Printing Police Lies

The policing of the G20 protests at the beginning of this month was routine. Policemen hiding their identification numbers and beating up peaceful protesters is as much a part of British life as grey skies and red buses. Across 20 years of protests, I have seen policemen swapping their jackets to avoid identification, hurling people against vans and into walls and whomping old ladies over the head with batons ...

The police behave like this, despite the opprobrium of left and right, because they know they will get away with it. They know that the government won’t rein them in; that the Independent Police Complaints Commission eats out of their hands; that the sternest sanction an officer can expect for beating or killing a passer-by is some extended gardening leave. They know that in a few days’ time the rightwing press will revert to publishing stories about the anarchist baby-eaters seeking to turn Britain into a bloodbath.

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G20 police blog boasts about a 'good kicking'

The Totalitarianizing of Britain: The crushing of eco-protest brings shame on our police

This blogger among others echoed Noam Chomsky's warning after 911 that the greatest danger facing the West was not from terrorism but from the assault on our liberties that would inevitably take place as a result of the 'security measures' that would be put in place. Predictably, that assault took place and the rule of law has been replaced, thanks to Messrs Bush and Blair, by police state rule.

The persecution of Muslims was just the beginning. Now that that phase has mostly played itself out the next to be persecuted are domestic dissidents and protest groups. What the UK police did at Kingsnorth last year and more recently at the London G20 protests mark a more ominous turn of the screw.

Gradually, those in the establishment are waking up. Let's hope that there is still time in order to halt what looks like an inexorable slide into totalitarianism. Journalist, Henry Porter, writes in yesterday's Observer:

This is the end-product of the disastrous legislative assault on Britain's rights and liberties inaugurated by Tony Blair. We are now in a crisis of moral or perhaps deep psychic inconsistency, with a government that in one half of its brain desires good PR on climate change but in the other half seethes with the authoritarian desire to stamp out an impertinent challenge to its record of inactivity. The manifestation of this arrogance can be seen in the police officers at the G20 demonstrations who covered their faces and removed their identifying numbers from their uniforms before lashing out at demonstrators - perhaps killing Ian Tomlinson - and the tactic of "kettling", which wrongly deprives people of their liberty, as well as risks their safety.

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