world!
And for a crowd such as I visualise to suddenly be confronted by massed ranks of Riot Police would, I fear, be something like throwing a match into a big box of fireworks.”

The whole thing hit the web at about 0200 on Tuesday morning (missing my self-imposed deadline of Monday 16th, when s.76 became law, by a coupla hours).

Here we are then, a week on, and Monday 23rd The Guardian publishes a piece by Paul Lewis entitled “Britain faces summer of rage – police” in which we have…

“Britain’s most senior police officer with responsibility for public order raised the spectre of a return of the riots of the 1980s, with people who have lost their jobs, homes or savings becoming ‘footsoldiers’ in a wave of potentially violent mass protests.

Superintendent David Hartshorn, who heads the Metropolitan police’s public order branch, told the Guardian that middle-class individuals who would never have considered joining demonstrations may now seek to vent their anger through protests this year.”

Now of course you don’t have to be a genius to work any of that out for yourself or make those sorts of predictions (obviously, cos I worked it out and made those sorts of predictions and I’m no genius) but nevertheless I’m still struck by the rather scary timing of the appearance of the latter.

Just don’t anyone even suggest to me that the toerags in blue serge have been scouring my website for ideas to justify their over-the-top policing techniques!

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