EcoLogics

Updated 23 October 2009 (scroll down to see update)

A brief post about the BBC Radio 4’s ‘News at One’ programme, heard yesterday, 20 October 2009. The programme focused on the news that a group of retired British generals have had a go at the BNP (without actually naming it) for ‘seeking to hijack the symbols of the armed forces and their history’. Martha Kearney, the BBC anchor,  interviewed Simon Weston, the renowned Falkland War veteran, who joined the generals in condemning the BNP; and then she interviewed Nick Griffin himself.

Two thoughts: first, it was apparent that the news piece was designed to support the armed forces’ position, and to undermine the BNP’s. This blogger has seldom witnessed such a manifest effort on the part of the BBC to coach one side, and to attack the other. While the BNP is a neo-fascist organisation and deserves to be condemned, the interview threw up into the starkest relief the manner in which the BBC’s alleged codes of impartiality are there to be used and abused, pretty much at will. How to reconcile the mentioned codes (see EcoLogics’ earlier analysis of these codes in The BBC, New Labour & the BNP) with the extraordinarily one-sided interviewing technique?

The point is not to defend the BNP, but to suggest that this has long been a style of interview employed by the BBC against anyone whom its journalists or editors regarded as being an ‘enemy of the state’. The interview showed just how manipulative the claims to impartiality can be, and how easy it is to abuse them.

The second thought concerns Nick Griffin’s performance. On one level, it certainly seemed to live up to the claim that Griffin/BNP have acquired a certain moderation when it comes to expressing racist views. Martha Kearney repeatedly tried to get Griffin to voice the racism for which the BNP is infamous, but more often than not, Griffin managed to side-step the inquisitorial blows. For example, when pressed on the matter of deporting ‘foreign’ members of the armed forces who committed crimes, Griffin appeared to soften the BNP’s stance, suggesting that if criminal behaviour occurred as a result of a lack of support for war veterans, this would have to be ‘taken into account’. Such deft discursive manoeuvres were cleverly interspersed with populist stances, such as the suggestion that Britain should immediately exit the war in Afghanistan, a war that had ‘nothing to do with us’, and involved sending poorly equipped men into battle.

However, when you contrast Griffin’s public stance with the information that has leaked out about the BNP’s views in the privacy of their own meetings (or indeed on the BBC’s own earlier interview on Radio 1), it becomes apparent that, more than having moderated his views,  Griffin has learned to hide the views, and to do so by appealing to a mixture of a perceived common sense, and a ‘centre ground’.

This being true, we can say that Griffin has learned to do what the Tories and New Labour have been doing for decades. No wonder both parties are worried; the fascists are learning, and so becoming a part of, the UK’s political culture.

Update 23 October 2009: after the infamous BBC Question Time

BBC’s handling of the Question Time episode in which Griffin appeared more than confirmed the above analysis. What a travesty of alleged impartiality: one moment the BBC was saying it had to include Griffin in the programme thanks to impartiality rules, and the next it was organising a veritable kangaroo court against Griffin. And today the establishment is congratulating itself….

The following is an excerpt of a post published by George Monbiot about Sir David Eady, a judge of the Queen’s Bench Division, whom Monbiot describes as Britain’s legal censor. EcoLogics publishes it in solidarity with Monbiot and all those—the Murdochs, Rothmeres and other home-grown or imported oligarchs excepted—who are finding themselves on the receiving end of Britain’s extraordinarily repressive libel laws. To read the full blog, go to monbiot.com to ‘The Hanging Judge‘.

“During the libel case brought by Richard Desmond, pornographer and proprietor of Express newspapers, against the investigative author Tom Bower, who had claimed that Desmond acted on grudges, Eady refused to allow the court to hear evidence that he had done just this in another instance. In July, the appeal court found that Eady’s decision was “plainly wrong” and risked “a miscarriage of justice”(5). In 2004, during a case brought by a Saudi businessman, Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel, against the Wall Street Journal, Eady decided that the newspaper’s story that the Saudi central bank was monitoring the accounts of certain businesses in case they were being used (unwittingly or otherwise) to channel funds to terrorists was not responsible journalism(6). Among his justifications was the fact that the US government hadn’t published this information: Eady appeared to see the interests of the state and the interest of the public as the same thing(7).

The law lords decided that Eady was “hostile to the spirit” of the public interest defence and that he had “rigidly applied the old law” in a way that was “quite unrealistic … unnecessary and positively misleading”. In one amazing passage, Lord Hoffmann compared Eady’s approach to that of the Communist Party censors in the Soviet Union(8).

But perhaps the gravest judgements against the Honourable Mr Justice Eady are those made by legislators in the United States. Such is the reach and severity of his illiberal rulings that four states have so far passed what are, in effect, Eady laws(9), and Congress is currently considering a federal bill whose purpose is to defend US citizens from his judgements, and the English law he interprets. The Eady laws arise from his encouragement of libel tourism: allowing cases with only the most tenuous connection with this country to be heard in London, and using them to stamp on free speech all over the world.”

Here’s the funny thing about Eady: according to the Daily Telegraph,

Surprising as it may now seem, Mr Justice Eady was once a leading courtroom defender of red-top journalism, much in demand as a barrister who could be relied on to uphold the freedom of the tabloids to expose the private lives of public figures. It was to David Eady that the Sun newspaper turned when the Coronation Street actor Bill Roache sued over taunts that he was “boring”.

This is EcoLogics’ contribution to Monbiot’s denunciation: how extraordinary that, in a country that is almost second to none when it comes to Rottweiler journalism, with oligarchs such as Rupert Murdoch routinely employing their newspapers to attack uncooperative politicians, or simply to make money by publishing pedling celebrity tat, we have the most draconian press law in the so-called ‘free’ world.

It might be argued that this is precisely the reason why we have these laws. In fact, given the nature of British political culture, it is usually only the rich, and apparently especially the rich on the political right, that can use the law to silence newspapers, and defend their interests. This means that, far from being in the public interest, the law as it stands serves to undermine democracy. According to Monbiot, a key defender of the status quo has been Jack Straw, who as Justice Minister has blocked attempts to reform the libel laws.

The worst offender when it comes to rottweiler journalism is Italy—or rather, Berlusconi’s press. Have a look at this press item, published by Reuters, which reveals that Berlusconi is having one of his TV channels shadow and secretly film a judge who has ruled against the prime Minister in a bribery case. ‘Days after Judge Raimondo Mesiano ordered Berlusconi’s holding company to pay 750 million euros in damages to a rival, the media mogul’s Canale 5 channel aired a video of the judge taking a walk, smoking and getting a shave at the barber. Dubbing the judge’s behaviour “eccentric”, a narrator points to him smoking the “umpteenth” cigarette, calls his turquoise socks “strange” and says: “He’s impatient … he can only relax at the barber’s”.

When the police interviewed me, I said that I saw no violence toward this individual, which I didn’t. And afterwards the police said it would take a very brave coroner to proclaim that the cause of death was because he was beaten up, or because of the protests that day. They said it would take a brave coroner to suggest the cause of death was because of any wrongdoing by the police. Initially I just kind of forgot about it. But it was later on in the day that I thought, why would someone say it would take a brave coroner? If the facts are there.

Daniel MacPhee, 24, social support worker, Kingston, quoted by the Guardian (1)

Let us be very clear: the old Latin saying ‘post hoc, ergo propter hoc’ (occurring after an event, therefore caused by the event) is as misleading as any real or alleged police attempt to cover up the events surrounding Ian Tomlinson’s death during the G20 protests in the City of London. We still do not know exactly what happened on the Royal Exchange Passage; but even if any investigation does eventually corroborate what seems increasingly clear—that Ian Tomlinson was assaulted by London’s riot police, that the attack was gratuitously violent, and that his subsequent death did occur moments after the attack—that does not necessarily mean that the police killed Ian Tomlinson.

*   *   *

Regrettably, these considerations are rather academic because, if past practice is anything to go by, it is highly unlikely that there will be a truly thorough, independent, and critical investigation of the events surrounding Ian Tomlinson’s death. It speaks volumes, in this sense, that the authority charged with investigating possible police crimes—the IPCC—can only use interviews produced by the police themselves. If the quote that serves as an epigraph for this post is true, it also speaks volumes that the police appear to have been so cockily sure that a coroner was unlikely to dare to associate the police with the death.

But perhaps the most worrisome aspect is the one mentioned by the Guardian’s Duncan Campbell, who noted that

‘Although the Guardian reported the death [of Ian Tomlinson] on its front page, almost all the coverage elsewhere ignored it completely or concentrated on a version of events that suggested that the police’s only connection with Tomlinson had been to try to rescue him from a baying mob of anarchists. The police were “pelted with bottles by a screaming mob” (the Mirror) or “pelted with bottles as a medical team tried to revive a demonstrator” (Mail). Tomlinson had died “after being ‘caught among the mob’” (Telegraph). The BBC TV night-time news the following day made no mention of the death in its main bulletin.(2)

*   *   *

If this kind of impunity—legal, and ‘media’ impunity—were a rare or isolated event, it would be serious enough. But coming as it does so soon after what many regard as the Metropolitan Police’s efforts to cover-up the chaotic circumstances surrounding Jean-Charles de Menezes’ death(3), it once again raises questions as to the systems by means of which we hold the police accountable for any abuse of their powers.

EcoLogics recently published a critique about the police’s claims that we face a ‘summer of rage’ in the UK, and this critique may shed some light on the policing of the G20 protests. According to the Times,

‘Large numbers of police forces are planning to cut thousands of officers despite the threat of a recession-driven surge in crime and disorder. Representatives from dozens of police forces contacted by The Times last night gave a grim picture of falling numbers and “significant and painful” cuts. One of Britain’s most experienced chief constables said that forces were being dangerously weakened at a time when a strong police force could be essential to “hold the line”. Timothy Brain, Chief Constable of Gloucestershire since 2001, said: “There is a risk of increased crime and disorder as a result of the effect of recession and many police forces will be made weaker as a result of the latest grant and council tax settlements‘(4).

In the light of the police’s worries about their own job losses, a critical observer has to wonder whether the kind of policing that was put in practice in the City of London was not actually designed to produce rage, and violent reactions on the part of protesters. Last week, one after another person who engaged in protest (or was simply trapped in the area) noted how the so-called ‘kettling’ of people—effectively arresting large numbers of people without due process, and without access to food, drink or toilets for hours and hours on end—generated much anger in what was otherwise a mostly peaceful protest. One after another media account documented how people—again, some of them inadvertently caught up in the fray—asked to leave, and were prevented from doing so by officers who gave no valid justification for the de facto arrests. Kettling—a euphemistic name if ever there was one for wrongful imprisonment—was once used only to ‘corral’ protesters who were deemed to be engaging in criminal actions. As of the G20 protests, it would appear that the police plan to use it as the single method of policing all protests, no matter how peaceful.

While the use of kettling is relatively new, the conflict of interests mentioned earlier is not. As noted recently by George Monbiot,

‘there has always been a conflict of interest inherent in policing. The police are supposed to prevent crime and keep the streets safe. But if they are too successful, they do themselves out of a job. They have a powerful interest in exaggerating threats and, perhaps, an interest in ensuring that sometimes these threats materialise. This could explain what I’ve seen at one protest after another, where peaceful demonstrations turn into ugly rucks only when the police attack. The wildly disproportionate and unnecessary violence I’ve sometimes seen the police deploy could scarcely be better designed to provoke a reaction’ (5).

This is, of course, an argument that is not only impossible to prove, but which can be plausibly denied: how absurd to argue that any police officer would want to face increasingly angry protesters. But of course, such an argument conflates the experiences of officers on the ’shop floor’ of public protest, and that of their strategists and commanders in the highest police headquarters across the land. It also overlooks the relative impunity with which some of the officers who do have to face protesters appear to be able to engage in brutal retribution if and when individual protesters, or indeed groups of protesters, ‘cross the line’. Although Ian Tomlinson does not appear to have been engaging in any kind of protest, it seems he was the victim of precisely this kind of retribution: an angry officer appears to have ‘flown off the handle’, and the event—just one, by all accounts, of many others like it—would have remained carefully unnoticed by most of the media had it not been for the Guardian, and for the video of an American fund manager.

Returning to the apparent interest in talking up the notion of a ’summer of rage’, are we really expected to believe that the police don’t know full well what the effects of ‘kettling’ are on the psychology of people who protest? And are we really expected to accept that kettling is, hands down, the best, the ‘one and only’, indeed the way of policing protests—even manifestly peaceful protests? Ecologics is mindful of the words of John O’Connor, a former Met officer who has recently criticised the tactic: ‘”They are using this more and more,” he said. “Instead of sending snatch squads in to remove those in the crowd who are committing criminal offences, they contain everyone for hours. It is a retrograde step … it is an infringement of civil liberties”‘(6)

*   *   *

There is another dimension of the policing of the G20 protests which has thus far escaped the attention of most journalists, but which is equally, if not more serious. The dimension involves the rise of a surveillance society in the UK. As one article in the Guardian noted last week, when people were ‘finally allowed to go on Wednesday night, they were ordered to provide names and addresses and have their pictures taken. If they refused, they were sent back behind the cordon’(7). In other words, people were given a choice of remaining under de facto and illegal arrest, or giving up personal details.

The emergence of a surveillance society is arguably the beginning of a police state ‘by other means’, a Gattaca-like social space where digital technologies may be employed in an effort to suppress protest before it even takes place. To take names, addresses and photographs from people who have been engaged in peaceful protest (or are simply caught by the police ‘kettle’) is, in some respects, little different from taking a buccal swab from someone who is a witness to a crime, or an alleged crime. It begins to criminalise anyone and everyone who comes into contact, however tangentially, with the police. In so doing, it tacitly inverts the age-old principle of common law, that people should be regarded as being innocent until proven guilty. In New Labour’s brave new world, the cost of total security—in fact, a security as leaky as the many databases that have been either lost or stolen from the government—is the erosion of the principles of the habeas corpus.

A detailed, historical study of how this dynamic has emerged has yet to be written, but anyone who investigates carefully enough will soon find that an economic motivation is at least partly to blame.  The motivation lies in the veritable industry that is emerging and promoting computer-based products ostensibly designed to provide total state, corporate, or private security. If the arms industry has played a nefarious role in the UK’s politics—to name but one example,  witness the High Court ruling, almost exactly a year ago, that the SFO acted unlawfully by dropping its investigation into BAE Systems—the everyday security industry is bound to generate its own actual or virtual corruption. In the UK,  perhaps the best example of the potential for a conflict of interest, if not for actual corruption involves David Blunkett, the former Home Office secretary. Blunkett enthusiastically championed a digital ID security system. He then took up a post as an adviser to Entrust, the Texan digital security company whose business is to set up precisely the kind of digital ID card that Blunkett and now Jacqui Smith have been so keen to institute[8]. One sentence in Entrust’s website pretty much says it all: ‘Entrust customers now use security to enable more than just protection. They work with Entrust to transform their security challenges into business opportunities‘(9).

If EcoLogics flags up this issue, it is to warn that a combination of weak policing of the police (yes, the police must themselves be policed); what some have described as ‘crony capitalism’ or corporate clientelism, or at least, a ‘jobs for the boys’ mentality; and a ‘total’ surveillance culture pushed by companies like Entrust is likely to constitute an exceptionally toxic cocktail: a cocktail that is sooner or later bound to generate the kind of repressive corruption—or corrupt repression—normally associated with conventional ‘police states’. Leading politicians and corporate heads in the UK need to be aware of the poison that they are sipping when they agree to aid and abet this dynamic.

Of course, we are far from a conventional police state in the UK. But are we as far as we would like to think that we are? Ian Tomlinson’s death may, and should be taken as a litmus test: anything short of a thorough, very transparent, and above all critical investigation may well end up confirming the growing belief that, when it comes to the democratic right to protest, the police, with the active connivance of the New Labour government, are a law onto themselves and exist to protect the interests of an increasingly corrupt elite—the kind of people symbolised not only by the former leaders of the country’s leading financial institutions, but now, by the politicians who believe it is perfectly legitimate to have the state pay for their own personal luxuries.

References

1) http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/08/g20-ian-tomlinson-death-witnesses, accessed April 8, 2009

2) http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/apr/07/civil-liberties-g20-police-assault-ian-tomlinson, accessed April 8, 2009

3) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7764882.stm, accessed April 8, 2009.

4) http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article5793087.ece, accessed April 8, 2009.

5) http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/apr/01/g20-policing-climate-protest-riot, accessed April 8, 2009.

6) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/03/g20-protests-police-tactics, accessed April 8, 2009.

7) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/03/g20-protests-police-tactics, accessed April 8, 2009.

8] http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2007/mar/25/uk.idcards, accessed April 8, 2009.

9) http://www.entrust.com/corporate/history.htm, accessed April 8, 2009.