Ello Ello Ello, what's goin' on 'ere then?

Don't ask policemen for the time. Certainly don't politely ask them why they aren't wearing their identification numbers, as legally required. That gets you a beating, then four days in a cell, without charge. Even better, the police themselves film it, presumably to show down at the masonic lodge or the policeman's ball.

No wonder that some good folks have founded Fit Watch (Forward Intelligence Team) to keep an eye on these loveable bobbies.

Ian Tomlinson RIP

I said a few days ago that the G20 riots had descended into the traditional police riot, and the footage of Ian Tomlinson (a man trying to get home from work) being bludgeoned by the police despite the fact that he was walking away with his hands in his pockets vindicates this. Is he our Blair Peach?

There is a cultural problem with the police at the moment, one which reminds me of the 1980s. They're spending an awful lot of time quietly briefing politicians and newspapers that mass violence is coming, and that they'll be going in hard: the very antithesis of their legal duty to FACILITATE protest. The police in this country have always been a reactionary and politicised force - witness the industrial disputes and the weirdo religious pronouncements of the 1980s, and the backlash which greeted Ian Blair's attempts to humanise the Met.

After the facts, their PR people are concentrating on selling a rosy version of events, as though they're working for a washing-powder company rather than a service supposedly existing to serve the public. Public bodies must be held to account, but they also have a duty to take far more care. Police PR mustn't be a marketing exercise, or be seen as an offence-defence role. One appalling example was the police injury list from Kingsnorth's environmental protest. The cops told the media and politicians that 70 officers had been injured during the £5m+ operation. However, a Liberal Democrat Freedom of Information request revealed no injuries sustained by attacks or scuffles with protestors. The 'injuries' ranged from toothache to bee stings, taking in 'officer injured sitting in car'.

This isn't just funny: it's a serious attempt to deceive readers of already pro-police newspapers and legislators. There's a sustained attempt to consolidate the extra powers afforded to the police after September 11th and use them against all forms of protest, as Mark Thomas et al. have repeatedly demonstrated. The National Extremism Tactical Unit is undertaking surveillance of peaceful protestors and journalists as though they are terrorists, and other secretive units are prepared to treat us all as threats to state security, rather than as concerned citizens.

Nor should individual policemen be allowed to escape scrutiny by ordinary citizens or by the courts: the ban on filming cops is an attempt to hide misdeeds, and a recent police brutality court case saw officers refusing to give evidence.

We've all been conditioned to see the police as 'on our side', despite their track record: the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad (aptly named: they committed a lot of serious racist crime), the Miners' Strike, and on and on. I've challenged a police officer for completely over-reacting to some loud kids at Wolverhampton station - a minor but scary event - and I'd recommend you do the same. They work for us and need reminding of this sometimes,

We are doomed

To recover from the St Pat's festivities, we ate Vietnamese food, sat in the Wellington with pints of real ale and read newspapers, then went to Star City for the premiere of The Age of Stupid. What a brilliant place for a green film: a palace of excess and consumption located next to Spaghetti Junction, a place with so much contempt for the environment that they have no information available about how to get there by public transport.

If you haven't heard about it, it's an important film about climate change. Chances are you're either entirely indifferent or bored with the subject. You shouldn't be. You should watch the film and leave with a sense of utter, utter dread, alleviated by a glimmer of hope that we can do something about it before 2015 - after that, we all get to live in a post-apocalyptic Kevin Costner film, and nobody wants that.

Actually, the film's not that good. It makes a lot of important points but makes them badly. The boo-hiss guy is a low-cost airline director, but it's a shame that they couldn't use a Western one, such as Ryanair's O'Leary. Instead, they pick an Indian as though it's poor Asian countries which have got us all into trouble. The nuclear potato is avoided utterly and the clumsy post-fall flashback structure has been done a million times in cheap SF. Pete Postlethwaite's pretty good though.

The strength is the movement that's growing out of Age of Stupid. The live Q and A beamed direct from Leicester Square was interesting, primarily for Ed Miliband's discomfiture. He had the last laugh though - every time they begged him not to build Kingsnorth, he stressed the need to experiment with CCS, clearly meaning 'I'm building it, and CCS might happen in 30 years time so piss off' while hoping that the greens would think 'Ah, he understands why coal's bad'.