It is of course right that there should be some sort of vague, heartfelt, right-on and hand-wringing and useless protest about capitalism and that it should be heard. It was inevitable that it should seek to bear witness in “peaceful direct action”, and so on. It was delicious that it settled on property which was in part owned by the Church of England, near The City.

The C of E rightly bent over backward to accommodate their fellow-travellers. In the days which have followed, everything has emerged beautifully. The protest has been able to show itself inchoate, and not widely supported. It strikes a note, of course, and then reminds one that making capitalism even better than it has been is not child’s play.

Now, of course, St Paul’s wants to get back to its real business and there seems to be serious muddle as its managing clergy flip-flops between their vague sympathy for the protestors and a desire to see the back of them. As of this morning, it seems that St Paul’s cannot bear to assert itself legally.

I like this situation. It has brought about the perfect confrontation between two factions of the peace and love brigade. Neither side has to change its thinking about the future of capitalism (such as it is). But both will presumably learn lessons about  the limits of protest and public sympathy for disruption.

So far as I know, little would be lost by letting the protest squat continue for as long as possible. The general public will slightly benefit from sensing that the protestors have little to add to the debate.

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Isn’t it that in their very niceness and that of their parents and teachers, they were not taught that they are fallible, impressionable, overly-trusting young persons? They were not inculcated with the sheer fearfulness, the taboos, the prejudices which have made most previous generations fear authority, aim to keep their heads down and steer clear of trouble.

Paradoxically, these naive young people think they are street-wise because they’ve been sick in the back of taxis once or twice. Nobody had told them to fear mobs – they had not been taught that crowds are dangerous.

It’s also likely that one should blame media. Not the media, as in horrid films and video  games. Isn’t it more that they simply don’t have much sense of the boundaries between reality and fiction? A boy lobs a fire extinguisher off a medium-sized skyscraper; a sociology graduate with her own Polo and 27″ TV steals a flat screen. They were “caught up in the moment”: but it was a multi-media moment more than a real place and time.

They lived in cloud-cuckoo land. When they get out gaol, we need to be kind to them, but hope that they become ambassadors for reality.

No related posts.

The Ritz and Fortnum & Mason mini-riot on 26 March 2011 looked like a matter of side-actions which were (I think) quite separate from the official TUC march, though sometimes began by sheltering within it. Oddly, the actions in Piccadilly looked (from the Sky helicopter coverage) to present the best opportunity for kettling (made the best and easiest case for it) of any of the recent protests (see a timeline below). There was a discrete, smallish crowd in an otherwise empty street, all gathered round acts of clear illegality. 

The police response to these “anarchist” activities seems to show that they have taken to heart the observations of HMIC (Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary) in Adapting to Protest (July 2009) and the very recent JCHR (Joint Committee on Human Rights) report Facilitating Peaceful Protest (25 March 2011). JCHR broadly approves of the HMIC response to the policing of the G20 direct actions in the City in April 2009 and it is fair to say that we now have a doctrine for the policing of protest. This states in effect that it is usually wrong for the police to stand on their legal right to insist on being consulted on, and to give their approval for, any protest likely to produce disruption. Commander Bob Broadhurst of the Met Police has come close to proclaiming this doctrine, motsly in defending last Saturday’s policing as though it had gone well.

The new view is explicit that protest, in general, ought to be facilitated, and – the implication goes – this is even true of disruptive protest.

The JCHR adds little to the doctrine (and, rather feebly, rather stands aside from discussing the wider picture) but has added a sort of sniffiness about “kettling” (or containment, as the police prefer to call it).

It is important that a right-winger (such as me) avoids being a blowhard. Anything that sniffs of the kneejerk is the way to be ignored, as well as to be wrongfooted on the essential value of peaceful protest.

Still I stress: one can be quite clear that much so-called peaceful direct protest is wrong in principle (see earlier posts), but its being illegal is a matter of judgement. The police have to decide whether it is worth standing on their rights when parliament, much of the media, juries and judges may rather wilfully assert what they take to be the “liberal” (pro-protest-at-nearly-any-cost) view. 

I am pretty sure that political expediency and not the law or decency have got the police into the position where they have to allow a good deal of disruption, damage and some violence because they know that only public opinion is in favour of more of a law and order approach. 

This expediency is on two possible grounds. (1) Political reality, as outlined above. (2) Policing realities. It may be easier and better for the capital to accept the sort of disruption, damage and violence we have seen, on do so on the grounds that alternative strategies might make the “anarchists” cleverer and less containable.

My main point is that hardly any of this is being discussed by the powers-that-be, at least in public.

Protest timeline, London, 2009 – 2011

It is important to stress that the recent protests in London have been quite different from each other.

(1) The G20 events (1 April 2009) raised issues about police misbehaviour which distracted people from discussion of  the way several “peaceful direct action” protests were allowed to shut down bits of The City and provided (maybe inadvertant) cover for damage to property.

(2) The Tory HQ invasion (10 November 2011) was a sudden unexpected outbreak from what the police may have been right to expect to be a peaceful protest. (It seems to have involved “peaceable” students who lost their heads.)

(3)  The Whitehall and Parliament Square confrontations (24 November 2010). I think (but am not sure) this protest was almost entirely ”unofficial” and without negotiation with the police.  (Again there was an element of “peaceable” students who lost their heads and I have no idea how many “anarchists” had got on board.)

(4) The more peaceful student protest of (30 November 2010) produced some confrontation in Trafalgar Square and some sudden skirmishes as protestors thought they might be kettled. I don’t know in what degree this was a negotiated protest.

(5) The Charles & Camilla event and the Whitehall and Parliament Square confrontations (9 December 2010) were the result of widespread and predictable (pre-advertised) side-actions quite separate from an “official” NUS protest negotiated with the police.

In all these cases, it was arguable whether the big non-NUS event should have been allowed. But one must remember that officialdom has not prepared the media, etc, for the idea that marches may be outlawed unless thoroughly negotiated with the police. It might have been inexpedient to outlaw the unofficial marches: but at least that should have been stated that they had not been sanctioned.

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The discussion was about whether the UK cosied-up to Libya in exchange for oil and whether that makes us complicit in all the ensuing wickedness that Gadaffi has inflicted on his people and cripples us as we now face dealing with the violence he is unleashing in what may be his nihilist end-game.

David Mellor argued that we had fatally contaminated ourselves in our dealings with Gadaffi and especially in an assumed England/Scotland stitch-up over the release of   Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.

I argued that – in line with the Kissinger line – countries deal with the regimes which are actually in place, and get what they can. Our relations with Gadaffi were not affectionate so much as expedient. Obviously, if true, it is horrible to contemplate that UK arms are being used against protestors. I don’t know the degree to which that is a matter of UK wickedness, but it remains true that dictators with cash can always find arms.

In response to David Mellor’s charge that the UK behaves badly partly because it is a poodle of the US, I noted that the US has shouted pretty loudly and clearly about human rights abuses in Libya and the UK has hardly been wrong to echo that.

My main point was that our being too close to Gadaffi has very little to do with how he has behaved and is behaving. The twists and turns of UK/Libya relations are small-beer compared to the “demonstration effect” which has flowed from Arabs and others watching Al Jazeera showing them voters in Iraq, protestors in Iran, and then street-led revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt.

I said what happens next in our relations with Libya depends on how the UK reads its moral and practical options. I am not qualified to be very definite on that subject.  I have some faith that William Hague will get it more or less right, which is the best one can hope for in foreign affairs.

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 The environmentalists had been charged with conspiring to shut down the coal-fired Ratcliffe-on-Soar plant outside Nottingham in April 2009.

Mike Schwarz, the protestors’ lawyer, has talked about climate protest as ”accountable” and Jenny Jones, a Green Party member of the Metropolitan Police Authority, has talked of it as being the “pink, fluffy” end of protest.

The difficulty is that a fair few climate protestors have declared themselves to be committed to “peaceful direct action” which they seem happy to define as including criminal economic damage. They are not remotely accountable, except (with luck) to the law. Any tax-payer or airline passenger or energy consumer should be pleased that the police want to understand the inner workings of their operations.

This is not to say the police handled their undercover work well, or that the prosecution authorities played their part properly.

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The three recent student protests reinforce my irritation with the assumption that a generalised right to protest means that the police have to facilitate people’s demands to protest pretty much whenever and wherever and whatever they choose.

Haven’t we now reached the point when students’ unions and the police ought to agree that the next big protest be in, say, Hyde Park and that it be clearly stated that any other protest activity will be regarded as sanctioned neither by the police nor the students’ leaders?

More generally isn’t it time that commentators, the media, Parliament and the Government start to say that a right to protest does not mean a right to shut down the government (come to that, any) quarter of London except on the strictest terms?   

I can see the point in letting young people let off steam, and being almost dangerously permissive in that regard. But this new evolution in the protest game needs heading off before it gets really serious.

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(1) This being a state visit, in which a leader is invited by the state (the nation, the country), the Pope is entitled to be treated with a particular dignity (as was President Zuma or the Chinese head of state). Any talk of arrest (in the manner of Pinochet) is plainly absurd. The idea of a citizen’s arrest is almost worse, and anyway rendered very difficult by the levels of security which rightly surround the pontiff.

(2) If they disrupt papal events, protestors will be abusing the right of thousands of people to celebrate and worship along with the leader of their faith. This ought to affront the liberal principles the protestors insist are so dear to them. This is especially so granted that the religious followers of Catholicism are themselves rather liberal and kindly. The Pope and his followers are not some extremist (say, fascist or crypto-Nazi) group who need challenging in some especially robust way.

(3) The Pope and his followers do not need to be subject to protest on the basis that otherwise they would not know the arguments against them. The protestors’ freedom of speech has been evident in the oceans of media coverage given to their arguments.

(4) It is not remotely self-evident that public protest will somehow be more convincing than media argument, so any argument by the protestors that efficacy commends their right to public protest is flawed.

(5) These arguments do not dispute the right of protestors to be evident on the street during the visit. They do, however, question the value and merit of such protest. One shouldn’t protest merely for the sake of exercising the right to protest, in the manner of Koran-burning or (on one interpretation) insolent mosque-building.

(6) Any Pope is a focus for protest, but this Pope is a target not least because he hasn’t built up the (rather irrational) fan-base which adored Pope John-Paul III. JPIII was not especially liberal, but he was the Beatle Pope, he ski-ed, he was the first Pope to go on tour, and he was associated with the Polish freedom-fighters. He had the Nelson Mandela dimension, even the JFK dimension. He hadn’t been head of the Inquisition. Priestly child-abuse was not much (or at all?) in the news on his watch. Benedict is a more complicated figure than he seems (as was JP), but the public imagination does not always grasp that sort of nuance.

(7) In general, it is important to say that almost all direct action, even “peaceful direct action”, is either silly or wrong. We are in a muddle about that, and I have written a lot on the theme. 

 (8) There is a lot to be said for wit in protest, and for bearing witness. The point being that outlawing disruption and confrontation, say, does not mean that more effective protest cannot be designed and implemented.

(9) There was nothing to stop protestors mounting an event of quite enormous scale, perhaps before the visit or away from Papal events. The issue about direct action, or about the style of on-the-scene protest, is not about any judgement as to the merit of the Pope’s visit versus that of the protestors’ cases.

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At this point, not much is known about how a policeman sustained head injuries during this afternoon’s protests at E.ON’s coal-fired power station at Ratcliffe-on-Soar.

Sky’s presenter asked its man at the scene where right and wrong lay in this dispute. The reporter went into a rap about the how clean or not the power station was, etc.

But the question should have been whether it is legitimate for protestors to seek – by force – to breach a power station perimeter as a precursor to an attempt to shut the station down, by force.

The protestors could be wholly right in their argument and wholly wrong in the way they pursue it. Equally, of course, the police may be wrong in the way they handle the protest. Famously, the police got plenty wrong during the G20 protests in The City earlier in the year.

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If the protestors really could save the planet, I imagine everyone would turn a blind eye to a bit of law-breaking.

Of course they can’t and the fault is not business or politicians. It’s us. We would not let any democratic administration act too fiercely on climate change. Yet almost all protest pretends it believes The People are OK, but the Establishment is wrecking things.

As it is, it is hard to see any reason why the “nice” (theatrical, stunting) protestors should continue to allow themselves to be used by the “nasty” (violent, anarchist) protestors as a cover. But then – and this is the difficult bit – many of the thousands who flock to set-piece direct action events seem to think a bit of bother is of the essence of what they do.

By what right do the protestors think they can camp out in the streets or interfere with businesses – not to say aim to invade and occupy, or damage, them? I imagine they are pretending that there’s no other way to be heard.

This is nonsense. The police and law will bend over backwards to facilitate big, peaceful demonstrations. Maybe not in The City on a day when the world’s leaders are in town, as in the G20 protests, but the weekend before, sure, as happened earlier this year. I think we ought at least aim to explain to protestors why most kinds of direct action really are much more problematic.

Especially, we should remind them that they do not have the same sorts of claim on our sympathy as did the slaves, the women, the disenfranchised, the American blacks, the black South Africans and all the other protest movements environmental protestors compare themselves to. Many of those causes never did mass direct actions, at least one used violence in an appalling way, all faced the problem of not being accorded a full place in their country’s democracies.

I wish Parliament would get its brain round this issue and try to talk sense. Instead, the authorities seem determined that almost all protest has to be respected as though it was serious.

It’s time we all grew up.

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Evidence to the JCHR, follow-up on Protest and Policing inquiry
by Richard D North
fellow of the Social Affairs Unit and editor of The Right Sites

[Part (1) deals with G20, Iona School and Plane Stupid's police spy and Part (2) deals with the Tamil takeover]

(1)
Introduction
As the JCHR implies by its willingness to revisit its work in Demonstrating respect for human rights? , events in the City of London on the 1st and 2nd of April – the G20 protests – have made discussion of protest even more urgent. The events at the Iona School in Sneinton, Nottingham also raise important issues. I hope the committee will use this opportunity to speak more critically than heretofore about direct action protest and human rights at what we might call a constitutional level.

Allegations about police infiltration of Plane Stupid and the campaigners’ response to them point to this kind of more profound issue because they are illustrative of the antinomian nonsense many protestors and their defenders believe about the special rights their beliefs afford them.

Demonstrating a respect for human rights? concentrated on the easiest part of the protest issue: identifying and discussing bad behaviour by police. It also concentrated on discussing the parts of protest law (for instance controlling protest round Parliament) in which it was easy to take the conventionally liberal approach of aiming to facilitate spontaneous protest.

More generally, and at the constitutional level, I think it is fair to say the report took a conventionally liberal view of human rights and protest. My main point here is that even if it is true that human rights courts have mostly taken the view that almost all “peaceful” protest must be accommodated, the JCHR ought at least to acknowledge that events in London on 1 April help show that this view may be too permissive.

I hope recent events will persuade the committee that if protestors won’t take a more mature view of their rights and obligations, their abuse of society’s tolerance is such that it is time that parliamentarians did.

The State and society have to accord a dignity and courtesy to protestors even when the campaigners refuse to return the favour. However, if the State and society do not command and demand respect from all parties, including protestors, both the State and society in the end suffer.

I argue that Parliament has a duty maintain the dignity and authority of the State because the subjects of the Crown have a right to look to the State to play its limited part in producing a sound society.

Less pompously, if parliament does not at least delineate and condemn infantile but corrosive abuses of freedoms it will risk being seen as being little better than those it refuses to chastise and even control.

The absurdity of protest on 1 April
On April 1 many peaceful protestors were either naively duped or cynically duplicitous as they provided cover for more violent types. Quite apart from that, it is time to stress that even if the “peaceful” protestors could claim a human right to protest on the streets of the City that day, and even if they had merely caused mild inconvenience and disruption, they ought to be ashamed to have wasted police time so uselessly at such a time and place.

Their protest failed two important human rights tests. The protestors’ case had been given ample publicity during a previous large demonstration on 28 March so there was no argument that the campaigns needed special expression on 1 April. Nonetheless, the protestors continued with their demonstrations when they were bound to cause disruption out of all proportion to their value.

The recent cases
It hardly needs saying that the police must always be held to account for their tactics and just now in the cases of the pre-emptive arrests of a body of trespassers at the Iona school and the “kettling” of demonstrators in the City. Obviously, police must also be held to account at an operational level when officers are alleged to be using unwarranted force and to be breaking the law (or disobeying orders) in being unmarked.

The Iona School incident raises less challenging questions than the G20 protest in the sense that it is pretty obvious that direct action protestors do not have a human right to take over a school or to conspire to interrupt operations at a nearby power station.  The G20 protests raise the more interesting question as to why so blatant an abuse of freedom has gone largely unremarked by the authorities and most of the media.

The alleged police infiltration of Plane Stupid, and Plane Stupid’s response to it, may help people see that much protest is almost hilariously blind to constitutional rightness. These campaigners seek to disrupt operations at airports, and have done so. They can hardly be surprised if the police seek intelligence on such activities. Yet Plane Stupid claim a human right to privacy even when they are plotting criminal acts.

Should we outlaw more protest?
There are obvious moves available to us, extending existing approaches. One possibility would be to further outlaw or limit protest of any kind or certain kinds at certain places at certain times. Another would be to insist on liaison with police for more and perhaps most sorts of protest.

At a practical level, interference might cause a dangerously counter-productive compensatory activity sheltering under resentment, whether feigned or not. If protestors knew that mass activity was explicitly forbidden or constrained in one place, it might be attempted elsewhere or more devious and inconvenient stunts might be evolved. In short, it may be expedient to continue with the present absurd situation.

Conclusion
If we can’t develop better law, we should at least aim to reframe the constitutional argument. We should label much present protest as infantile, unproductive and undemocratic. It would help if the JCHR declared that much protest, and the recent protests which occasioned the JCHR’s present return to the matter, importantly fail the human rights test that one’s exercise of freedom should take account of its effects on others’ freedoms. They needed to pass tests as to appropriateness and proportionality. Our cases fail the tests to the point at which parliamentarians ought to comment on it.

If on pragmatic grounds they cannot recommend outlawing such behaviour, the JCHR should at least risk asserting that it is not a human right to devise inconvenience and worse for one’s fellow-citizens, provided there are ample alternative means to register protest and where necessary they are facilitated by the State.

It is important to say that sensible new limits to protest should not be favoured or introduced for the convenience of the police, or out of fear that the police cannot and should not operate with better discipline.

(2)
Evidence to the JCHR, follow-up on Protest and Policing inquiry
by Richard D North
fellow of the Social Affairs Unit and editor of The Right Sites
Text below sent in an email on Saturday, 2 May 2009

Supplementary note on Tamil protest in Parliament Square

I do not have detailed knowledge of the recent Tamil protest in Parliament Square but would say that it fits into my general thesis that there is a very present need to stress that there is an important right to protest in public but no general right to cause inconvenience (let alone anything worse).

ends

No related posts.