"Illegal" protest

There's been much made of the "illegal" nature of this week's Climate Camp protest outside Heathrow, by the right-wing Press, the government, and of course the cops. In an act of serious OTT-ness, the British Airways Authority sought to ban up to 5 million people, including members of subversive groups such as the National Trust and RSPB, from travelling to the environs of the airport [3]. They still succeeded in obtaining an injunction against members of the protest group Plane Stupid from travelling to the area - an injunction, mind, which in law should be based on the high probability that a criminal act would occur if it weren't granted, so effectively the protesters were branded as criminals before they even had the chance to take any action, and their movement - supposedly, free movement and free assembly are keystones of 'democracy' - curtailed on the basis that they might cause a bit of a fuss. Ho hum.

Whether or not the protest is "illegal" isn't clear to me, but then I'm no Brief. What is clear is that the State is determined to treat the protest with as much repression as it can get away with, seeing as the camp is in the media spotlight. By all accounts, at least those not carried by the barking Right press, the protesters are a pretty meek, mild and moderate bunch. There are no hardened anti-globalisation activists, no Black Bloc, no Wombles, and the very clear emphasis has been on nonviolence. Not one of the protesters has acted violently towards either person or property, unless you consider supergluing yourself to doors as 'violent'. The slogan of the protest has been "We are only armed...with peer-reviewed science", which hardly counts as insurrectionary. On the whole, despite lurid warnings from the cops about the camp being "infiltrated" by "anarchists" [1] bent on causing trouble [2], they were a pretty peaceable and moderate bunch, and with the participation of locals they were less dog on a rope than Afghan on a designer lead.

Yet still the cops threw everything they could at them. As is now common practice at protests, cops shoved cameras into people's faces [4]. They stopped and searched people under the newly-passed anti-terrorist laws, despite NuLabor apparatchiks (sorry, MPs) promising loudly during Commons rubber-stampings (sorry, 'debates') that such laws would only be used for, well, anti-terrorist purposes, and wouldn't be indiscriminately targetted at anyone whose faces the cops didn't like - so much for that wee assurance, eh? There were twice as many cops at the camp as protesters, and they harassed protesters as a matter of routine, sometimes physically attacking them garbed in full riot gear. And this is against a protest in the public eye, for a cause many people sympathise with. Imagine what the State does to less public protests for less cuddly causes, such as 'animal rights extremism'.

All this for a non-violent protest with some headline-grabbing but far from destructive direct action. No doubt the cops and State and barking Press will go on about how the protesters could carry out 'legal' protests, but what can you now do, legally? If you want to demo, you have to give the cops at least a week's notice and let them vet your route - if you go on to the streets without such notice, you'll be nicked. The cops can tell you where and when to demo, and you'd better be careful what banners you carry or what you say or they'll nick you for behaviour likely to cause 'distress' to the public, and this was before the recent raft of anti-terrorist legislation [5][6]. That's if they allow the demo at all - the cops have the power to ban demos on the nebulous grounds of 'public order'. And if you do demo, you'll be corralled and controlled and surveilled, and woe betide you if you deviate from the planned route as you may well find yourself up against vanloads of riot cops itching for a scrap.

There are no legitimate means of mass demonstration these days, let alone any kind of direct action. The sorts of 'People Power' [TM] that brought down repressive regimes elsewhere, and were lauded by the West as prime examples of liberty in action, are completely illegal here - you simply couldn't have tens of thousands of people gathering spontaneously on the streets, let alone camp there as happened in Prague and Kiev. The only legitimate protest you can now make, and that heavily circumscribed by laws on 'glorifying terrorism', is in writing, but the State doesn't mind that because nobody cares - there are millions of blogs and web fora and newsgroups out there, so what does it matter if a few ranters bang on about this or that? They'll never be noticed, and even if they are they'll never have an effect, but at the same time this 'freedom' to write is held up as proof that this is still a liberal democracy that preserves 'traditional liberties'. Put simply, writing doesn't scare the State and the ruling classes - it's people on the streets that scare them, and this has been so for centuries.

What ought to worry many is that, if there are no legitimate outlets for protest, then any protest, no matter how mild, is illegal and liable to State suppression. A simple corollary of this, for the protester, is that you might as well be hung for a sheep as a goat - if you're going to get your skull cracked for being peaceful, why not go the whole hog and start throwing rocks? This is the lesson from countless oppressive regimes in history, one of the most recent being the repression of legitimate protest in N Ireland which kick-started The Troubles. The State will know this only too well, and is trying, through the exponential increase in surveillance and police powers, to so control and surveil its population that it can nip any protest in the bud. This is a dangerous, high-stakes game that it's playing, and one in which there will be more and more 'innocent casualties'...

In the meantime, if you want to carry out a legal protest ... go abroad to a country where civil liberties are written into constitutions. Italy and France come immediately to mind, or Spai. Not that that's ever stopped cops breaking heads (just look what happened at the Scuola Diaz in Genoa years ago) but it does put a rein on them, and does mean that they might be held accountable for their actions. Right now, over here in our Green and Pleasant Land, cops can shoot unarmed civilians at point-blank range without any fear of comeback. The killers of Jean Charles de Menezes, though known, will never be held to account, and neither will their commanders. Similarly the cops who burst into the house in Forest Gate and shot and wounded two of its occupants, who were completely innocent of anything other than being Muslim, will enter a long and happy retirement without a stain against their careers. When cops can get away with murder, and can lock up people for any reason or none, at any time, for up to a month, then they can do most anything they want. This is a very, very dangerous time to be a protester who ventures away from the keyboard and into real life...

Indymedia Climate Camp site
[1] Police: 'Heathrow camp infiltrated by anarchists', Guardian Unlimited, 16/8/07
[2] As an armchair anarchist myself, in my wilder youth an activist, the idea of anarchists "infiltrating" anything is a hoot. A prime characteristic of anarchists is their openness to declare themselves as such - you want infiltration, go to the Trotskyites for lessons. Or to the sewer Press, who "infiltrated" the camp with a few of their jackals during the protest looking for tasty copy.
[3] 'Bullying' BAA seeks Heathrow protest injunction, Guardian Unlimited, 1/8/07
Camp for Climate Action
[4] For photocops being photographed in their turn, see the Indymedia report on a demo outside a Heckler & Koch plant in Nottingham on 24/7/07.
[5] Airport rebels take on police, Observer online, 12/7/07
[6] Protest as harrassment, George Monbiot, 22/2/05
[7] Protesters are criminals, George Monbiot, 4/10/05