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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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

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Readers of previous posts wil know that I think much peaceful direct action protest is about as stupid as possible. In general, I have defended police tactics in dealing with it. I have been at odds with the liberty movement and even the parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights and its thinking about the policing of protest. Even the G20 London protest seems to have been better policed and managed than the protest in Continental cities which followed at the weekend.

All that said, the coppers have given “the other side” far too much evidence that they are thick and nasty. Let’s list the dire catalogue so far.

(1) Police appear to have been thuggish in their disbanding and dismantling of the climate camp in Bishopsgate on the evening of 1 April. Yes, the camp was absurd, and yes it had to be got rid of at some point. But if it is true that unmarked policement thumped harmless protestors, then the police have taken leave of their senses. I am not so concerned that some junior policemen may have misbehaved themselves. I am very concerned that no proper account of the events and of disciplinary action has been given by senior officers in public.

(2) Something similar applies to the way a policeman hit Ian Tomlinson. From start to finish that incident seems to have found no response, or the wrong response, from senior policemen. I can think of one reason why senior policemen have to stay quiet in the wake of such events. It is that legal process has to take its course and it won’t do for officials to second guess the process. I don’t know whether this is what has silenced senior people. I am pretty sure that the chain of command will need as soon as possible to be very frank in admitting that any thuggishness in the junior ranks is almost completely a management and a cultural failure.

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Much of the discussion about the G20 protest seems to have missed the point. But then the authorities don’t really help much. The police were accused of playing a PR game with dire warnings about protest ahead of events. But the warnings were probably justified and maybe played their part in reducing the numbers of “innocent” protestors who would have indeed made the situation harder for the police and easier for violent chaos merchants. After all, the “innocent” “non-violent direct action” protestors are playing a very silly game.

The police and the London authorities ought to say that it is important that protestors be given a huge and convenient opportunity to make their arguments and have lavatories and hotdogs. That is what happened on 28 March when to a large degree London was given over to them.

It ought to be equally clear – and clearly stated – that during the course of the big event (G20, whatever) some much smaller facilities will be available to have focussed protest near to the venue.

But it ought to be clearly stated that there will be no tolerance for disruptive protest.

In effect, the authorities ought to be saying that the quid qo pro for a very willing acceptance that protest must be facilitated is that disruptive protest – non-violent or not – will be treated as plainly illegal.

Protestors will hate this. The media will take a lot or persuading. Even the parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights might balk at it. But it is a very reasonable proposition.

At the moment, we have an awkward in-between situation in which some protest groups insist on their right to stage “peaceful direct action” wherever and whenever they like (in the recent case, in Bishopsgate). These “peaceful” groups then become cover for the more chaotic elements.

In effect, we should be saying that disruption of the ordinary tenor of life is not a right and will incur legal penalty. After all, disruption is an unproductive bore at the best of times, but when a city is playing host to dozens of world leaders it becomes a clear nightmare.

Anyone claiming to be thoughtful, constructive and democratic should want to be helping rather than hindering the emergence of a world order in which countries talk to each other. They should hate the thought that anything they do means that hordes of police have to stomp around looking fascistic. They should see that the affectation of forcing rather arguing for change is absurd and illiberal. They should be appalled that their “peaceful non-violent direct action” becomes easy cover for violence”.

Oh, and I almost forgot. If the police were heavy-handed with the climate camp in the City streets once the media’s back was turned, then they are were nearly as silly as climate campers.

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I have of course no idea how The People’s anger will express itself. There may indeed be mass protest to match the previous events staged by CND, Stop the War, the Countryside Alliance or even the vast majority of those angered by the Poll Tax. But I very much doubt that most or much of it will be extreme. If millions of ordinary people feel the need to take to the streets, it is very unlikely that they will think it is chic, intelligent, relevant or effective do direct action, whether violent or non-violent. Most of them will want to bear peaceable witness to their fury. But that’s it.

The vast majority of the people who will be in London protesting against the G20 meeting next week will be sincere if silly. I say silly because they wouldn’t have to do much thinking to realise that The People may or may not want large changes to capitalism and its recent workings, but they are damn sure that massively inconveniencing their fellow-citizens whilst mouthing wildly unrealistic slogans is not constructive.

Meanwhile the hotheads and tearaways and joke revolutionaries who lead them are of course provocative much more than they are frightening. They can lock up a city and force masses of police overtime and perhaps even create some mayhem and get thumped. Some people will confuse defending their rights to be heard and even to be a nuisance with the idea that these protestors are somehow important.

The point about the joke revolutionaries is that their direct action is synthetic. They don’t believe they can cause much damage and wouldn’t really like to. They construct an argument which is supposed to look and sound like the use of force, but they are merely doing expensive street theatre.

If you want proof of any of this, try looking at Chris Knight on Channel Four News. He thinks he’s being frightening, or has the inalienable right to pretend to want to be. Yes, he doesn’t frighten me either.

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There’s a fair amount of sensible stuff in HL paper 47-11/HC 320-11(published today). The committee is right to tick the police off about occasional heavy-handedness (at, say, Fairford). It is right to think that a good deal of recent legislation (especially about protest round Parliament) seems heavy-handed. It is right to worry that the authorities risk muddling protest in with terrorism and use words like “extremism” where they are not appropriate.

However, the committee completely misses the point with a wide range of direct action protest.

Leave aside for the moment the committee’s not saying anything useful about mass protest which is designed to have a highly disruptive – even violent – edge. We’ll maybe see some of that this week at the G20 London meeting.

Even sticking to territory the committee seems more interested in, they fail. Non-violent direct action groups like Plane Stupid and Greenpeace and others play duck and drakes with authority as they plot and act to physically interrupt normal working at airports and power plants and so on. It’s fine for the committee to call for more dialogue and more human rights awareness from the police. At the end of the day, however, many protestors’ entire purpose is to produce big effective stunts, and someone has to stop them. The police can’t look pretty as they do this work, and the protestors hold all the cards. (I can’t see that the committee’s Northern Ireland comparison is a good one, though lessons are welcome from anywhere.)

My own irritation with many modern protestors is that they are so disingenuous and play the rest of us for such fools. Of course the committee is right to say that they have a powerful right to be heard. But they have a very much weaker right – often none at all – to interrupt the normal business of a highly democratic society.

I think it is fair to say that the committee completely misses this sort of point.

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Let’s accept that we damage the planet when we fly. My point is that it doesn’t make any difference where the flying is done. The atmosphere spreads most greenhouse gases from their source to, well, everywhere.

To take London, as an example. It makes no difference to the planet whether the capital’s flights start or finish in HTR, GTW, LTN or STN or Boris’s mud flat special. Expand that thought and we get to the UK government’s problem. It makes no difference to the climate whether Europe’s flying is done to and from a UK airport or to and from AMS, CDG or FRA. But it does make a difference to the UK’s businesses and citizens.

None of this is to say that HTR is a good environmental or economic candidate for expansion. It’s just that – for any given amount of UK, EU or global flying – the UK will naturally want to ensure an optimum amount is done from the UK and from the optimum airport in the UK.

Is HTR the optimum candidate for expansion? I have no idea. The right answer is unlikely to emerge from a NIMBY trade-off between the locals who will be blighted by whatever choice is made.

It is also important to see that there is no contradiction between wanting to reduce carbon emissions and wanting to maximise the UK’s role in global transport. The UK government can very respectably argue that whatever level and type of flying is good for the environment (or is settled on regardless), the UK wants as big a share as it can get.

I don’t say the government should argue that. It may be the UK does not want to be a world transport hub. All I am pointing out is that there is no contradiction between seeking that role and leading the battle to reduce greenhouse gases, and even to reduce flying.

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I contributed written evidence to the committee, and also contributed some memos following my rather faltering oral evidence.

Here are the top ten things I ought to say on radio (not in order of priority):

(1) Protest doesn’t change policy
Sometimes (say Chartism or the Suffragettes) demonstrations and direct action are in tune with underlying politcal and economic forces: then it can look as though protest “worked”. But it’s mostly an illusion. In the cases of roads, airports, CND, Stop the War – you name them – activist protest more obviously had little effect on policy. (Drop the Debt may be an exception.)

(2) Even big demos aren’t a problem
Well-organised demonstrations (liaised with the police) – however large – are usually uncontroversial and vent a lot of public ire.

(3) Protest doesn’t help democracy
Almost all “direct action” – including non-violent direct action, NVDA – is neither effective nor valuable to a democracy. It almost always involves inconvenience or cost (or worst) but is not a serious contributor to policy debates.

(4) Westminster is special
There is nothing wrong with the premise of SOCPA that within a kilometre of Parliament all protest events should seek police permission. Such a rule is not repressive unless it is interpreted badly.

(5) The police are sometimes clumsy
Where police behave oppresssively against protest, they should be challenged and explain themselves.

(6) Most illegal direct action should be more severely punished
Civil disobedience activists want seem courageous and feisty. A little gaol time might deter the theatricals and chasten the threatening. (If we ended up having to gaol lots of lippy students, we’d need to lighten the punishments, of course.)

(7) Scrap “lawful excuse”
It ridiculous that protestors’ criminal damage and criminal trespass can be defended in court on the basis of “lawful excuse”. That was designed for quite different work.

(8) Direct action is illiberal
It is not “liberal” to defend direct action. It is “illiberal” to use protest to trump parliamentary democracy.

(9) Protestors are seldom extremists
It is important that authorities keep their categories in order: very little direct action is done by “extremists”. Messing this up makes unnecessary enemies.

(10) The right to protest is extremely important, even if it is mostly ineffectual.

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I am all for celebrities “being the change” which they long for, qua Obama and all the rest of the claptrap the right-ons have spun themselves (as the actual President-elect buffs up plans to beat the beejaysus out of the Taliban). But most would rather prate than act.

Poor Jarvis said he was nervous as he went into the “Belly of the Beast” in Canary Wharf where he found a charming financier who admitted the faults of the current generation of capitalists without much conceding that there was anything wrong with capitalism which couldn’t be fixed. So far so good. More of him, please.

It was a bit hard to listen to Jarvis tell us that fixing climate change was mostly down to goverment. They can “fix” financial markets but not the planet, he fretted. Yes, someone might have told him, that’s because we all sort of democratically know we must fix the market, but “we” don’t really care about climate change. Not yet, not much, and not at any serious cost to our wallet or convenience, we don’t.

Why would the masses care when we see the cognoscenti, the sleb aristocracy and the commentariat all trolling off on cars, boats and planes just like always? This time, of course, some of them do it with a carbon footprint agenda. Ours, not theirs.

Here’s a helper on the team from the Cape Farewell campaign which hosted Jarvis’ trip to the Arctic, as the adventure began:

Cape Farewell 2008’s New York contingent is getting ready to board our plane for Iceland, where we will meet the Londoners (Jarvis Cocker of Pulp, among them) and take a charter to Greenland. There we will bus to the seaside and board zodiac rafts that will take us to the Russian sea vessel that will be our home for the next 12 days.

You might argue that a trip of this kind – carbon footprint and all – is merited by the wondrous outpourings of world changing creativity which will result. Jarvis tells us in a little video that he’s not sure he will create anything much as a result of his jaunt, but that certainly reading and watching stuff on the telly wouldn’t suffice in his case. He’d have to see it all for himself.

Blimey. On that logic, we couldn’t have beaten slavery without everyone schlepping off to the Carribean, or got kids out of factories without a mass fact-finding mission to Blackburn.

The elementary point of course is that if Jarvis wanted to be taken seriously he could have reduced his annual carbon footprint by the 80-90 percent which is widely advertised as being morally and scientifically necessary. This will be very hard if he has still to make a living, but easier if he has been prudent and put a goodly stock of wealth generated earlier in his career into the hands of world capitalism.

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A personal note

In 1968 I was a long-haired 22-year old in patched jeans. Yes, there were beads. I was an anxious supporter of the US in Vietnam. I was not pro-Tory but I was anti-Labour. I had no sympathy with the idea that Britain was in need of any sort of revolution. I admired the British Constitution. I had never admired Bob Dylan but thought Cream were probably the best band in the world and that Good Vibrations was probably the best pop song of my generation. At the time, I was driving vans for a grocers’ firm called Walton, Hassell and Port out of a Victorian warehouse in Spring Place, Kentish Town, London. During the time I worked there, I may have overlapped with the spell David Aaronovitch spent at Gospel Oak Primary School just round the corner.

The bigger picture

David Aaronovitch made a very good programme for Radio 4 (The Sixty-eighters at 60) which anatomised the problem with 1968. (Broadcast in August and repeated in December 2008.) This isn’t so much that lots of the young revolutionaries have grown up in a greater appreciation that their country (and the US) was in better shape than they then supposed. And the nuclear family turned out not to be awful and probably better for most of us than communal upbringing. That’s all gratifying to those of us who never thought otherwise.

But one could argue that these retreats are from youthful extremes rather than from the underlying beliefs of the period.

David Aaronovicth’s programme was most interesting because it took a flying look at the influence of  Sixties radicalism.

Some of his interviewees were fascinating on the perverse effects of the wrong-headed application of 60s radicalism to northern Ireland’s much older sectarian wrongs. (It put the wind up a generation of Protestant unionists who might have been a bit more biddable if they had not seen such intensity of radicalism threatening them on all fronts.)  More widely, I’d note that the US got out of Vietnam because of massive mainstream antagonism whose expression was if anything delayed by national outrage at long-haired protest (whose main effect was to bolster Richard Nixon’s anti-radicalism, as argued by Rick Perlstein in Nixonland). The era of Reagan and Thatcher was a revolt against welfarist creep and economic fudge (and not any sort of response to Sixties radicalism).

For politicians older than Mrs Thatcher, the ‘68ers were probably more or less indecipherably off-the-scale (and often more comic than threatening). She herself was very definitely a pre-Beatle type, and really an anti-Beatle type. It may be galling to them, but the 68ers really got their moment with Tony Blair. He was more or less effortlessly a reflection of their style, except that he was also some sort of an old-fashioned moralist who one could imagine ironing his jeans.

Is that it? Is that all there is?

One might be tempted to say that our sexual and moral freedoms are a product of the 68ers. But reforming men like David Steel, Hugh Greene and Roy Jenkins were not, I think, much inspired or empowered by the ‘68ers.

Still, the youthful enthusiasms of (nearly) an entire generaton are apt to express some large social tendency and are apt to produce long-term social effects.

It’s more interesting to touch on the way that the ‘68ers believed and still believe that “institutions” are a Bad Thing. The problem isn’t so much that they thought love and anarchy could run art schools and universities. It’s more that they found it – find it – hard to believe that structures, hierarchies and organisations are more valuable than the sum of their parts. I think the best quick discussion of this business is to be found in Confessions of a Reformed BBC Producer, Antony Jay’s pamphlet for CPS.

I have a profound problem with authority myself, so I may be a natural ‘68er. I am certainly at least half a bohemian and I know what it is to be drawn to the Romantic as well as to the Classical. These are all Sixties tendencies.

These are the sorts of reasons for my feeling that the big claims of the 68ers – to have seen a new future both for individualism and for communalism – are not so much wrong as over-egged. These are very old tensions and putting them in jeans and setting them to electric guitar proved not really to much invigorate them.

Meantime, someone will have to rebuild the idea and practice of institutions. I have been very struck by the lack of institutional wisdom or memory in the modern BBC and the modern Parliament. The BBC can safely be binned. But Parliament is in the curious position of needing to rediscover old strengths (independence of character and mind) in order to also summon up the flexibility to bin old mummeries.

This is of course the point of my project, Making Better Government.

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