Police, camera, action

So our cops are getting cameras. The timing couldn't be better. From Monday 16 February 2009, a police officer could arrest you under anti Terrorism laws for photographing them.

This yields a huge irony. They can film you, but after Sunday try to film or photograph them and you could end up having a very bad day.

It's not just police officers. Armed forces personnel and spies are covered too.

Technically, it could mean that at Remembrance Day marches, the Great North Run or any other events where police officers and/or armed forces personnel may be in attendance, photographers are fair game for the cops with cameras. Photographing the army recruitment van at the Sunderland Air Show or on King Street could get you your collar felt.

Given that the identity of those in the intelligence services is secret, you could photograph one of our spooks and not even know it. But publishing an image of them could technically land you in clink.

I'm sick of using the phrase 'police state'. It sounds paranoid, overwrought and emotive, but I can't think of a better term for what our government has taken us into. We've seen similar laws, like the Protection from Harassment Act, worded so vaguely that they can be used and abused by the police time and again.

This needs to be reversed. No government or police force should have these kind of powers.

Massaging the pain

And the figures. As part of their stormtrooper fest at the Kingsnorth power station demonstration, the police manipulated a pliant media to paint a picture of participants hell bent on violence and terrorism.

Lib Dem MP David Taylor unearthed a list of horrific injuries police received during the event, which tells a chilling story of ruthless hippy demonstrators and of real courage under fire by our brave boys in blue:

"stung on finger by possible wasp"

"officer injured sitting in car"

"officer succumbed to sun and heat"

"pain in lower back"

"toothache"

Absolute carnage.

The horror, the horror.

Common sense prevails in Europe

The Telegraph, Daily Mail and their followers regularly criticise human rights legislation and it's arbiter the European court of human rights. Often it's portrayed as a lawyers' gravy train or an unacceptable interference in UK law.

But this is what it's for. Protecting individual rights from an authoritarian and illiberal state, policed by an increasingly powerful and militarised police force.

Our parliament (that's our MPs folks) couldn't/wouldn't stop this DNA farming, and the House of Lords refused to do anything about it.

The creeping authoritarianism we've seen in the UK since the 1970s shows a growing illiberal tendency among the British political elites. I suppose we're not alone, the USA has its Patriot Act, we have the Terrorism Act.

The DNA and fingerprinting rules adopted by the police are mostly for the investigation of the commission of crimes not yet committed. In effect, this means that the police consider everyone on the database as a potential criminal, which is contrary to the ethos of presumed innocence. The fact that our police are happy using this mandate gives rise to the argument that the police are already too far drunk on their power.

Tonight I'll be opening a bottle of malt to mark this, it's something worth celebrating. I hope those who normally slag off interfering European institutions as pc liberal lefty bureaucratic monsters are humble enough to accept that European intervention can work.

However, it's a tragedy that this should ever have gone to a European court. We should be able to defend our basic rights here in the UK. Even though the UK is signatory to European and UN conventions on human rights, unfortunately we don't have a specific bill of individual rights here in the UK. Given the growth of police powers, and the unwillingness of our MPs to protect our interests, we need an inalienable bill of rights to help protect us from the state.

Dystopian present

Helicopter searchlights scanning the area. Armed shock troops intimidating citizens. Arresting innocents. Taking their possessions. Accusing them of uncommitted crimes. Inciting violence. Using dodgy laws to bludgeon peaceful protest.

Well, the police in Kent are certainly making a name for themselves. Welcome to Airstrip One in the 21st Century.

I've complained in the past about Labour members having lost a sense of principle after their party's warmongering and steady walk towards a police state. However, some of them still have the moral courage to stand by their principles.

Brown's desperate attempt to bolster his leadership, embodied in raising the pre-charge detention limit for terrorism suspects to 42 days, rallied most of the pliant troops who put party politics before the protection of our civil liberties. But not without some last minute horse-trading.

I've never often had an occasion to agree with Diane Abbott, but she rightly accused the government of:

"trading ancient civil liberties in a grubby bazaar"

Every concession Brown gave the wavering backbenchers was bought with another scrap of our freedom.

Kudos to Jim Cousins (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) and Chris Mullin (Sunderland South), the only Tyne/Wear Labour MPs with the cojones to stand up against Brown. Respect to all who voted against this disgusting charade.

PS - the Unionists where whores under the Tories. They're still on their back - but taking Brown's shilling.

Silly cults

The next time the police moan about red tape and endless form filling sucking the life out of their jobs, I'll remember this episode of our brave boys and girls in blue in action and ignore their whinging for the bollocks it is.

The City of London police, members of which have in the past benefited from church of Scientology's largesse, went to great lengths to hand a prosecution notice to a protester who refused to stop displaying a placard describing Scientology as a 'cult' at a demonstration outside the cult's London headquarters. What a pointless waste of time.

Even if we ignore the barmy interpretation of a dodgy law, teenagers are the victims of shootings and stabbings all over London, and some are found carrying weapons in public. Yet the police went to the bother of checking with the CPS before handing the summons over to a teenager who had did nothing worse than express, in a public place, his opinion about a club whose members believe in an imaginary premise.

The police interpreted the use of the word 'cult' as "abusive and insulting". Abusive and insulting pretty much describes the police's attitude to free speech.

Hopefully the judge hearing this case will recognise what a time wasting piece of bullshit policing this is and throw it straight out.

Welcome to Gattaca

Gary Pugh, the director of forensic sciences at Scotland Yard and DNA spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers ACPO, wants to start screening children for criminal traits at a young age. Pugh said:

"If we have a primary means of identifying people before they offend, then in the long-term the benefits of targeting younger people are extremely large... the younger the better."

Further, he wants all primary school age children on a DNA database. Such an activity would be in effect the cataloguing of every future generation.

This is wrong for so many reasons. Science fiction meets Nazi social Darwinism meets 21st Century phrenology.

If we ever needed a reason to send the ACPO members on a winter holiday to Snowdon this is it. Then again, if we had a mechanism to screen for dickheads, we could have spotted Pugh earlier and given him help.

Terror Vision

If anything illustrates how badly thought out the concept and operation of the National DNA Database, it's this article from El Reg. David Mery was arrested on the Tube in London in July 2005 for "suspicious behaviour and public nuisance". His crime, carrying a rucksack and wearing a big jacket. Considering the de Menezes killing, at least Mr Mery lived to tell the tale. After he was released without charge, he has fought to have his DNA details removed from the database. His fight has highlighted the complete lack of controls in the NDNAD, which inevitably means that instead of an objectively managed system we have a mechanism that is in the hands of a subjective powerful few, without adequate or open checks and balances.

His website gives a Kafkaesque account of his arrest and subsequent treatment under the much abused anti-terror laws, and the casual contempt the police have towards citizens and their rights. One man's story, one of many, illustrating our slow slide into a police state - all in the name of the War Against Terror.