EcoLogics

We asked the police what powers they wanted and gave them to them

–Tony Blair, during speech about law and order in July, 2004

Note: This is the third in a series of posts:

Labour’s Spiral of Terror (I): Introduction
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (II): The policing of ‘views’
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (III): RIPA 2000 and Blair’s Hobbesian Ideal
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (IV): Blunkett’s Law
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (V): the other 9/11

At first glance, Glasgow and Poole would appear to have little in common. One is far to the north of the British Isles, and represents itself as a modern, progressive, and multi-cultural city. The other is far to the south, and is happy to represent itself as a sandy tourist resort, the site of one of the world’s largest natural harbours. Where Glasgow is usually regarded as a bastion of ‘old’ Labour, Poole is so Conservative that it doesn’t even have a single New Labour councillor. Whatever the real similarities or differences, both places have recently witnessed events that reveal the social consequences of New Labour’s spiral of terror.

In April of 2008, Poole made national headlines when it emerged that its council was using what was widely (and mistakenly) regarded as anti-terror legislation to spy on a family who were wrongly accused of lying on a school application form.  The following extracts, taken from The Telegraph, tell the remarkable story:

‘A council [the Poole Council] has used powers intended for anti-terrorism surveillance to spy on a family who were wrongly accused of lying on a school application form. […] For two weeks the middle-class family was followed by council officials who wanted to establish whether they had given a false address within the catchment area of an oversubscribed school to secure a place for their three-year-old. […] The “spies” made copious notes on the movements of the mother and her three children, who they referred to as “targets” as they were trailed on school runs. The snoopers even watched the family home at night to establish where they were sleeping. […] Poole borough council disclosed that it had legitimately used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) to spy on the family’. […] The mother, who wishes to remain anonymous, said: “I’m incensed that legislation designed to combat terrorism can be turned on a three-year-old”’(1).

Almost exactly one year later, it was Glasgow’s turn to make security headlines. In late April 2009, the Guardian published an article that revealed that two police officers from the Strathclyde Police Force (or men who identified themselves as such) had tried to infiltrate the anti-climate change group ‘Plane Stupid’. They had done so by threatening one of the group’s activists, Matilda Gifford, with a criminal record for her previous arrests, and by offering to bribe her in exchange for inside information. The activist recorded the conversations, and the following are excerpts of the exchange, as transcribed by the Guardian:

‘”Well let’s just say if you were prepared to meet us, and talk to us, we may be in a position to help you out financially,” said the assistant.

The DC continued: “Look at the big picture – we work with hundreds of people, believe me, ranging from terrorist organisations right through to whatever … We have people who give us information on environmentalism, leftwing extremism, rightwing – you name it, we have the whole spectrum of reporting.

“The point we’re making is: they come to us with the concerns, because within the organisations for which they have strong ideologies and beliefs they are happy to go along with that, but what they will not get involved in is maybe where it’s gonna impact someone else. That’s when they come to us and say ‘by the way, so and so – in my opinion – is maybe getting a wee bit too hotheaded’.”

Before ending the meeting, Gifford reportedly asked: “Are you Strathclyde police?” The DC paused, and replied: “We are.”’

When Gifford asked how much money would be involved, and said she was not interested in ’20 quid’ (the British term for 20 pounds sterling), one of the officers replied ‘”UK plc can afford more than 20 quid.”’(2)

Assuming that the two police officers were not themselves acting on behalf of ‘UK plc’, any questions regarding the legality of both sets of events—the Poole town council’s spying, and the attempted bribery by the Strathclyde Police—would have been covered by one same legislative act: the ‘Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, 2000’, better known as RIPA 2000. In RIPA 2000 we find a good symbol of the legislative dimension of New Labour’s spiral of terror, and so it is pertinent to describe some of its key aspects.

* * *

To begin with, it should be noted that the name Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act is rather cunning; in some respects, the act is arguably better described as a form of deregulation. The act established the new legal framework for what is known as ‘targeted surveillance’, i.e. spying on an individual or a group of individuals (as distinct from mass surveillance of the kind made possible by the fact that ISPs are now obliged to hold onto their users’ internet records for several years). However, its advocates within New Labour were as keen to provide a legal basis for targeted surveillance in the age of new media technologies—the official justification for the legislation—as they were to prevent the courts from making any spying public. RIPA allows the government to require an ISP to provide access to a customer’s communications in secret (or indeed to demand that an ISP fit equipment to facilitate surveillance). But it also stops courts from revealing the existence of interception warrants and any data collected with them. As the Act states, ‘Subject to section 18, no evidence shall be adduced, question asked, assertion or disclosure made or other thing done in, for the purposes of or in connection with any legal proceedings which (in any manner)—(a) discloses, in circumstances from which its origin in anything falling within subsection (2) may be inferred, any of the contents of an intercepted communication or any related communications data; or (b) tends (apart from any such disclosure) to suggest that anything falling within subsection (2) has or may have occurred or be going to occur.’(3)

This aspect of RIPA means that anyone who can use the legislation for targeted surveillance (more on that issue, below) can do so in the knowledge that the surveillance process is unlikely to be controlled by the courts. And yet, as the examples of the Poole town council and the Strathclyde Police reveal, there are good grounds to assume that RIPA 2000 not only can, but will be subject to abuse in the absence of strict oversight.

The second point worth highlighting involves the range of institutions that can use (or abuse) RIPA 2000. As the act’s original preamble makes clear, it was, from the beginning, a very wide-ranging act of legislation: ‘An Act to make provision for and about the interception of communications, the acquisition and disclosure of data relating to communications, the carrying out of surveillance, the use of covert human intelligence sources and the acquisition of the means by which electronic data protected by encryption or passwords may be decrypted or accessed; to provide for Commissioners and a tribunal with functions and jurisdiction in relation to those matters, to entries on and interferences with property or with wireless telegraphy and to the carrying out of their functions by the Security Service, the Secret Intelligence Service and the Government Communications Headquarters; and for connected purposes(3)’.

What is not always realised is that in 2003, David Blunkett dramatically extended the number of institutions that might use RIPA 2000. It would be serious enough if RIPA could be used (or again, abused) by the security services, alone. But as reported by the BBC’s Newsnight programme on April 14, 2008, by that date some 635 UK agencies had been authorised to use one or another of the powers instituted by RIPA 2000. The civil liberties non-government organisation Liberty, which was Newsnight’s source for the above statistic, suggested in its Privacy Report that amongst many other agencies, RIPA 2000 was enabling local authorities, food and fishing agencies, and even the Charity Commission to use targeted surveillance powers (4). What began as an act that was clearly written for the security services, ended up as what has rightly been described as a ’snooper’s charter’ for hundreds of councils and other national and local state agencies.

To put this practice into context, the Telegraph reported on April 12, 2008 that in 2007, councils and government departments across the UK made 12,494 applications for ‘directed surveillance’ to the police’s 19,000. In the same article, the paper suggested that an unidentified ‘local government body’ had admitted that councils and other government bodies ‘would soon carry out more surveillance than the police.’ According to the Telegraph, one council, the Gosport borough council, was even using the RIPA legislation for ‘an undercover investigation into dog fouling. Council officers equipped with digital cameras and binoculars are spying on dog walkers’(5).

The third point worth noting is that the RIPA legislation was introduced by New Labour in February 2000. Given the time that it takes to develop and introduce new legislation, this means that New Labour began work on the legislation years before September 11, 2001.  But also, and as noted earlier, the legislation was then dramatically extended, after 9/11, to a variety of forms and levels of everyday governance in 2003. The significance of both aspects of the timing cannot be overemphasized; to repeat the crucial point, the legislation was introduced before 9/11, but then dramatically extended beyond anti-terror operations after 9/11. On this ground alone, anyone who claims that the introduction of this legislation was no more than a response to terrorism is either mistaken, or being deceitful.

What RIPA 2000 makes clear is that a key aspect of the scaffolding that holds up New Labour’s spiral of terror involves a sweeping, and far-ranging legislative project which is by no means simply a result of any real or alleged ‘war on terror’. On the contrary, it illustrates the way in which the spiral of terror has involved what has become, in effect, a kind of ‘terrorisation’ of all forms of criminality, a U.S.-style zero-tolerance discourse that is premised on the notion that any and all measures must be taken to secure the safety of the nation. This ideal, which might be described as the idea of a ‘Securi-State’, has now gone so far that it is even possible to use the most draconian of measures to try to prevent people from leaving their dog’s shit on pavements and park grounds. But crucially, it has also been extended to any kind of protest or activism that is somehow deemed to be ’subversive’. The aforementioned Strathclyde policeman’s comment says it all:

“Look at the big picture – we work with hundreds of people, believe me, ranging from terrorist organisations right through to whatever … We have people who give us information on environmentalism, leftwing extremism, rightwing – you name it, we have the whole spectrum of reporting.”

Upon reading this comment, EcoLogics wonders if part of that ‘whole spectrum’ includes the civil rights group Liberty—note that police looking through Damian Green’s computer searched for emails to and from Shami Chakrabarti—or indeed 10 Downing Street itself: who passed on McBride’s infamous email to the Conservatives? Such issues to one side, the question must be raised: what has motivated this extraordinary slide towards a more and more authoritarian form of policing?

* * *

A first answer can be found in a remarkable speech that Tony Blair gave on the subject of ‘law and order’ in July 2004. The speech makes very clear, by Blair’s own account, that the real agenda behind legislation such as RIPA 2000 was years, if not decades in the making:

It was John Stuart Mill who articulated the modern concept that with freedom comes responsibility.

But in the 1960’s revolution, that didn’t always happen.

Law and order policy still focussed on the offender’s rights, protecting the innocent, understanding the social causes of their criminality.

All through the 1970s and 1980s, under Labour and Conservative Governments, a key theme of legislation was around the prevention of miscarriages of justice.

Meanwhile some took the freedom without the responsibility.

The worst criminals became better organised and more violent.

The petty criminals were no longer the bungling but wrong-headed villains of old; but drug pushers and drug-abusers, desperate and without any residual moral sense.

And a society of different lifestyles spawned a group of young people who were brought up without parental discipline, without proper role models and without any sense of responsibility to or for others.

All of this was then multiplied in effect, by the economic and social changes that altered the established pattern of community life in cities, towns and villages throughout Britain and throughout the developed world.

Here, now, today, people have had enough of this part of the 1960s consensus.‘(6)

EcoLogics will eventually post a detailed critique of this speech—a speech which may well come to be regarded as one of the historical markers of Britain’s drift towards an authoritarian society. Here it suffices to note that, while Blair invokes John Stuart Mill, his stance, as represented by this speech and by his government’s actions, is actually much closer to that of Thomas Hobbes (if indeed his position can be said to be closer to that of any philosopher). Hobbes was famously the advocate of a ’social contract’ between society and a sovereign (or sovereign authority) to whom all individuals must cede any natural rights for the sake of protection. Any abuses of power by this authority should be accepted as the price of peace. The extent of the drift towards this authoritarian discourse in the New Labour party is perhaps best symbolized by what is the most extraordinary statement in Blair’s speech: towards the end of the speech, Blair actually boasts that ‘We asked the police what powers they wanted and gave them to them’…

A first answer to the question posed earlier is thus that New Labour’s enthusiasm for the Securi-State is at least partly a matter of ideology, in the traditional sense of the word: a ‘world view’ such as was expressed by Tony Blair, and which has been enthusiastically echoed by many other leading members of New Labour: amongst others, David Blunkett, Charles Clarke, Peter Mandelson, Tony McNulty, Jacqui Smith, and of course, Gordon Brown himself.

In the aftermath of Ian Tomlinson’s death, the question that is faced by the country is what, if anything, can be done to put, in one former policing minister’s words, the genie back into the bottle. The last post in the series will revisit this question; in the next post, we will concern ourselves with a second, and arguably equally important motivation for New Labour’s efforts to transform Britain into a ‘Securi-State’.

Update May 7, 2009:

In the wake of the controversy surrounding New Labour’s efforts to circumvent the European Court of Human Rights on the DNA Database, the Bristol East MP has provided an excellent example of what this post described as Blair’s Hobbesian ideal–an ideal that, if this MP’s ideas are anything to go by, goes far beyond the New Labour jefatura:as the MP puts it, ‘Yes, Shami Chakrabati is right when she says the Government’s proposals could mean that ‘wholly innocent’ people could have their details stockpiled for years. That’s the cost of such a plan. But the benefit – protecting other wholly innocent people from being raped or worse, isn’t that worth the sacrifice? Are your ‘civil liberties’ really so precious that you’d be prepared to have these crimes on your conscience?’ (http://kerry-mccarthy.blogspot.com/2009/05/dna-database.html)

References

(1)‘Poole council spies on family over school claim’, in Telegraph, April 11, 2008, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/11/nspy111.xml, accessed April 14, 2008.

2) ‘UK plc can afford more than 20 quid,’ the officer said, in Guardian, April 25, 2009, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/25/police-informers-tape-recordings-gifford, accessed April 27, 2009.

3) See http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2000/ukpga_20000023_en_1#Legislation-Preamble, accessed April 14, 2008.

(4) G. Crossman et al. (2007) Overlooked: Surveillance and Personal Privacy in Modern Britain. London: Liberty, p. 16. Copy available at http://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/issues/3-privacy/index.shtml, accessed April 14, 2008.

(5) Council spy cases hit 1,000 a month, in Telegraph, April 12, 2008, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/12/nspy112.xml, accessed April 14, 2008.

(6) Full text of speech transcribed at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3907651.stm, accessed April 27, 2009.

‘…got a reference to capitalism and communism’...‘It’s one of the things he’s being arrested for’… ‘It’s to provide evidence of his views.’
–justification given by a police officer for taking an item from the home of environmental activist

Note: This is the second in a series of posts. The following is a list of the posts: New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (I): Introduction
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (II): The policing of ‘views’
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (III): RIPA 2000 and Blair’s Hobbesian Ideal
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (IV): Blunkett’s Law
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (V): the other 9/11

On June 13th, 2008, a group of environmental activists stopped a train carrying coal to the Drax power station. The climate change campaigners boarded the train and prevented it from moving for about 24 hours. The action was designed to heighten public awareness over the emissions of the largest coal-fired power station in Europe.

The next day, the police raided the homes of most of the protesters. The raids would have passed unnoticed by the public had it not been for the fact that the father of one of the alleged activists filmed the police as they went through his son’s personal possessions. The video itself might have been lost among the millions of videos that are put up in YouTube had it not been for the fact that on Sunday, April 19, the Guardian website gave the video the internet equivalent of a front page treatment. The video, which is available here, offers a good example of what this blog is describing as New Labour’s spiral of terror.

* * *

The video is structured as a kind of visual first-person narration, with the father (or the presumed father) asking the officers about the rationale for their actions as they search through the alleged activist’s possessions. The viewer must be careful when drawing conclusions from the video because it is extensively edited. However, one exchange appears to leave little space for manipulation on the part of the filmmaker(s). Speaking off-camera as he films the police opening an envelope, the father asks the police why they are taking the envelope (or at any rate, of the alleged activists’ possessions). The officer who is handling what looks like a medium-sized manila envelope answers ‘…got a reference to capitalism and communism’. When the father asks ‘What’s the significance of that?’, the officer answers ‘It’s one of the things he’s being arrested for.’ When the father says ‘What?’, the officer replies ‘It’s to provide evidence of his views.’ The reply from the father pretty much says it all: ‘Of his views…?’

* * *

As captions explain in the beginning of the video, police in the UK have the right to search the property of a suspected offender for evidence of the alleged crime. During the exchange shown in the video, there appears to be a reference to Section 18 of the Police and Criminal Evidence (PACE) Act of 1984. This legislation allows police to search the premises occupied or controlled by anyone who has been arrested for an indictable offence. PACE 1984 has a rather notorious legal pedigree; it was introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s government at the height of the events surrounding the Miners’ Strike, and New Labour has made some aspects of the legislation even more draconian in recent years. While the legislation has officially been represented as a means of balancing police powers and civil liberties, it is clear that PACE is part of a long and growing series of legislative acts that have reduced our civil liberties; they also appear to have given the police the kind of quasi-legal elbow room required to engage in the abuse that is finally generating the universal condemnation that it deserves.

Now Section 18 of the PACE legislation was presumably designed to allow police to search premises in order to find evidence such as stolen goods, illegal drugs, firearms and so forth. The fact that the video shows the police taking personal items that relate to what one of the officers describes as the alleged activists ‘views’—in particular, views relating to ‘capitalism and communism’—illustrates perfectly what EcoLogics means by New Labour’s ‘spiral of terror’. British (or at any rate, English) laws that were once designed to combat organised crime and other serious offences are now being used in an apparently routine manner to gather ‘intelligence’ about the views of individuals suspected of engaging in environmental and other forms of activism.

To conservative viewers of the video (or readers of this blog), this might seem like a perfectly legitimate action—after all, the alleged activists whose actions are mentioned by the video have just ‘hijacked’ a train. However, it doesn’t take an expert in British jurisprudence to point out that it is one thing to search for, say, firearms or illegal drugs, and quite another to be looking for evidence of ‘politics’ or ‘views’. In the former case, the police are acting legally in the sense that they are searching for evidence that can be treated as evidence according to the law. In the latter case, the police are acting illegally in so far as they are searching for information that is not defined as being illegal by any legislation. Pursued to its logical conclusion, this practice implies that anything from adherence to an environmental(ist) discourse to a civil libertarian outlook is now regarded as evidence of criminality—in fact, as a form of terrorism—by at least some sectors of the police.

* * *

The political implications of the crossing of this threshold, and indeed the reach of New Labour’s spiral of terror were dramatically illustrated by the illegal arrest of the Tory shadow immigration secretary, Damian Green. Thanks to a parliamentary enquiry on the matter, it has now been confirmed that members of 10 Downing Street used the excuse of threats to national security to sick the anti-terror squad on Green. It was bad enough that Green was falsely and maliciously accused of endangering national security, and that 25 or so anti-terror police officers were sent to harass him and his family just hours after a major terrorist attack took place in Mumbai. Green himself has noted the irony of this in a recent article in the Times: after describing the cock-ups at the beginning of the raid (apparently the police surrounded the wrong house at one point), he said that he was

‘pleased that Mr Quick, who authorised his arrest, resigned this month over another matter. “I thought that he should not be in charge of the anti- terror squad because the day they arrested me was the day of the Mumbai bombings. Al-Qaeda might have been trying to do a worldwide spectacular. It did seem to me that to have 25 of the anti-terror squad going through my bank statements and my bed was not what the head of the anti-terror squad should have wanted.”’(1)

But the event that revealed the full extent of the politicization of Britain’s security apparatus was the news that the police also searched Green’s computer for emails to and from Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty(2). Like other critical observers, Chakrabarti has taken the government to task for the spiral of terror, and this fact has evidently not been lost on whomever sent the anti-terror squad to ‘do’ Green. It is significant in this sense that no one has actually had to resign over a matter that in another place and time might well have forced a Home Secretary, if not the prime minister him/herself, to resign. Bob Quick was forced to resign, but only after he supposedly compromised another raid. His immediate superior, acting commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson, was later confirmed by New Labour as the new Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. It is precisely this kind of politically inspired ‘category mistake’, and the fact no one has actually paid for its abusive nature, that shows just how far New Labour’s spiral of terror can and will go.

* * *

After the departure of the Bush administration, at least one leading member of the New Labour Party felt safe enough to come out and recognise what most people had long suspected: that the so-called ‘War on Terror’ was an ideological construct (3). After that dramatic, if somewhat belated acknowledgment, Gordon Brown has tried to row back and to resuscitate the ideological crusade. It would seem that some in the New Labour machine still believe that there is political mileage to be gained from the process. Witness, for example, the effectiveness with which the disastrous news about Ian Tomlinson’s death were blitzed by the grand announcement of what has subsequently proved to be yet another false anti-terrorist operation. But a more worrisome, and more plausible prospect is that New Labour is now unable to stop the forces pushing the nation in the direction of what many have described as a police state.

In some respects, it is unhelpful to raise the spectre of a police state in the UK. On the one hand, and as many critical observers have rightly pointed out, we are a long way from the kind of repressive regime that, say, Cesar Augusto Pinochet, or Jorge Rafael Videla instituted respectively in Chile and Argentina in the 1970s. On the other hand, in a context that remains driven by a increasingly isolated but still powerful coalition of neoliberal politicians, media, and transnational corporations, any suggestion of anything like a police state provides a welcome opportunity to tar and feather anyone so far to the loony left (or the paranoid right) so as to mistake ‘a few minor police infringements’ with Pinochet’s DINA or Jorge Videla’s Buenos Aires Provincial Police. In the process, any debate about what is happening in the UK gets distracted by a debate over what is not happening, and the outcome is that New Labour and their security apparatus (and it does seem that it is increasingly their apparatus) continue to have free reign.

Part of the reason for this is that no one in the media seems to have the time (or perhaps the space) to sit down to spell out the middle ground between democracy and a police state. We remain stuck in a discursive oscillation between the New Labour (and it seems, the Tory) claim that there are just a few police ‘bad apples’ (as if the spiral of terror has nothing to do with the overall political process); and the equally problematic, though perhaps somewhat more accurate view that police brutality has always been an issue, and that what has changed is only really the targets of that brutality: where once it was miners and then road protesters, now it is ‘respectable’ members of society such as the members of the Countryside Alliance, or indeed, the Shadow Cabinet. Where one stance denies the far-reaching changes by minimalising or individualising any problems, the other denies at least some aspects of the changes by totalizing and generalising all forms of police abuse.

In the following weeks, EcoLogics will propose a different vocabulary with which to analyse New Labour’s spiral of terror. Next week’s post will begin the process by starting to identify something that is a half-way house between democracy and a police state (the ‘Securi-State’), and by analysing one of the central motivations for the emergence of what is at once a very old, and a novel principle of governance.

Notes

1) ‘Damian Green: It could have been terrifying but it was a farce’ in Times on Line, April 18, 2009, at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6115806.ece, accessed April 18, 2009.

2) ‘Shami Chakrabarti was target in police search’ in Times On Line, April 18, 2009, at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6116023.ece, accessed April 18, 2009.

3) ‘David Miliband: ‘War on Terror’ was wrong, in Guardian, January 15, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/15/david-miliband-war-terror, accessed April 21, 2009.

And it [a New Labour government] will be a government that seeks to restore trust in politics in this country. That cleans it up, that decentralizes it, that gives people hope once again that politics is and always should be about the service of the public.
–Tony Blair, speaking in front of 10 Downing Street after the elections in May 1997

Nowadays, the intersection between politics and the economy in different parts of the world, including the emerging markets, is very strong.
–Tony Blair, in interview with Financial Times after joining J P Morgan in January 2008

Note: this is the first in a series of posts. The following is a list of the posts:

New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (I): Introduction
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (II): The policing of ‘views’
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (III): RIPA 2000 and Blair’s Hobbesian Ideal
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (IV): Blunkett’s Law
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (V): the other 9/11

Two articles appeared in today’s Guardian that arguably mark a watershed in the history of the British policing: the first was an article by David Gilbertson, a former Scotland Yard commander and assistant inspector of constabulary. In the article, Gilbertson offered a remarkably candid and critical account of how it is that Britain’s police have come to be dominated by an organisational culture that is intimately linked to, but by no means simply determined by the ideology of the now widely discredited ‘war on terror’. According to Gilbertson,

‘Over the past decade, supine management has compensated them with various “toys and fripperies, beads for the Indians” (in the words of a very senior officer at a meeting I attended in 1997), including extendable batons and Tasers. Increasingly, British policing morphed into a faux-US style of operation. Uniforms were made to look overtly military. The public were regarded, almost uniformly, as suspects, with any hint of dissent interpreted as anti-police. To this must be added the post-9/11 and 7/7 atmosphere. A succession of intrusive powers under the various terrorism acts convinced many officers that they are frontline combatants in the war on terror’(1).

Given its author and content, this article was worthy of a headline in any newspaper. But by mid-morning, a second article had displaced it in the Guardian’s website. The second article was titled ‘Secret police intelligence was given to E.ON before planned demo’. For those unfamiliar with the firm, E.ON is a German energy corporation that was established in 2000 and has become one of the world’s largest energy service providers. Its CEO is Dr Wulf Bernotat. According to Business Week, Bernotat’s career in the energy sector took off at Shell; amongst several other posts that Bernotat held within the oil giant, he was Area Coordinator for Africa of Shell, London from 1992 to 1995 (2), a period that was perhaps Shell’s most controversial from the point of view of its involvement in Nigeria (3).

The following quote sums up the shocking claims made by the Guardian:

‘Correspondence between civil servants and security officials at the company reveals how intelligence was shared about the peaceful direct action group Climate Camp in the run-up to the demonstration at Kingsnorth, the proposed site of a new coal-fired power station in north Kent. [...] Intelligence passed to the energy firm by officials from the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) included detailed information about the movements of protesters and their meetings. E.ON was also given a secret strategy document written by environmental campaigners and information from the Police National Information and Coordination Centre (PNICC), which gathers national and international intelligence for emergency planning’(4).

The Secretary of State for the Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform is Peter Mandelson. Mandelson is, of course, the third man in the New Labour Troika, and prior to being ‘rehabilitated’ for a third attempt at cabinet service, he was the European Trade Commissioner. In the light of the news divulged by the Guardian, Mandelson must have one of the most ironic job titles in the New Labour government.

* * *

Last year, EcoLogics began a series of short essays titled ‘Britain’s Spiral of Terror’. The series was never completed, partly because it was difficult to come across incontrovertible evidence of a dynamic that was increasingly obvious to critical observers, but which could be plausibly dismissed by political realists (or conservatives) as a form of conspiracy theorising.

What a difference 12 or so months can make. The crisis in New Labour’s increasingly authoritarian approach to policing and national security, and now the news regarding E.ON, vindicate the ’spiral of terror’ thesis. However, they also show that EcoLogics underestimated the extent of New Labour’s self-entrapment in a downward spiral of authoritarianism and neoliberalism; a spiral which, contrary to what might be expected from the most chameleonic of parties, continues to lead New Labour politicians to promote policies that virtually guarantee that the party will be slaughtered in the forthcoming elections.

This raises the question: what is the nature of this ‘spiral of terror’, and why is New Labour locked into a course of self-destruction (and to be sure, not just of self destruction)? What are the motivations behind the process, and what, if anything, will the next government be able to do to reverse Britain’s fateful descent towards a ‘securi-state’? EcoLogics will be having another go at the series, with a change in the title that reflects the growing isolation of New Labour as the party most unambiguously committed to the politics in question.

Notes

1) D. Gilbertson, ‘At the core of this policing crisis is a leadership failure’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/20/policing-relations-general-public, accessed April 20, 2009.
2) Wulf Bernotat, Executive Profile, Business Week, http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/people/person.asp?personId=796926&symbol=EONGn.DE, accessed April 20, 2009.
3) See for example, the Wikipedia entry about Ken Saro-Wiwa at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Saro_Wiwa, accessed April 20, 2009.
4) ‘Secret police intelligence was given to E.ON before planned demo’ in Guardian April 20, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/20/police-intelligence-e-on-berr, accessed April 20, 2009.

Note: this post originally appeared in another blog. EcoLogics is happy to re-post it here.

Several weeks ago a fellow environmental educator who works in the U.S. sent around an email that celebrated the changes being introduced by the Obama administration. The scientist suggested that things were already looking up, what with real scientists being appointed to high places. As he put it at the beginning of his email, ‘Imagine! National scientific organizations headed by scientists again!!’

The educator was certainly not alone in looking forward to a more hopeful time. Something like a collective sigh of relief could be heard amongst most environmental educators across the globe on the day that Obama beat McCain. Obama’s victory was widely interpreted as the end of the road for what may well go down as the most ideologically-driven presidency since Nixon. Under Bush, big business was given concession after concession at the expense of a variety of local environmental concerns, but also at the expense of the increasingly urgent matter of climate change policy.

The cartoonesque image of an ostrich with a Bush-like head buried in the sand would have been appropriate were it not for the fact that there is ample evidence that the Bush administration engaged in all manner of back-room strategies to undermine the work of scientists with bona fide research—research about climate change, and also about a host of other subjects that Bush and his increasingly hard right-wing advisers regarded as being ‘politically sensitive’. Little wonder that just two years after Bush had taken office, Donald Kennedy was speaking in the Science magazine of ‘an epidemic of politics’ in a variety of science institutions (1).

Over the past few weeks, some have tried to find the silver lining in the Bush administration’s toxic cloud. For example, just this week an article in the International Herald Tribune tried to argue that ‘even those who view [Bush’s] environmental record most harshly acknowledge that he also took significant action. He improved air quality, gave renewable energy a large financial boost, left behind the largest marine sanctuaries ever established and started a dialogue that could help lead to the next international treaty on climate change’(2). This is a sweeping generalisation that is almost certainly false for that very reason. But more to the point, it is a bit like arguing that Bush deserves credit for ‘pacifying’ Iraq; not only is that not true, but it misses the fundamental issues regarding the illegality of the war, the subterfuge that was employed to launch it, and its disastrous consequences for the country’s people, if not for the entire region.

There is, then, good reason to look forward to a significant shift in the new administration’s policies, and certainly there is some evidence that such a shift is already under way: witness, for example, the naming of competent officials such as Jane Lubchenco to head NOAA and Steven Chu as head for the Department of Energy. Witness also the repealing of a raft of Bush administration measures in areas such as drilling in Utah and in the operation of coal-fired plants. At least by mid-February 2009, it also seemed true that Obama was making ‘all the right noises’ in regard to the urgency of taking swift action on specific climate change policy.

After recognising these positive aspects, it is pertinent to make the case for an even greater vigilance, and more environmental activism during the Obama presidency. There are three general reasons for this. The most obvious is the extreme urgency of swift change regarding climate change policies. Dr James Hansen put the time frame starkly into perspective when he said in an interview for the UK’s Observer that ‘We cannot now afford to put off change any longer. We have to get on a new path within this new administration. We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world. America must take the lead’(3). Early today, Prof James McCarthy echoed this idea in the BBC News website (4).

There are, however, two additional, and somewhat less obvious reasons for both goading the Obama administration into action, and scrutinizing its policies more carefully than ever. The first of these has to do with the ideological consequences of what might be described as the ‘post-Bush effect’. Put simply, Bush’s administation was so driven by a right-wing ideology that it may seem that Obama has only to ‘be Obama’ to do a far better job. Such complacency is not only disingenuous, but dangerous. As the time-scale proposed by Hansen and McCarthy makes clear, nothing short of a revolutionary set of policies will address the environmental crisis; in such a context, just ‘being Obama’ is unlikely to be enough.

This leads us to another reason for being critical vis-à-vis the Obama administration’s policies. If it is true that Obama has made the right noises with respect to the environment, a careful reading of many of his policies in other areas, and the team of advisers that he has assembled suggests a president that will be willing to go a long ways in appeasing the Republicans, or rather, the alliance of lobbies that represent the interests of neoliberal institutions. Beyond the extraordinary nomination of Robert Gates as Defence Secretary, it is highly significant, for example, that Obama named Timothy F. Geithner as his Treasury Secretary. Geithner was the former president and chief executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and is reported to have played a leading role in trying to manage the financial crisis. It seems clear, on the one hand, that Geithner was not very effective in that role. But even if he was, it is revealing that, according to the New York Times, Geithner ‘largely prevailed in opposing tougher conditions on financial institutions that were sought by presidential aides, including David Axelrod, a senior adviser to the president’(5). It would appear, in this sense, that in the U.S. as in Britain, politicians are still promoting some of the very people who were most closely associated, by action or inaction, with the neoliberal excesses in the finance sector. This seems not only disingenuous, but manifestly wrong from the point of view of potential conflicts of interest. Some might even argue that it is a recipe for the kind of corruption imputed to the Bush administration, and in Britain, to New Labour.

By way of an aside, it is remarkable to note how consistently most of the media are trying to either downplay, or reconcile the presence of such ancien régime figures with Obama’s signature call for change. To quote just two examples in the New York Times, the paper argued in its background information pages that the new Commerce Secretary, Judd Gregg, was ‘chairman of the budget committee from 2005 to 2007 and is known as a fiscal conservative. He could help President Obama by capitalizing on his relationships with fellow Republicans as well as his contacts in the business community(6). Where Ken Salazar, the new Interior Secretary is concerned, the Times suggested that ‘A few environmental groups may fault him for his pragmatism, and some within the oil and gas industry may disagree with his cautious stance, like favoring a phased approach to opening Colorado’s Roan Plateau to drilling’(7). Again and again, the presence of such figures is represented as a kind of show of strength on the part of Obama, a kind of ‘broad tent’ approach that is able to include, rather than exclude, the opposition. Perhaps it is true that, at least to start with, Obama can simply not afford to ignore the ‘coalition of the right’ in the US and beyond. But the suspicion has to be that the presence of people like Gates, Geithner and of course Gregg may yet be proven to be a sign of Obama’s own conservatism—a conservatism acutely analysed by Gabriel Paquette in the Guardian [8]. More generally, it may also be a sign of the continued hegemony, in the Gramscian sense of this term, of the neoliberal lobby groups that have apparently already ensconced themselves in the new administration.

Far from having consequences for commerce or the economy alone, this ‘broad tent’ approach may mean that Obama will be as prone as the Clinton administration to engaging in the kind of political compromise that arguably led the U.S. to drift further and further to the right, and further and further into the ‘grey’ during the pre-Bush years. The paradox is that, however much Bush was (and remains) a hate figure amongst most if not all environmental activists, there was a terrible clarity about most of his policies, a clarity that more often than not made it possible for environmental activists to smell an environmental rat a mile away (apologies to Muroidea lovers). This did not always make it possible to stop the policies, but it did mean that environmentalists did not often have to spend a lot of political energy trying to unmask dynamics of ideological dissimulation. With Obama, the situation may be reversed; it may be more feasible to stop some policies, or at least to mediate them, but their implications are likely to be far less obvious, and so potentially just as damaging if and when the neoliberals get their way. For this reason, environmental activists and environmental educators will need to fine-tune their critical faculties, and prepare for what is likely to be a four–, or perhaps an eight–year struggle with Obama advisers who are apparently already proving effective at whispering sweet neoliberal nothings into Obama’s ear.

By way of a postscript: If this seems unduly pessimistic to liberal readers on either side of the pond, they might care to reflect on the misguided reception many Britons gave to New Labour, and to Tony Blair during his first years as prime minister.

Update, February 12, 2009, 22:25 GMT: news just in, Judd Gregg has declined the honour of being Obama’s Commerce Secretary. Is the ‘broad tent’ collapsing? Hardly–there are plenty of neoliberals amongst the Democrats. Is this a sign that perhaps Obama is less conservative than this blog has made him out to be? Let us wait and see who is next on Obama’s list of prospective Commerce Secretaries.

References

1) See Science, 31 January 2003, Vol. 299, No. 5607, p. 625. Article available at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/299/5607/625, accessed August 24, 2007.

2) International Herald Tribune, February 7, 2009, ‘Obama sorting Bush’s environment legacy’, at http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/02/07/america/enviro.4-424718.php, accessed February 11, 2009.

3) The Observer, January 18, 2009,‘We have only four years left to act on climate change – America has to lead’, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jan/18/obama-climate-change, accessed February 11, 2009.

4) BBC News online, February 12, 2009, ‘Obama “must act now” on climate’, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7885036.stm, accessed February 12, 2009.

5) The New York Times, February 9, 2009, ‘Geithner Said to Have Prevailed on the Bailout’, at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/business/economy/10bailout.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=Timothy%20Geithner&st=cse, accessed Febuary 10, 2009.

6) The New York Times, ‘Jud Gregg’, at http://projects.nytimes.com/44th_president/new_team/show/judd-gregg, accessed Febuary 10, 2009.

7) The New York Times, ‘Ken Salazar’, at http://projects.nytimes.com/44th_president/new_team/show/ken-salazar, accessed Febuary 10, 2009.

8] The Guardian, January 26, 2009 ‘Obama the Conservative’, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/jan/26/obama-conservative-progressive-agenda, accessed January 26, 2009.

On March 9, the Sunday Times—a Rupert Murdoch paper, not exactly known for its liberal perspectives—revealed that Ferrovial’s BAA (the privatized British Airport Authority) had ‘colluded with government officials to “fix” the evidence in favour of a new third runway at Heathrow’.

The paper suggested that documents obtained under freedom of information laws showed that

‘BAA gave instructions to DfT officials on how to “strip out” data that indicated key environmental targets would be breached by the airport. The airports operator repeatedly selected alternative data used for the consultation to ensure that the final results showed a negligible impact on noise and pollution. The DfT gave BAA unprecedented access to confidential papers and allowed the company to help to rewrite the consultation document. The final document significantly reduced the likely carbon emissions caused by the runway by not including incoming international flights.’

The paper quoted one official involved in ‘Project Heathrow’ – the Department for Transport unit that researched the environmental impact of the runway – as saying that ‘It’s a classic case of reverse engineering. They knew exactly what results they wanted and fixed the inputs to get there. It’s appalling’(1).

Today’s Guardian is reporting that New Labour’s own Environment Agency is now confirming that the plans for a third runway would indeed breach the EU directives on nitrous dioxide polution, leading to increased mortality rates across the south-east of England:

‘In a damning conclusion, the agency said the consultation process, which ended last month, had not proved that the scheme would not breach EU directives on nitrous dioxide pollution. “After full consideration of the documents our conclusion is that overall we do not think the evidence presented is sufficiently robust to conclude that the proposed Heathrow development will not infringe the NO2 directive, bearing in mind the uncertainties that need to be addressed.

“This is because the assessment of air quality pays insufficient attention to these uncertainties and to the range of possible future scenarios, like road traffic, meteorological variability, climate change, background air quality and atmospheric quality,” the report said.’(2)

* * *

On March 11, George Monbiot revealed in The Guardian that Gordon Brown’s apparently popular measure to force general practitioners to open their surgeries late into the evening and on Saturday mornings is also part of a New Labour deception:

‘The government launched its campaign a year ago, with a press release published by the Department of Health. This claimed that a report by the Cabinet Office, published the same day, “reveals that nine out of 10″ people polled “said they want public services, such as GP surgeries, that are open some evenings and weekends, even if that means they would sometimes be shut during the working week”.’

‘This was reported verbatim by the press, but it was a complete fabrication. I have read the report. It contains no mention of this poll or anything resembling it. The terms “surgeries”, “evening”, “weekend” and “working week” do not occur.’

‘To the department’s intense discomfort, Ipsos Mori found that “the vast majority of patients (84%) say they are satisfied with the hours their GP practice was open during the last six months”. Those who must visit GPs most often are the most relaxed about opening hours: only among 18- to 34-year-olds – the healthiest section of the population – does the level of unhappiness rise above 20%, and then only by a whisker.’

According to Monbiot, ‘The Confederation of British Industry was also unhappy with the results. It commissioned another survey, again from Ipsos Mori. This received responses from just 1,014 people – one 2,500th of the Department of Health’s sample size. It asked a slightly different question: “How easy or difficult was it to get an appointment at a time that was convenient to you?” It discovered that 31% found it “fairly or very difficult”.’

Monbiot says that the CBI then ‘issued a report claiming that “a commonly heard complaint is that GP practices are not open at weekends, early in the morning or in the evening … GP services are not responding to clear signals for change from patients”. But it produced no evidence: the survey didn’t ask about opening times. There are plenty of reasons why patients might have found it difficult to get a convenient appointment.’

Why, then, was the government so keen to get the GPs to change their surgery times? I quote Monbiot once again:

‘Because it assists a quite different agenda. To avoid the political firestorm big business rains on any government that stands in its way, Brown must make constant concessions. What business wants most is the 40% of the economy controlled by the state. He must find clever and camouflaged means of delivering it that do not prompt us to take to the streets. This means waging a PR war against GPs and the other public sector dinosaurs who impede choice and change. It means a thousand small steps towards privatisation.’

‘So government is expanding the number of independent sector treatment centres, even though they turn out to be far less efficient than the NHS and leave the taxpayer with major liabilities. It is opening staggeringly expensive polyclinics, operating seven days a week, which will be run by multinational companies. It will allow the primary care trust in Birmingham to shut the city’s surgeries and replace them with primary care units franchised to corporations – the promoter of this scheme happily admits to modelling it on McDonald’s. It is transferring GPs’ surgeries to supermarkets (the first was opened by Sainsbury’s last week) and giving high street chemists responsibility for diagnosing and treating minor ailments, even though they are not qualified to tell the difference between an ordinary cough and lung cancer.’(3)

Does this remind the reader of any other subject I have written about recently?

* * *

Three questions might asked by anybody who believes that this modus operandi runs counter to the most fundamental principles of democracy, and the autonomy of government:

If New Labour are willing to go to these lengths to secure private corporate interests in these contexts, in what other contexts are they doing the same?

If New Labour have lied about these issues, what else have they lied about, and what else are they lying about?

Finally, if New Labour are willing to go these lengths to secure other institutions’ interests, to what lengths will they go to secure their own power?

References

(1) ‘Revealed: the plot to expand Heathrow’ in Sunday Times, March 9, 2008, http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/transport/article3512218.ece, accessed March 13, 2008.

(2) ‘Environment Agency joins Heathrow third runway critics’, in Guardian, March 13, 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/mar/13/travelandtransport.theairlineindustry, accessed March 13, 2008.

(3) G. Monbiot, ‘Making GPs more accessible is just a disguised concession to big business’, in Guardian, March 11, 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/mar/11/nhs.health. Accessed March 13, 2008.

What is the difference between a ‘Terrorism Power’ and the Power of Terrorism?

Martin Niemöller became a famous U-boat commander in WWI. After the war, he joined the Friekorps, a group of far right-wing paramilitaries who wished to revoke the Treaty of Versailles and to stop the rise of socialism in Germany. Amongst many other actions, in 1919 members of the Friekorps engaged in the summary execution of two leading members of the left, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.

In 1920, Niemöller followed his father’s footsteps and took up the study of theology. He eventually became a Lutheran pastor and a fervent Nazi sympathizer. By the early 1930s he had acquired a reputation for being one of the foremost pro-Nazi Christians in Germany. National Socialism, Niemöller felt, was fundamentally a Christian movement, and Germany needed a Christian führer.

Similar stories might be told of many religious Nazi sympathizers both within and beyond Germany. However, in the mid-1930s it became clear to Niemöller that the Nazis were willing to imprison anyone who spoke out against their policies. In Niemöller’s view, this was wrong if it meant that the Gestapo could enter a church and detain some of its members. Niemöller dared to suggest that it was even wrong to imprison Jews if they had already converted to Christianity.

Despite this anti-Semitic stance, Hitler had Niemöller arrested in 1937. He was sent for ‘re-education’ first to Sachenhausen and then to the Dachau concentration camp, where he remained until the end of the war. Apparently Goebbels was determined to execute him, but Niemöller acquired the status of an international cause cèlébre when the Bishop of Chichester took an interest in his case. The threat of adverse publicity may well have saved Niemöller’s life.

When WWII broke out in 1939, Niemöller nonetheless offered to rejoin the German army and to fight for Hitler. And indeed, after the end of the war many of Niemöller’s erstwhile defenders realized that he was hardly the anti-Nazi hero that they had assumed him to be. But Niemöller took a number of steps to atone for his Nazi complicity, which he articulated in terms of a Lutheran discourse on guilt. He became a signatory with fellow pastors of the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt (‘By us infinite wrong was brought over many peoples and countries…’), and later he also recognised that he came from what he described as an anti-Semitic ‘past’. He eventually became a leading German pacifist and anti-nuclear activist, and he even accused President Harry S. Truman of being the second worst mass-murder in the world (after Hitler himself) for having dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In the course of this mea culpa, Niemöller repeatedly noted how, during the rise of Nazism, he and many others had found it convenient to look the other way. He turned this self-criticism into a short poem that went on to become something like an anthem amongst human rights activists in the U.S. and elsewhere. According to Harold Marcuse, a professor in the University of California who has researched the poem, and whose work has allowed me to write on this subject, one of the earliest versions of the poem is found in Milton Mayer’s book, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45. Marcuse quotes Mayer as saying that

‘“Pastor Niemöller spoke for thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothin[sic]; and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something—but then it was too late.”’

There is still some debate as to what social groups Niemöller included in the poem. Marcuse believes that Niemöller produced different versions, some of which referred to Jews, Jehova’s Witnesses, and some also argue, Catholics. Be that as it may, Niemöller himself suggested a ‘definitive’ version in 1976:

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out (1).

* * *

On Sunday, August 12, 2007, a group of environmental protestors began to set up a ‘Camp for Climate Action’ in a field outside Heathrow Airport. The camp was set up in protest over the relentless growth of air travel across the world. Heathrow is already the world’s busiest international airport, and plans are afoot to build a third runway. This would allow the airport to boost its flights from the current limit of 480,000 per year to almost 800,000 (2). According to the protestors’ website, Heathrow ‘is already a bigger source of CO2 emissions than most countries’. Even if this is a misleading statistic, it’s difficult to disagree with the activists’ suggestion that the proposed airport expansion is ‘sheer lunacy in this time of ecological crisis’(3).

That perspective is not contradicted by the British Airport Authority’s (BAA) own website. BAA is the privatised corporation that runs the airport. It was recently bought by Ferrovial and de-listed from the London Stock Exchange. Ferrovial is a Spanish construction giant that was founded in 1952 by Rafael del Pino. Del Pino made his fortune by doing maintenance for the Spanish state railway system (RENFE) at the time of the Generalísimo Franco (4). Today Ferrovial is led by Rafael del Pino Jr., and its ownership of BAA gives it a virtual monopoly over airports in the London area. Whoever wrote the entry on Rafael Sr. in Wikipedia describes him (‘and family’) as one of the richest men in the world (5).

A cynic might expect the owners of BAA to deny climate change. But after accepting the reality of climate change, the Ferrovial/BAA website’s Heathrow link notes that ‘The worst effects of climate change could be catastrophic for our planet and might include heat waves, floods and droughts, melting ice caps, rising sea levels, more frequent and severe storms and hurricanes, and damage to ecosystems and agriculture.’ Like the environmental activists themselves, Ferrovial/BAA also believes that climate change is not inevitable, and indeed quotes the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change as saying that ‘“There is still time to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, if we take strong action now.”’ Ferrovial/BAA further says that ‘The risks to our planet demand an international response, based on the best available scientific evidence. We believe there is an important debate to be had regarding climate change and our starting point is simple: aviation’s contribution is growing and we must take action now to curb emissions from flights’(6).

Those who surf the Ferrovial/BAA website might thus be forgiven for being a little confused to learn that a couple of weeks ago, the corporate giant tried unsuccessfully to get the high court to issue what might well have become the most sweeping injunction ever imposed on an environmental protest. In theory, the proposed injunction would have given police the right to arrest anyone who failed to give 24 hours’ notice of their intention to join the protest, and who used any of the following: sections of the huge M4 and M25 motorways; platforms six and seven at Paddington Station (which serve the Heathrow Express rail service); or the London Underground’s Picadilly Line. Just who this ‘anyone’ included was unclear even to the judge, who asked the infamous anti-protest lawyer, Timothy Lawson-Cruttenden, to clarify who was the target of the injunction (7). At the time of the hearings, the Mayor of London said that he regarded the proposed injunction ‘unreasonable, and unnecessary. It is a serious infringement of civil liberties and an attack on the right to peaceful protest.’ In the same press release, the Greater London Authority noted that

‘This extraordinarily wide-ranging injunction, over which Transport for London was not consulted by BAA, could have a significant impact upon London Underground operations. It seeks to hold the individuals named in the injunction as representative of not only the action groups that they are said to represent, but also anyone who happens to support the groups, whether they are a member or not. […] This means that some five million people, the vast majority of whom have never taken part in any disturbance and are entirely lawful supporters of groups including the RSPB and the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England, the Woodland Trust, and the national trust, could be restricted by the injunction.’[8]

There is, however, something else that makes this protest, or rather the attempts to suppress it, truly extraordinary. As reported by The Guardian, the government has encouraged the police to ‘“deal robustly”’ with activists—no surprise there, ‘robust’ is of course a corporate euphemism for the ruthless imposition of a managerial course of action. What is extraordinary is that the Guardian has got access to a government document which it quotes as saying that police should make use of the ‘“terrorism powers”’, ‘“especially the use of stop and search powers under s44 Terrorism Act 2000”’(9).

As the Guardian notes, this act gives police the power to stop and search people and vehicles for anything that could be used in connection with terrorism; to search people even if they do not have evidence to suspect them; to search homes and remove protesters’ outer clothes, such as hats, shoes and coats; and to hold people for up to a month without charge.

The document’s justification for this draconian step is a verbal monument to New Labour’s blurring of what counts as a ‘Terrorism Power’, and what counts as the Power of Terrorism: the document is quoted as saying that police should use the Terrorism Powers ‘“because the presence of large numbers of protesters at or near the airport will reduce our ability to proactively counter the terrorist act [threat]”’(10).

* * *

It would of course be absurd to suggest that New Labour’s UK has become a contemporary version of the Nazi’s Germany. Even if today a parallel can be drawn between the persecution of Muslims and Jews, and even if it is true that Gordon Brown has now proposed that the period of detention without charge (the code-name for a police-state-like power of arrest without due process) should be extended from 28 to 56 days, it would be foolish indeed to draw a simple analogy between the two contexts. The UK in 2007 is not Germany in 1937.

And yet, Niemöller’s poem, like his life, offers not one, but three inter-related cautionary tales for those of us who do no more than read about New Labour’s efforts to undermine civil liberties.

The first one may be derived, paradoxically, from the uncertainty as to whom Niemöller included in the poem. While it is extraordinary that he left Jews out of the ‘definitive’ version, that should not obscure an equally important point: even if some people are far more likely to be persecuted by authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, it is always easy enough to include someone else—some ‘other’ group—in the list of ‘usual suspects’ if it suits the regime’s ends. In this sense the changing list of groups included in the poem is, inadvertently, very accurate.

The second point is that the poem reminds us of the temporal dimension of authoritarianism, and of course, of totalitarianism. In modern cultures, these political processes seldom if ever happen all at once, and indeed especially in the early days, each is likely to offer a seductive or indispensable ‘way forward’, especially when it seems that only other people’s civil liberties are being curtailed. Even if one is outraged by each new infringement, it is likely to be easier to remain in a state of passive outrage than to actually speak up, and speak out, against abuse.

The third cautionary tale, which is found in Niemöller’s own life, is perhaps at once the most obvious, and the most disturbing: authoritarianism or totalitarianism are not that—authoritarianism or totalitarianism—to their advocates. On the contrary, it is quite possible to vehemently oppose one or more aspects of such regimes and still remain fundamentally complicit with them.

There seems to be a lot of support in the media for the Heathrow protest. Will the protest trigger a minor revolt against the Terrorism Powers but leave intact New Labour’s power to terrorise the population by invoking an imminent (and immanent) threat of terrorism? Or on the contrary, will this year’s revelation of the ‘alternate’ uses of the Terrorism Powers be the proverbial silver lining in the enormous storm cloud that is climate change?

References

(1) This is a translation from the German. Readers interested in finding out about Niemöller may wish to consult the following websites: Professor Marcuse’s page at http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/niem.htm; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Niemöller; or http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GERniemoller.htm, all accessed 29 October 2009.
(2) John Vidal and Helen Pidd, ‘Police to use terror laws on Heathrow climate protestors’, in Guardian Unlimited, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/aug/11/ukcrime.greenpolitics, 12 August 2007, accessed 29 October 2009.
(3) Both quotes taken from the ‘Camp for Climate Change’ website, http://www.climatecamp.org.uk, accessed August 13, 2007.
(4) See http://www.baa.com/portal/page/Corporate%5EAbout+BAA%5EWho+we+are%5EWho+owns+us%3F/3907dc4bf8721110VgnVCM10000036821c0a____/448c6a4c7f1b0010VgnVCM200000357e120a____/, and also http://www.ferrovial.com/en/index.asp?MP=14&MS=250&MN=3, both accessed August 13, 2007.
(5) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafael_del_Pino_%28Spaniard%29, accessed August 13, 2007.
(6) All quotes taken from BAA’s link for the Heathrow airport: http://www.baa.com/portal/page/LHR%5EAbout+BAA+Heathrow%5EClimate+change/3130875427b54110VgnVCM20000039821c0a____/448c6a4c7f1b0010VgnVCM200000357e120a____/, accessed on August 13, 2007.
(7) For an account of what one newspaper described as scenes of ‘high farce’ at the high court, see the Independent’s http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/high-court-confusion-over-exactly-who-baa-wants-to-ban-from-protesting-at-heathrow-459928.html, 2 August 2007, accessed 29 October 2009.
[8] Greater London Authority Press Release, ‘Mayor demands that BAA rethink its “draconian” injunction’, July 31, 2007, http://www.london.gov.uk/view_press_release.jsp?releaseid=13112. Accessed 29 October 2009.
(9) John Vidal and Helen Pidd, ‘Police to use terror laws on Heathrow climate protestors’, in Guardian Unlimited, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/aug/11/ukcrime.greenpolitics, August 12, 2007, accessed 29 October 2009.
(10) John Vidal and Helen Pidd, ‘Police to use terror laws on Heathrow climate protestors’, in Guardian Unlimited, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/aug/11/ukcrime.greenpolitics, August 12, 2007, accessed 29 October 2009.