G-20 protests – Prog Gold

â€œThey who are in the highest places, and have the most power, have the least liberty, because they are the most observedâ€

Published on May 10, 2009

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This is the sort of story being pushed into the background by the media free for all that’s the MPs expenses scandal; normally it’d cause public outrage. Yet another way in which Parliament’s let down the voters, but at least it shows some people are still watching.

It’s been alleged by lots of those present (or watching live, like me)that the violence at the G20 London protests was incited by police provocateurs to discredit protestors, following the established European pattern.

The police, as is their wont, continue to deny it strenuously, despite damning video evidence. But also as is their wont they made the mistake of assuming the crowd was composed entirely of hippies with dogs on strings.

Wrong!

G20 police ‘used undercover men to incite crowds’

“…Liberal Democrat [MP] Tom Brake says he saw what he believed to be two plain-clothes police officers go through a police cordon after presenting their ID cards.

Brake, who along with hundreds of others was corralled behind police lines near Bank tube station in the City of London on the day of the protests, says he was informed by people in the crowd that the men had been seen to throw bottles at the police and had encouraged others to do the same shortly before they passed through the cordon.

Brake, a member of the influential home affairs select committee, will raise the allegations when he gives evidence before parliament’s joint committee on human rights on Tuesday.

“When I was in the middle of the crowd, two people came over to me and said, ‘There are people over there who we believe are policemen and who have been encouraging the crowd to throw things at the police,'” Brake said. But when the crowd became suspicious of the men and accused them of being police officers, the pair approached the police line and passed through after showing some form of identification.

Brake has produced a draft report of his experiences for the human rights committee, having received written statements from people in the crowd. These include Tony Amos, a photographer who was standing with protesters in the Royal Exchange between 5pm and 6pm. “He [one of the alleged officers] was egging protesters on. It was very noticeable,” Amos said. “Then suddenly a protester seemed to identify him as a policeman and turned on him. He legged it towards the police line, flashed some ID and they just let him through, no questions asked.”

Amos added: “He was pretty much inciting the crowd. He could not be called an observer. I don’t believe in conspiracy theories but this really struck me. Hopefully, a review of video evidence will clear this up.”

Clearly German federal police didn’t get the memo. They (accidentally or otherwise) arrested one of their police provocateurs:

Police Officer Arrested for Joining Berlin’s May Day Riot

During the May Day protests last week, Berlin police clashed with nearly every kind of demonstrator imaginable — including one of their own. An off-duty police officer from Frankfurt has been arrested for stone-throwing during riots which left over 450 of his colleagues injured.

[…]

The 24-year-old, usually stationed at Frankfurt International Airport, is suspected of taking part in the May Day riots in Berlin and — in at least two instances — throwing cobblestones and striking police officers. He was off-duty and staying in Kreuzberg, the multi-ethnic and alternative neighborhood at the center of the annual demonstrations, during his visit to the capital, where he completed his training in August last year.

The policeman has been suspended and will remain off-duty until the criminal proceedings are over…

Yeah sure. More like a pressured plod didn’t recognise the code word. Now they have to follow through with the arrest and charge.

If this arrest of a fellow-officer follows the UK pattern, give it a couple of months and most likely any charges will be quietly forgotten and the officer concerned will be compensated with a comfy well-paid admin post in a regional station somewhere.

Injustice Is Built In

Published on April 20, 2009

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You wouldn’t have seen it in New Labour’s 1997 manifesto, though.

Labour’s deliberate policy of shutting down legal channels to justice for the average Joe and Josephine in order to crush dissent, this from an adminstration of lawyers, is something I’ve been blogging about for a long time.

I was idly rereading the ‘police’ post archive this morning in light of the G20 police brutality reports when I was reminded of this 2000 Schnews article, which made me wonder: how many of those peaceful protestors arrested at Kingsnorth or Nottingham or the G20 or Plymouth or on misapplied terrorist legislation have had, or can get access to legal advice?

Not too many, I’d wager:

Sweeping changes to the legal aid system are going to mean that thousands who find themselves dragged into the legal system are going to find themselves without proper legal advice. Despite the fact that this government has created 6,000 new criminal offences in the last ten years, and is hauling record numbers before the courts and off to chokey, they’re now keen to restrict access to legal advice. All in the name of cost-cutting and reducing inefficiency of course. What is actually happening is a massive erosion of hard won rights and the end of the legal aid system, which helped achieve some degree of parity in court cases. (OK, so SchNEWS is obviously against the system, man, but meantime still not keen to see what few civil liberties we have taken away!)

The changes came in on January 14th. Prior to this, on arrival at the police station you would be offered contact with a solicitor of your choice. From now on you will be directed to the Criminal Defence Call Centre (CDCC). This is staffed, not by solicitors but by accredited representatives who’ve done a training course, many of them actually ex-coppers. You will only be allowed to contact your own solicitor if you pay privately. Needless to say the call centre advice is probably going to be different to that of a specialist defence solicitor.

While I have met at least one accredited representative who was an ex-copper and did a fantastic job, to put so many of them (they’re cheaper than actual lawyers) in charge of dispensing legal advice to the arrested might lead one to think the government’s given the police control of the independent legal process – though no doubt Jack Straw would deny that to his dying breath.

One Brighton-based solicitor told SchNEWS, “Previously we could intervene in the process earlier – warn people to make no comment, not to sign police notebooks and not to answer any questions off the PNC1 form*. We could act as an outside guarantee of people’s rights while they were inside. Now, the system is in meltdown. If the call centre is too incompetent to get hold of your brief then you may end up using a duty solicitor or remaining unrepresented. If you’re not going to be interviewed then you can be fingerprinted, DNAed and booted out of the door without once receiving any independent advice.”

While there was never a Legal Aid golden age Labour’s deliberate blocking of justice and dismantling of low cost legal advice networks and legal aid over the past 12 years has created a legal advice desert. So far it’s only been affecting those nasty, nasty druggies, petty crims, burglars and crusty anarchists, so there’s been little outcry about it from the bourgeoisie. They’re criminals, who cares?

But if there’s no justice for criminals, there’s no justice for anyone. As I wrote at the time:

Should citizens, empowered by knowing what their rights are and how to enforce them, start to challenge the boss, who knows where it might lead?

The overthrow of New Labour – and that would never do.

Why, such an informed populace might start enforcing their rights on other things too. They might even start to challenge the everyday petty tyrannies of Labourâ€™s incompetent and authoritarian government, like, say, the deaths of children in custody or the illegal invasions of other sovereign nations or the selective imposition of swingeing terrorist legislation on people of a certain ethnicity and/or religion.

Maybe now a few of the comfortable middles at legitimate protests like the G20 have had theirs or their kids’ heads batoned, been kettled by aggressive paramilitaries or arrested on trumped up ‘terrorism’ charges for merely expressing their right to free speech, we’ll see a bit more outrage and a lot more challenge.

Comment of The Day

Published on April 19, 20092 Comments

I see that anarchist rag The Sunday Times (prop. R. Murdoch) is featuring more video of police brutality at the G20.

Rupert Murdoch’s the champion of the oppressed masses now? Who knew? Fight the power, Rupe!

As if.

Commenter GnosticMind responded to Henry Porters’ column on public order policing in today’s Observer and he hits the bullseye when he says:

19 Apr 09, 5:36am (about 2 hours ago)

What is also interesting here is the media treatment of those attacked by the police : The second victim to come forward, the woman from Brighton, has now hired Max bloody Clifford of all people, to represent her : Anyone well versed in Situationist dialectic and critique will see exactly what is happening here — the state media machinery absorbs the threat to the status quo, by repackaging the threat — and selling it back to its own people — as spectacle and entertainment.

The society as spectacle wins yet again — if , that is, most people are fooled and pacified by it yet again.

All that Situationist theory is old hat by now, and very overdone, years ago — but by God they got it right.

They certainly did.

I bet TimesOnline’s hitcount is well up. The management (R. Murdoch) and the advertisers must be loving it. Do I smell an advertising revenue spike?

Dissent and violent repression;not only poliitical theatre but the saviour of the economy.
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Hindsight Is Overrated

Published on April 17, 2009

Belatedly, a former UK Director of Public Prosecutions asks the essential questions about the police’s behaviour at the G20 protests:

…here are some questions for the IPCC to consider as it investigates the events leading to Ian Tomlinson’s death: why were British police officers attending a demonstration in the heart of London with their identifying numbers hidden? In the absence of a fire risk, who authorised them to pull balaclavas up over their heads? And why didn’t they want anyone to see their faces?

Yes why? Were they “Only following orders….”? Presumably the police at Mark Saunders shooting were following orders to cover their faces; otherwise that’s a lot of bad apples in the police.

The DPP is responsible for determining any charges and prosecuting criminal cases investigated by the police in England and Wales; he or she makes decisions about the most complex and sensitive cases and advises the police on criminal matters. He reports to the Attorney General, the Government minister who answers for the Crown Prosecution Service in Parliament.

How come it was that the politically-appointed former DPP from 2003 to 2008, MCDonald, a QC and former (and again post-retirement) member of human rights chambers Matrix (colleague Cherie Blair), couldn’t bring himself to ask those questions when he could have had some effect?

It’s much easier to write a condemnatory Guardian editorial after the fact – and presumably pocket a fee – than to act against the police when you have the power to.

The G-20 protests: Cointelpro’d?

Published on March 24, 20091 Comment

Lenny talks about the media hysteria surrounding the G-20 protests and where this is coming from:

A great deal of this scary material is apparently coming from one website, G-20 Meltdown. This website is described as an “umbrella group” for protesters, supposedly representing 67 different protest groups, although there is nothing on the website to show that this is so. The only indication that it might be is a list of organisations supporting the protests, but a disclaimer at the bottom of the list rectifies a previous ‘error’ which implied that these organisations were supporters of G-20 Meltdown. (This error has lead to some statements in newspapers implying that the Stop the War Coalition among others are in some sense affiliated to G-20 Meltdown, which I don’t think they are). And far from being run by hotheaded anarchists, the website is run by Camilla Power, an anthropologist based at the University of East London, a trade unionist, and a member of the CPGB. Another source for these scarifying articles is Chris Knight, cited as a member of the protest group ‘The Government of the Dead’. He is another CPGB member, and a professor of anthropology based at UEL. His frankly bombastic statements include the suggestion that the army and police might lose control of the City of London. If he were serious about this, he wouldn’t say such a thing either to the press or in any public forum where it could be accessed by police. Such statements, whatever the intention behind them, are foolish. They allow the press to imply that there is violence planned (there is not), and they give the police carte blanche to claim that the city is under extraordinary threat, thus mandating severe repression.

The question now is, who are Camilla Power and Chris Knight and why are they allowing themselves to be used to discredit the protests? Yes, there are sometimes young hotheads impressed by reading their first subversive books who think the best way to fight the power is to smash up a McDonalds, but this whole operation smacks of
Cointelpro. Veterans of sixties and seventies leftist causes (civil rights, disinvestment of South Africa undsoweiter) say you could always tell the FBI or Special Branch infiltrants: they were the ones calling for violence and “radical” action, preferably as publically as possible.