Democracy's finest hour?

Well, my little rant about the Police Commissioner Elections yesterday hardly encouraged the burghers of the Black Country to vote in droves: the Dark Place's turnout was 12.87%, and the West Midlands average was even lower: 12.35%. You can guarantee that most of those voters were golf-club fascists voting UKIP, birch-wielding Tories and of course police officers. So even if a single candidate gets 50% of the vote by some miracle, the most they'll command is 6.15% of the region's 5 million+ people.

We shall have to bear this in mind when the next Tory MP claims a strike is illegitimate if fewer than 50% of the members voted. But in the meantime, let's ponder this. When elected mayors were proposed, people got to vote in a referendum on the concept itself. Some places voted yes, others voted no. Hartlepool voted yes, and yesterday decided to abolish the post. So if the Tories are so keen on local democracy, why no referendum?

The answer is, of course, that the like the appearance of democracy rather than the thing itself. That's why they like police commissioners. They've watched a lot of Westerns and really believe that a lone hero can clean up this town. Not coincidentally, that's the argument the Daily Mail and other Tories made about certain other law-and-order types: Mosley, Mussolini and Hitler. Democracy is not served by concentrating power in the hands of a lowest-common-denominator demagogue.

Which brings me to my next example, Mr Michael Gove.

You may think he's a harmless Pob lookalike, but one of his favourite concepts is the Academy school. It's a really simple idea. You take a school run by the elected local council and you give it to a 'sponsor', who could be, say, a Tory Party donor and Christian fundamentalist, or a university not entirely unadjacent to The Hegemon. You then exempt it from Freedom of Information laws. You sack the governors and replace them with an unelected advisory board. Parent and staff governors are not replaced. You exempt the school from requirements that teachers actually have qualifications, from minimum food standards and from measures banning vending machines and the like.

To whom is the school answerable? Not the parents. Not the staff. Not the students. Nor the local authority, who you might think would have a keen sense of the areas educational needs and plenty of expertise in logistics, supplies, legal advice, pay, and all the other complicated things a school requires. A council that can be sacked if the local voters decide it's doing a bad job. No, the school is answerable only to one Michael Gove and to whichever dubious corporation decided that running (but not funding) a school would be a good bit of PR.

And that, children, is 'democracy' in action. See also: the privatisation and restructuring of the NHS.

Keystone Kommissioners

Morning everybody. It's voting day! No, really!

I usually vote at 7 a.m. partly because democracy is still a bit exciting even in its British form, and partly to ensure that just for a second, there's a 100% majority for Truth and Justice.

Not today. I lazed around and didn't get to the polling station - in the Civic Offices at the heart of The Dark Place - until 9.48 this morning. It didn't bode well when the election officials actually cheered when I walked in and shouted 'An actual voter!'. I know more people will vote at lunchtime and in the evening, but it's not a good sign, and some of my friends were the first to vote at their stations too.

To be honest, I only voted because I feel strongly that you should vote at every opportunity or shut up when everything goes wrong. I utterly oppose the idea of elected police commissioners. I suspect it was dreamed up by some boomer Tory who remembers Commissioner  Gordon and Chief O'Hara from the 1960s Batman TV show.

They think these guys will shine a symbol into the sky and Eric Pickles will land on the roof and shoot skateboarders.

This is really why I voted. I know damn well that the only turnout will be from the Daily Mail-reading, Neighbourhood Watching, curtain-twitching reactionaries who vote Tory and mutter darkly about 'coloureds' and property prices. The kind of people elected will pander to the paranoia of the aging white suburbanites who will never be persuaded that crime is falling, that the police can't be trusted without supervision (Hillsborough, the Birmingham Six, various paedophile cover-ups, Jean Charles de Menezes and multiple other things were 'isolated incidents') and that policing shouldn't be an extension of Conservative Party policy. They want youths and dogshit off the streets and that's what they'll get in their areas if the motley crew of ex-coppers and ex-politicians who've stood get through. The non-white kids are in for a hard time if they stray from their slums and upset the commissioner's voters. My appalling MP Paul Uppal explicitly envisions a city swept clean of anyone who isn't a 'shopper': these police commissioners will turn the police service into private security guards looking after businesses and rich Tory voters' areas, because that's what will attract votes.

The argument for election is that the old policing boards were unaccountable and distant. They were appointed from the ranks of councillors elected in police areas. I have no idea who my commissioners were, but I did know that if I threw out my local councillors, the police board would change. I also knew that with a certain distance from the electorate, they couldn't canvass for the Rambo vote or play dog-whistle politics. Justice and policing shouldn't be politicised in this way: it's political enough already. Elected commissioners will become the bursting zits of a foul body politic.

Finally, it enrages me when Tory MPs call union strikes illegitimate if the turnout is less than 50%. By those standards, most MPs shouldn't have seats. Perhaps they'll pipe down when the policing commissioners are elected with less than 10% of the eligible vote.

I voted for Bob Jones, a Labour councillor and longstanding member of the policing board. One reason made me bother: he, like all the Labour candidates, promises to stop moves to privatise police activities. I fear and distrust the police as it is. A for-profit police force will be the stuff of dystopian novels. I've seen Robocop and it's not that far-fetched.

What of the other candidates? The Tory is one of John Cheever's 'quick civil servants of extinction': one of those hard-faced technocrats with no regard for civic virtues and too much for the iniquities which can be committed under the name of 'efficiency'. There's Derek Webley, an 'independent' who calls himself a Bishop, and says he as 'acted as media spokesman for the West Midlands police', so we need say no more about the Evangelical shill for repression. There's a UKIP candidate, so let's hope nothing blows up on nights when there's a full moon. Bill's an interesting guy. He used to be a Conservative until even they objected to him and his wife posting Facebook photos of them with golliwog dolls. Bill runs the Campaign Against Political Correctness, so I think we can assume that under his leadership, black chaps will find themselves falling down police station stairs like in the old days. Predictably, Mike opposes 'red tape', 'anti-social behaviour', 'elf-and-safety', 'chalkboards' and 'abroad' (I may have made this last one up). He hopes Jimmy Savile will burn in hell with a spike up his bottom. He is also the local head of The Freedom Association. That sounds nice, but they spent the 80s campaigning for apartheid and took money from the South African government, so you can just imagine the kind of policing he's keen on and who deserves freedom. He'll probably do quite well.

Cath Hannon (Independent) is an ex-copper, so she's out on the basis of quis custodiet ipsos custodes and anyway the daughter of Irish immigrants should have known better than to have joined the force which fitted up the Birmingham Six. The Lib Dem, Ayoub Khan, is a barrister who seems far too friendly with a force notorious for its treatment of ethnic minorities. And finally, there's Mike Rumble, a frightening-looking ex-officer with business fingers in some unsavoury pies and who can't spell 'independent' (and as an ex-rozzer during the darkest days of the WMP, probably couldn't be independent either).

Buy something, or you're nicked

Every time I open the newspaper, I see something prefigured in the science fiction of Jeff Noon, William Gibson or Ken MacLeod. We're not going to be travelling to other galaxies or going back in time, but we are gradually building a kind of corporate dystopia, a la Gattaca, Bladerunner, Robocop most explicitly and similar texts.



The future won't feel like Robocop. You personally might not be manhandled by brutal corpocops. But you're probably not mentally unwell, young or black. The streets will be clean and there won't be any raised voices. But the near future is becoming dystopian in a far more insidious way. It might seem innocuous, but the deployment of 100 militaristic security officers on the streets of Manchester is a further step away from the perfectly reasonable expectation that as citizens, we have the freedom to walk the streets and the expectation that should we commit crimes, we are arrested by public servants and tried by our peers.

These ex-police officers patrolling the shopping areas of Manchester will look like officers - they'll be wearing stab vests, and carrying radios and cameras. The company which employs them is even negotiation to get them the authority to levy fines on people for minor offences.

Think about that for a second. Despite the numerous examples of police brutality and corruption available, the police service is employed by us and is accountable to us through the courts, local authorities and parliament. We pay them extremely well and expect them to protect us. These cut-price cops won't have any requirement to prevent crimes against us, or against the public sphere. Low-paid and responsible only to corporations, they'll stand by and watch while your granny gets mugged. Why not? There's nothing in it for them, and they're probably not insured to get involved. At the same time, we're giving away to these corporate security guards the right to punish us - without trial - when we do something that offends their employers. Clearly there's only one kind of crime that matters to the Conservatives - crimes against business.

This is such a bad idea that even the cops - formerly the armed wing of the Conservative Party, though the Tories are doing their very best to alienate them - think it's a step too far.  This will happen in your town too. My own awful MP and his cronies in WVOne explicitly see this city's centre as a retail space only: nothing else will be permitted.

Public space is being handed over by councils entranced by shiny presentations and promises of zero-tolerance on litter - but what will also go is the catholic anarchy of urban space: the poor, the rich, the young, the old, the amblers and strollers and buskers and natters and campaigners and loafers will all be swept away with them. How will you appeal against being made to move on by these retail bouncers? You won't.

Thankfully, resistance is possible… as Mallrats makes clear.

Uncanny: Fry and Laurie predict the future

For your convenience and amusement, two old Fry and Laurie sketches - one which envisages the privatisation of the police force, as leaked to the press on Saturday, the other taking It's A Wonderful Life to explore a world without Murdoch:





The police privatisation story is a shocker. I have to say that I don't particularly care whether a company or an in-house mechanic fixes cop cars very much - but the plans include detention, patrolling, intelligence work and investigations: and senior cops (no doubt looking forward to fat directorships) are very keen on this.

British policing has always been a fraught affair: in the Victorian era, the police were widely viewed as working-class traitors, to the extent that an anti-garotte collar formed part of the Met's uniform. Since then, the police have become deeply politicised: despite the individual efforts of the many decent community peace officers, large sections of the police have been devoted to sleeping, bugging and burgling their way round the protest movement without any justification, enthusiastically smashing the miners and generally acting as the armed wing of the Conservative Party, and maintaining corrupt links with the Murdoch press. Minor issues like pursuing rape cases or racist crimes seem to fade into insignificance compared with the greed and reactionary politics of the Association of Chief Police Officers.

If the police become privatised, the bad days of 70s corruption will return. Community support will disappear once policing becomes a profit-generating activity. I certainly won't feel under any compulsion to co-operate with the Corporate Cops. Without public consent, ordinary policing will become impossible. What officer will risk his life for the minimum wage and a corporate uniform? Honest police officers sworn to uphold justice, the law and democracy are essential to any society: making them employees of some offshore corporation will entirely break the social bonds which hold us together. The upper reaches of the police force already believe that their job is to serve the 1%: now they're looking forward being part of it.

Still, it makes the Police Commissioner election very easy: my vote will go to whichever candidate promises to kill this idea.

Luckily, popular culture provides another depiction of life under a privatised police force: Robocop, quite left-wing films which explore the social effects of privatisation of public services including policing. Here's a clip from Robocop 3:

It's PC Gone Mad!

Oh dear. The Tories have made rather a serious tactical error. They've told the average bobby on the beat that s/he's either going to be sacked or get quite a large pay cut. The police are threatening protest, which is very interesting indeed.

Now you and I may have opinions on the police forces, and whether they're over or underpaid, but it's political insanity to mess with their terms and conditions. Why? Because the cops have always been the state's working-class enforcers: not liked by their employers and distrusted by the people (which is why Victorian Metropolitan plods wore an anti-garotting collar as part of the uniform).*

Governments have always paid officers well because during times of tension, they're required to put aside their opinions and class allegiances and defend the status quo. Take the Miners' Strike, for example: most of the police were working-class lads who chose to enforce the Thatcher government's diktats in return for employment and fat bonuses. This is why they're still hated in ex-mining areas, despite the growth of community policing. One theory holds that Raoul Moat became a folk-hero in the north-east because he shot policemen: if this is true, it's unforgivable but it has a context.

So what are the Tories up to? The police did what they were told during the Miners' Strike. They weren't so keen on the Poll Tax and lo and behold, the big riots were allowed to rage. If the cops are feeling victimised in this recession, I don't think we can expect them to try very hard to counter the protests that are surely going to escalate in the next year or so. Perhaps they'll even join in. It's no coincidence that one of the student demonstration chants to the police was 'your job next'.

How do I feel about this? Very optimistic. Just because the police is the armed wing of hegemony doesn't mean it always has to be. We need a police force: rapists and murderers aren't proletarian heroes, whatever Moat's supporters think. But it is time the police stopped being treated like - and thinking of themselves as - a special category. The sooner they join the people, the better.

What I really don't understand is how the Tories think this will come good for them. A demoralised cop struggling with a mortgage and two jobs isn't going to take a brick in the face for the government. Why should s/he? We need the police, but the government will need them even more when the true horror of what they have in store for us becomes apparent - and they seem to have forgotten this fact.

(If the police do stage a demonstration, I suggest that we all go along as stewards, 'evidence gatherers and security guards. We can then estimate their numbers to the news media and talk about their determination to cause trouble: 'There was a hardcore minority in para boots and black clothing with protective gear, yes, but there were only about 250 people on the march in total, not the 50,000 they claimed, and we've got the names and pictures of the known troublemakers' - they do it to us).

*Jennifer Davis, "The London Garrotting Panic of 1862", in VAC Gatrell, B. Lenman, G. Parker, Crime and Law (1980) 

Sound good sense - from the Tories!

It seems like the pressure on the government to do something about indiscriminate and expensive police spying is bearing fruit. While the Home Secretary is bullying police forces into reversing their decision not to fund the private spying corporation known as the Association of Chief Police Officers, the Police Minister is telling Parliament that it's unacceptable to have a private and unaccountable company (staffed by policemen paid by us) engaging in policing.

Herbert told MPs the case demonstrated strongly that Acpo should no longer have the responsibility for national organisations such as the unit that runs covert operations gathering intelligence on domestic extremists in England and Wales.

"Units like this should not be operated by Acpo and they should be operated either by a lead police force or in future the National Crime Agency where there is proper governance in place." Acpo currently runs national units involved in running counter-terrorism work, domestic extremism, vehicle crime and criminal records.

He also refused to comment on claims by MPs that both the names of the business secretary, Vince Cable, and the Green party leader, Caroline Lucas, were listed on the domestic extremism database simply because they had been present at peaceful protests. 

I always knew Vince was trouble.

Rather scarily, the Metropolitan Police say they need to take over ACPO's activities

 "so that it would come within our command and control system, which would ensure a) compliance with the law, b) compliance with rules and c) compliance with ethics."

Er… were they breaking the law? Will there be an investigation? Anyway, this is all rather excellent. Now we just need to know why the counter-terrorism squad are asking universities to inform on students. Since when has legitimate protest against fees been 'terrorism'? Ask your university's management if they've had the letter, and whether they've complied - or fill in a Freedom of Information request. The Hegemon has 'educated' more than one Guantanamo guest, so I presume that MI5 is active on campus already.

Klever Keystone Kops

Like every other public agency, the police are lobbying and spinning as hard as they can to resist budget cuts(the government resists by spinning worse cuts than they'll actually implement, to soften us up).

Unlike many others, the cops have come up with a brilliant line:

Everyone's going to be on the streets protesting your other budget cuts. If you cut our funding, there won't be enough of us to stop them marching on Downing Street and stringing you up from the lampposts.

I paraphrase, but that's basically the gist of it.

"In an environment of cuts across the wider public sector, we face a period where disaffection, social and industrial tensions may well rise," says Barnett in his draft speech to the annual police superintendents' conference, which takes place in Cheshire.

"We will require a strong, confident, properly trained and equipped police service, one in which morale is high and one that believes it is valued by the government and public."

'It's the lads, sarge. They want to crack lefty heads, but they're worried about their jobs. Knuckledusters cost money, y'know'.

 Got to admire that level of cunning!

Only in (Northern) Ireland…

… would you find the Police Service raiding the Policing Board, the organisation that's meant to, er, oversee the behaviour of the police.

How does this Graber you?

Anthony Graber is a high-speed geek: the kind of man who straps a video camera to his head and goes for a ride on his motorbike.



The other gentleman in this video is a Maryland State Trooper, though he doesn't introduce himself as such until after he's waved the gun around, according to our hero. He gave Mr. Graber a citation for speeding, which seems fair enough, though the gun seems a bit excessive, though it may be normal for the US.

Then silly Mr. Graber, believing that a conversation between a policeman and a citizen isn't 'private' (because anything you say to a policeman can be presented in court, and because Maryland police officers record encounters themselves), put his tape on Youtube.

Oops. Suddenly the speeding ticket became a police raid, confiscation of his computers and 16 charges, including extra motoring offences and several wiretap violations! Hilariously, one charge refers to 'surreptitious' recording - despite the camera being stuck on Graber's head! He now faces up to 16 years in jail if the cops get their way.

I know Ewar will find some way to justify the policeman's action, but it's beyond me: encounters with public servants are just that - public - and if the police don't have anything to be ashamed of, they shouldn't object to their actions being recorded for posterity. After all, we in Britain are recorded everywhere we go. In case you're unsure, or a policeman tells you differently, the government has clarified the law: you can photograph/record the police in virtually all situations.

Thankfully, the ACLU are on the case.

No justice for Ian Tomlinson

Ian Tomlinson was a middle-aged man who accidentally got caught up in a demonstration as he was walking home.



Having been refused permission to get through the police cordon, he turned with his hands in his pocket and walked away.

At this point, a police officer smashed him with a truncheon from behind. Tomlinson collapsed. No officer offered first aid - only protestors did so, having carried him further from the police.

Tomlinson died where he fell the second time.

The police initially told the press Tomlinson was a protestor, and that he died from a heart attack, on the basis of a post-mortem carried out by their pet doctor - a man in deep trouble with the medical authorities for other slapdash work. A second post-mortem revealed the cause of death to be internal bleeding.

I don't care what the cause was - it's hard to think that heart failure was unconnected to being bludgeoned by a policeman in a surprise attack. In any case, the result isn't the core issue: it's the unprovoked violence by an officer of the law.

In a written statement the CPS admitted that there was sufficient evidence to show the officer had assaulted Tomlinson, but claimed a host of technical reasons meant he could not be charged.

Tomlinson's son Paul, flanked by his mother Julia, who was struggling to hold back tears, said: "It's been a huge cover-up and they're incompetent.

In a detailed letter setting out its reasons, the CPS said that the actions of the officer – seen striking Tomlinson with a baton then shoving him to the ground on footage obtained by the Guardian – amounted to assault.

It said: "The CPS concluded that there is sufficient evidence to provide a reasonable prospect of proving that the actions of PC 'A' in striking Mr Tomlinson with his baton and then pushing him over constituted an assault. At the time of those acts Mr Tomlinson did not pose a threat ... There is sufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of proving that his actions were disproportionate and unjustified." 

Now the results are in: no criminal charges for the policeman who did this. The investigation took so long that assault charges are out (what a handy loophole), and they decided not to go for intermediate charges (such as grievous bodily harm) for unclear reasons. Turns out you can do whatever you want if you've a uniform. And people wonder why I'm wary of the police.

Update: even the Independent Police Complaints Commission thought this was manslaughter, and told Tomlinson's family so. 


And let's see what the forensic pathologist said:

He told the Guardian prosecutors made a factual error in dismissing a charge of actual bodily harm.

He said his report contained clear evidence that Tomlinson suffered injuries sufficient to support a charge of ABH.

But the CPS dismissed the injuries as "relatively minor" and thus not enough to support a charge of ABH in its written reasons given to the family.

Cary, speaking for the first time about the case, told the Guardian: "I'm quite happy to challenge that. No the injuries were not relatively minor. It is a flawed approach. He sustained quite a large area of bruising. Such injuries are consistent with a baton strike, which could amount to ABH. It's extraordinary. If that's not ABH I would like to know what is."

Poor old cops

I felt genuinely sorry for the cops and criminals outside my flat last night. They were like a pair of tired old tap-dancers in an empty hall, going through the old routine one last time without interest or enthusiasm.

Two youths (ill-fitting baseball caps, branded t-shirts, tight tracksuits with the trousers tucked into socks to display their white trainers) decide to start hitting each other, right in front of the police car which has just come round the corner. They weren't very good pugilists: even I could have landed more telling blows. The police officers sit there for a second, clearly deciding whether or not it was worth even bothering to get out of the vehicle. Eventually they do. The 'fight' stops and the kids submit to the rozzers without any show of defiance or injustice.

For all concerned, it was like an ancient religious ritual whose significance has long been lost - as meaningless and regular as the weather. The teens bore each other and the police no ill-will, and the officers were kind to them in a weary kind of way, no doubt resigned to a pile of administration over a petty argument, leading to no further action.

It certainly wasn't like The Bill, which is going out on a high.

"If one of those bubbles touches me, it's assault"

Yes, a young lady was arrested at the G20 demonstrations for blowing bubbles. Annoying, but hardly life-threatening.



It's the Canadian version of the Kingsnorth police injuries story. There, the government told Parliament that 70 officers were injured in the course of the £9.5 million policing operation at the climate protest.

70 officers were injured. Not by protestors, and not exactly seriously:

the Home Office minister Vernon Coaker wrote to the Lib Dem justice spokesman, David Howarth, saying: "Kent police have informed the Home Office that there were no recorded injuries sustained as a result of direct contact with the protesters."

Only four of the 12 reportable injuries involved any contact with protesters at all and all were at the lowest level of seriousness with no further action taken.

The other injuries reported included "stung on finger by possible wasp"; "officer injured sitting in car"; and "officer succumbed to sun and heat". One officer cut his arm on a fence when climbing over it, another cut his finger while mending a car, and one "used leg to open door and next day had pain in lower back".

A separate breakdown of the 33 patients treated by the police tactical medicine unit at the climate camp shows that three officers had succumbed to heat exhaustion, three had toothache, six were bitten by insects, and others had diarrhoea, had cut their finger or had headaches.

Still, the initial claim made some useful headlines portraying anyone who protests about anything as rabid violent extremists.

Grandma, what big teeth you have!

You know that I have a problem with the police - too many of them think that a uniform gives them the right to bully citizens.

Be thankful we don't live in Oklahoma, if this is true:

When Lonnie Tinsley's 86-year-old bedridden grandmother refused to take her medicine, he called emergency services in El Reno, Oklahoma and requested a medical technician. Instead, a dozen armed officers arrived at the scene.

According to officer Duran’s official report, Mrs Varner had taken an 'aggressive posture' in her hospital bed. In order to ensure 'officer safety', one of his men 'stepped on her oxygen hose until she began to suffer oxygen deprivation'.

Another of the officers then shot her with a taser, but the connection wasn’t solid. A second fired his taser, 'striking her to the left of the midline of her upper chest, and applied high voltage, causing burns to her chest, extreme pain', and unconsciousness. Lona was then handcuffed with sufficient ruthlessness to tear the soft flesh of her forearms, causing her to bleed. After her wounds were treated at a local hospital, Lona was confined for six days in the psychiatric ward at the insistence of the El Reno Police Department.

The game's up

I'm very sad. You probably knew that. I'm actually sad tonight, on reading that The Bill is to receive the death sentence for crimes against acting.

In case you're not familiar with this show (and let's face it, only Brits and Australians are), it's a police drama which faded into soapdom. A successor to ground-breaking realist shows like Z Cars, its strengths were tight scripting, a refusal to end with neat conclusions and a clear-eyed view of policing: the characters were complex and often unsympathetic. There were usually many sides to each story, and the producers were extremely quick to pick up on big news from the real world.

Those were the glory days - it gradually became a home for actors whose characters in other soaps had been killed off, and so it became filled with beefcake and totty who wouldn't (or couldn't) do moral complexity: bent coppers don't look great on the CVs of buffed narcissists looking for charidee work.

I'll miss The Bill. Perhaps it will get time off for good behaviour and inhabit the twilight world of repeats channels. You naysayers: leave it aht.

Just for Kate

As she's the only one as obsessed with politics as I am (though she gets a partner - that's not fair), another politics post. Everyone else can look away now.

Stop and Search has been banned by the European Court of Justice. Yet again, it took the EU to point out to this government and the police that stopping and searching people without reasonable grounds is oppressive. Under UK law, the cops can take you aside and go through your pockets without even having to suspect that you're up to anything.

In the 1970s, this behaviour was known as the 'suspicion of being black' law, as black youths were targeted out of all proportion. The laws were changed in the 1980s, then changed back in the 2000s under the Terrorism Act. Lo and behold, the cops started harassing ethnic minorities again. Then they turned their attention to anyone planning to hold a legal demonstration, and photographers - a very useful tool to prevent democracy.

The sole condition was that the search had to look for articles used in connection with terrorism – but this covered many things commonly carried by people in the street. Police did not even have to have grounds for suspecting such articles were present.

The judges said that, because of this, there was a "clear risk of arbitrariness in granting such broad discretion" to a police officer.

Their concerns were compounded by the fact that black and Asian people were four times more likely to be stopped under section 44 and there was a risk that the power could be misused against demonstrators.

"The absence of any obligation on the part of the officer to show a reasonable suspicion made it almost impossible to prove that the power had been improperly exercised," the judges said in describing the lack of judicial checks.

This lightens my mood even more. Poetry marking is going well (congratulations, students) and Alastair Campbell is coming out with some corking BS to the Iraq war inquiry.

Once again, 3 cheers for the European Union. Now we just need to make it socialist.

What a weird week

I'm going to be nice about the boys in blue for the second time in a week!

Dennis O'Connor has published a report into the police's management of public protest, and it's a gem. He's called for a major reappraisal of the attitudes and behaviour of the police, and has called for them to return to the values of consensual policing, rather than seeing their job as opposing protest - less automatic surveillance, less violence, more care.

What's more, the police seem, so far, to have accepted it.

Life's suddenly becoming all serene.

Rebranding in action

If you legally protest anything - no criminal damage, insulting language etc. - then you're a 'domestic extremist', according to the police, and you get your own page on a range of super databases. If you care about a lot of things (again, perfectly legally), then you're included in a new police card game: The Domestic Extremist Top Trumps Cards, in which the cops tick you off a list whenever they spot you.

I've always thought of my attendance at these events as tokenistic at best, a means of reminding our masters that they may achieve compliance, but they haven't engineered consent. It's rather flattering to be considered a 'domestic extremist' (which actually sounds like a heavily-armed housekeeper).

Vehicles associated with protesters are being tracked via a nationwide system of automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras. One man, who has no criminal record, was stopped more than 25 times in less than three years after a "protest" marker was placed against his car after he attended a small protest against duck and pheasant shooting.

Which is outrageous. That level of stops is usually reserved for black men in the British tradition of policing.

Copenhagen - the coercion starts here

When the various anti-terrorism laws were set in place, the government promised everybody that these powers were to cope with a limited, awful problem. Some idiots believed it. Perhaps one of them (though I doubt it), was Chris Kitchen, an environmentalist activist.

Amongst those with other ideas were the police, who realised that the Terrorism Act 2000 could be used to harass and obstruct anyone with whom they have an ideological disagreement. They don't need to go about the hassle of charging, court appearances, juries and all the other checks and balances which attend the prosecution of justice in a democracy.

Mr. Kitchen was on the bus to Denmark when he was hauled off it under the Terrorism Act to see whether he was a terrorist. On protesting that environmentalism isn't terrorism, the officer informed him that 'terrorism means a lot of things' - which a) isn't true and b) demonstrates the inevitable creeping use of oppressive laws to stifle citizens' freedom of movement and expression.

Sure, it's an isolated case - so far. A fair few hundred people are heading to Copenhagen, and they're not terrorists, just people who want to remind those in the motorcades and fancy hotels that more than just votes are at stake. Time for the police to remember that their duty is to the public, not to those with whom they agree.

No thanks, Coppers

The police have been roundly criticised, including by their own investigations teams, for their handling of legal protests - they've beaten, harassed and maliciously arrested innocent people. So they're on a charm offensive, and are running a slick PR campaign which claims that all those nasty male coppers wading in boots-first are going to be replaced with nice mumsy officers bearing cups of tea for thirsty sloganeers.

Climate Camp aren't impressed and have declined Plod's request for advance notice of the address of the new super-secret action base:

Stick that in your kettle

One of my distant superiors was involved in the design and defence of 'kettling', the police tactic of imprisoning legal protestors for long periods, allowing them out only if these innocent people surrender their details and images to cops for a database that's been declared illegal.

Well yah boo sucks to you, Professor: your methods have been described as 'inadequate' and outdated by the official report into the G20 events.

Some highlights:

Commanders appeared not to properly understand basic human rights laws or the legal requirements surrounding the use of kettling, the report said. However, O'Connor said this was the case for only some senior officers, and refused to identify those at fault.

It says police are currently failing in their human rights obligations, and describes public order policing guidance issued by the Association of Chief Police Officers – adopted by all forces across England and Wales – as "insufficient".

The national policy should be overhauled, it says, to "demonstrate explicit consideration of the facilitation of peaceful protest".

contrary to claims by senior Met officers ahead of the demonstrations, there was "no specific intelligence which suggested any planned intention to engage in co-ordinated and organised public disorder".

Despite that, senior commanders gave "no consideration" to the idea that the protests might be peaceful and planned how to deal "robustly" with unlawful activity.

Just to be clear: there are some individual officers behaving insensitively and criminally, but this report, and my point, is that there's a structural and institutional problem with policing when it comes to protest: the police force is far to the right of the population and shows no sign of recognising citizens' rights to peaceful protest.