Dispatches: Ready For a Riot

I couldn’t help but thinking as I watched Channel Four’s Dispatches documentary last night, Ready For A Riot, that when the police spoke of there being only two ways of dealing with “public order offences” (protests) – containment or crowd dispersal – they were forgetting secret option number 3: do nothing and let the protest run its course.

I have not been to a single protest yet where the police presence has helped keep the peace; yet almost every protest that I have attended in which the police have been involved has ended in either a riot, or running violence.

The assumption made – at least in public, where the admission of plain and simple oppression of dissident opinion would be too damaging – is that protests need policing, or else they might get out of hand.

How about we start making a new assumption though, one actually based on evidence: police turn peaceful protests into riots time after time after time.  Protests do not automatically need to be contained or dispersed, they need to be listened to and embraced – without any policing at all – because they are the cornerstone of any functioning democracy.

Now I would be perfectly happy for police to come in – riot vans and all – and restore law and order after an un-policed protest erupted into a genuinely threatening riot (were that ever to happen), but until the citizens of a country are trusted enough that they can voice their political opinions without fear of threat or violence from the State, then we will never truly live in a democracy.

Technorati Tags: Protest,Police Repression,Police,Dispatches,Channel Four,Civil Disobedience,UK Politics,Politics

The Queen is a Patron of Terror!

With a week that has seen one environmental activist arrested for suspicion of conspiracy to commit criminal damage, and four other climate activists detained for attempting to travel to Copenhagen in advance of the UN climate talks being held there this December, I was amused to see a flier today in my local library advertising the huge “The Wave” event planned for December 5th in London.

My amusement was not at the event itself; in fact, my wife and I are planning to attend the protest ourselves, and I highly recommend anyone reading this who cares about the environment to do the same.  For those who don’t know, it’s a mass march planned in London on December 5th (dress-code: blue), starting at Grosvenor Square at 12pm, and ending at Parliament by 3pm, with the aim of encircling Parliament and forming, quite literally, a human wave of change.

No.

My amusement was because this particular flier was on behalf of the RSPB, a charity whose Royal Patron is none other than Queen Elizabeth II.

As eco-activists are more and more being treated like criminals and terrorists in this country, being arrested under Prevention of Terrorism laws and conspiracy charges – indeed, as protest itself is being increasingly repressed and criminalized – it will be interesting to see what happens on December 5th. 

If “The Wave”, like every other radical mass-protest on London before it, is deemed in any way criminal by an over-reactive police force, or if any of its organizers or participants find themselves arrested on yet more jumped up charges of conspiracy-to-reduce-climate-change, one has to wonder: as Royal Patron of an organization involved in these allegedly despicable acts, will Queen Elizabeth herself now be culpable as a sponsor of radical eco-extremists?

Technorati Tags: Environment,Protest,Queen Elizabeth II,The Wave,London,RSPB,Police Repression,UK Politics,Politics