With the millionaire ConDem's rapid dismantling of the very social
fabric of our society crashing along unabated, it is obvious that
there will be anger among the ordinary people. People who have been
subservient, compliant and hard working as they tried to have a
decent life will soon find, that is no longer possible. Anger will
turn to action with circumstances forcing people to come together and
organise for their mutual survival, the state however, to protect its authority, will do its
damnedest to prevent that coming together. The policing will change,
dissent will be stifled and protest will be criminalised. On that theme, the
following article is lifted in full from that old war horse of the
anarchist movement,
FREEDOM, the longest running anarchist newspaper
in the UK.
The graphics are not FREEDOM's.
When
Oxbridge graduate Bernard Hogan-Howe began his new job as
Metropolitan police commissioner in September, he brought with him a
quaint PR phrase 'total policing' (that he himself coined when chief
of Merseyside police) as a way of introducing himself into the new
role as top cop. As a sound-bite it ticked all the right boxes for an
insouciant media – enticing, unspecific, and unavoidably
non-committal. But what in reality does a change at the top of the
police pile mean for anarchists and activists especially during this
period of economic disintegration and increasingly fractious social
unrest, what can we expect in this new era of total policing?
Already this year we have seen several examples of pro-active
policing taking on a more sinister role – the kind of policing that
goes beyond public order and preservation of the peace but designed
to undermine political expression.
When education activists did a banner drop at the Lib Dem party
conference in September they were remanded for three days by West
Midlands police as their “membership of an organisation showed that
they could not be trusted not to cause danger to the public”. In
Bristol there was a raid on The Automonist radical magazine where
police seized phones, computers and paperwork looking for a
connection to the August riots, and it was during the August riots
that several people received long jail sentences for simply posting
messages on Facebook encouraging participation in the unrest. There
were also the pre-emptive arrests and raids on squats in the run up
to the Royal wedding and of course the arrest of145 people for the
Fortnum & Mason peaceful occupation on 26th March.
But
perhaps the most pronounced indication that we are enterig a new era
of political policing was the excessive and overt role of
plain-clothes police during the November student demonstration in
Central London.
Despite the tightly regulated route of the march – each side street
blocked by a small army of well defended barriers – gangs of
plain-clothes police, acting independently of uniformed police,
embedded themselves in the demonstration and sought to impose
themselves upon the crowd, only revealing their identities when
people grew hostile towards them. Whether this was to provoke a
reaction or simply target individuals they wanted to arrest, the gang
strategy highlighted a new and potentially dangerous example of
things to come.
This
new approach to the management of political dissent and public
protest will impose itself more and more as the crisis deepens, where
the legitimacy of government is constantly questioned and the role of
the state relentlessly challenged, where ordinary people, angry and
disillusioned with the current state of things, become active
political subjects.
For
the state to maintain its authority and control over an increasingly
embittered population they must ensure not only a compliant protest
culture but the continued separation between political activists and
the rest of society. Policing now has taken on a form of dissuading
us from expressing a common purpose. This is is the political
policing of the future.
