On the Beat- Keeping the flame alive

Sophie Khan talks shop

12 August 2011 – Keeping the flame alive

Is this the summer of protests? It definitely looks that way, and with protests, marches and demonstrations being organised on a weekly basis, it is time the government listened to the voices of the protestors and recognised the real damage that their reforms will have on the ordinary person.

Last month we saw the march to ‘Defend the NHS’ on its 63rd birthday and the month before the national strike on 30 June called by the National Union of Teachers (NUT) and the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL), supported by the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), which lead to the closure of many schools and disruption at some airports as the UK Border Agency staff also joined the picket line.

The silence by Francis Maude, minister for the Cabinet Office, following the strike was priceless as he had previously rubbished the strike and had accused the strikers to have “jumped the gun”. But it is his government that has jumped the gun, by pushing through austerity cuts without real consultation and not recognising the severe impact these reforms will have on hundreds of thousands of people. The controversial comments by Oliver Letwin, the coalition’s policy minister, at a meeting with his constituencies over the weekend, that he is to instil “some real discipline and some real fear” only goes to show that the government knows that they have a fight on their hands against the cuts and one that they may not win.

So the right to protest and strike against the cuts continues and with preparations being made in Manchester for the Tory conference in October. How is the government going to quell the air of resistance?

The scaremongering tactics to arrest non-violent protestors during protests included the ‘snatch and grab’ seen on 30 June of a young man outside Charing Cross train station. The reason why the young man was arrested is unknown but what is clear from the footage of the incident on Youtube is that a group of policeman forcibly removed him from where he was standing in the crowd and took him away from the area.

The rise of the pre-crime arrests of activists before royal weddings is another example and is a tactic that is used by the police to round up known activists regardless of whether a crime has been or will be committed. This new policy stems from the ‘thought’ of a possible crime rather than whether there is evidence that a crime is going to be committed and seems to be taken straight out of George Orwell’s novel 1984 where it was the job of the thought police to uncover and punish thoughtcrime. The newsletter published on 29 July 2011 by Project Griffin, a police initiative which assesses the threat of terrorism in the City of Westminster, adds further weight to the thoughtcrime, as one of their initiatives is to report any information relating to anarchists to your local police.

These policies and tactics will not deter the protest movement which continues to gain momentum, but these need to be fought with the same vigour and force as the protests themselves. If it can be shown that the police tactics used are questionable or illegal then those arrests need to be challenged by lawyers at an early stage. Now is the time to mobilise an ‘army of lawyers’ against the ‘army of police’ to counter these practices, and the Lawyers’ Activist Network is one step towards bringing together pro-protestor lawyers from across the country to provide crucial support to activists so that their right to protest is protected.



http://www.solicitorsjournal.com/story.asp?sectioncode=3&storycode=17725&c=1