Michael Meacher MP

The uncovering by the Guardian of police surveillance of ‘domestic extremists’ who turn out to be protesting over climate change or the Iraq War is the latest revelation of just how far the suppression of fundamental civil liberties has reached in the increasingly authoritarian British State of the last three decades. It is chilling that the main police unit involved, The National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), now holds a central database which lists thousands of what it calls ‘domestic extremists’ simply on the grounds that they may have attended meetings of peaceful direct action or civil disobedience. NPOIU’s language says it all: anti-war campaigners are “extreme leftwing” protest groups, while “environmental extremism” includes campaigns such as the Climate Camp and Plane Stupid. None of these campaigners may have criminal records, yet it is errily reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984 when Anton Setchell, ACPO’s national co-ordinator for domestic extremism, defends the targeting of people and the building up of dossiers on the grounds that “everyone who has got a criminal record did not have one once”. In other words, peaceful protesters are assumed to be guilty until proved otherwise.

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It has just been reported that, exactly a year ago, on 21August 2008, a physically fit man aged 40 was arrested, taken to the nearby police station, placed in a gage in the station yard, and died 20 minutes later. Some 30 persons, nearly all men, die in police custody every year, and in most cases there no doubts or misgivings about the cause of death. In a small number of cases however there are real grounds for suspicion about the reasons for death and real concerns both about the behaviour of the police and the procedures of the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC). The death last year of Sean Rigg, a musician from Brixton, is one such case. There are several suspicious elements, any one of which may later be satisfactorily explained, but which cumulatively do give considerable cause for concern. Nor is this just an examination of one man’s death; it is a system under scrutiny.

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The mass of new video evidence piling up on the G20 protests raises some very searching questions which cannot be brushed aside on the usual grounds that the police have a difficult task, demonstrators can get aggressive, and in a crisis the police must always be supported. Over 185 video recordings show (1) riot police charging protesters who have raised their arms in the air exclaiming ‘this is not a riot’, (2) riot police shoving people back inside the ‘kettle’ by striking people on the head with riot shields, (3) police bearing the badges of medics striking people with batons, (4) uniformed officers accompanied by plainclothes officers armed with batons, (5) police with their numbers concealed and a police inspector from Bishopsgate who refuses to identify himself when asked, (6) riot police officers grabbing a woman from behind and throwing her violently to the ground, as happened also to Iam Tomlinson, (7) a police inspector who tells the media to leave the area or face arrest, (8) a woman hit in the face by a back-handed blow from a police officer and then batoned hard on the back of her legs, and (9) a police handler who lets his dog bite the arm of a man who has just turned away. This is not simply maintaining law and order. It is provocative, aggressive, take-’em-on policing, and it immediately raises the question: is this form of policing out of control, or if not, who is controlling it?

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The finding that Ian Tomlinson died during the G20 protests, not of a heart attack but of an abdominal haemorrhage, is truly devastating for several reasons -
1 Had the City employee not by chance captured the episode on video, the whole matter would have been swept under the carpet.
2 The police rushed to spin a story to the media which exculpated them any blame, and indeed present their involvement exclusively in a good light, before they had taken any witness statements or examined any CCTV evidence.
3 The Home Office pathologist brought in to do the first post mortem hastily produces a verdict which conveniently also excuses the police of any responsibility.
4 The IPCC (independent Police Complaints Commission) initially simply accepted the heart attack story and left it to the Met. to carry out any inquiry, claiming that no video evidence was available (though there were 4 CCTV cameras in the vicinity).
5 The media, with the exception of the Guardian, all tamely accepted the police version without any independent checking of the facts.
Quite apart from a possible manslaughter charge against the Territorial Support Group police officer who struck down Tomlinson, this catalogue of misdirections and deceptions calls for drastic rform.

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