Shambles

I’m considering shaving my head and getting a pair of antlers tatooed on it.

I thought I was indulging in black humour when I drew comparisons between the progress of Ghana toward democracy, and the current UK election. I really thought it would look funny later. But now I’m hearing about the kind of shit that used to happen under Achaempong. I’m hearing about police breaking through spontaneous protests of the disenfranchised outside polling booths.

The BBC report that hundreds of people in constituencies spread across London, Manchester, Chester, Liverpool, Bolton and Sheffield have been shut out of polling stations after multi-hour queuing. I fully expect to hear of more. I’m hearing about polling stations that ran out of ballots. I’m hearing about spontaneous protests at polling stations being broken by police.

The Electoral Commission have announced that they will be investigating electoral irregularities. 3 seats have returned and they are already saying this! In 1992, three separate sets of observers were in action; UN, some Swiss hired by the government and some Finns I never found out who hired. Everyone and the BBC agreed the elections were fair. One observer said on air, “If Eastern Europe could run elections this clean I’d be out of a job.”

Not if the returning officers of Sheffield Hallam have anything to do with it, mate. What we have here is students (the group most likely to vote LibDem) being separated from ‘residents’ into a separate queue. They were then processed so much more slowly that ‘hundreds’ (BBC) were turned away without being able to vote.

[ Edit 0040: Here is the 140-character saga of the Sheffield Hallam law student Rak Smith. Disenfranchisement in a modern democracy, tweeted live. I would like to congratulate Raksky for presence of mind and good liberal instincts in making a speech to angry riot police. And I would like to add my fury and support to the pleas of those who have been denied their right to vote. ]

This is scandalous. Leaving aside the convenient coincidence that this is Nick Clegg’s own seat; this is a travesty against one of the longest democratic traditions in the world. Be it conspiracy or not, it is most certainly cock-up, and that’s not bloody good enough.

We suspected that a hung parliament would reveal the bankruptcy of this system. There’s no evidence yet to suggest that the seats will accurately reflect the popular vote, so that is still likely. But it didn’t occur to me that we’d see the kind of voting irregularities we saw in elections run by the Bush regime.

I could never vote in Ghana. I campaigned, but couldn’t vote. And I remember what the polling queues looked like. Hundreds of people standing singing in the sunshine, baking and sweating and grinning their ears off. I remember hearing about violence in Gonja territory, and how fast it was dealt with. People were in jail by the end of the day. I predict now that no-one will go to prison for this. If we wouldn’t prosecute them for the Iraq war we won’t prosecute anyone for this.

BBC, in 2010, report that the police have broken picket lines in two places, where enraged voters who had been denied the chance to vote had blocked the ballot box until it carried their electoral rights within its seal.

The system is bankrupt. It cannot be permitted. I’ve heard calls for V masks in Parliament square. I’m inclined to echo them right now.

JQP in Brief

Balls on the Back Benches

Not, unfortunately, Ed. Labour MP Graham Allen has written a very interesting post suggesting some out-of-the-box perspectives on British democracy. I agree with a considerable amount, if not all, of what he said but that’s not why I’m linking it.

None Dare Call It Treason

The Climate Camp is back, and thoroughly established on Blackheath, scene of a number of very drunken evenings of burly cheer back when I was a Kent schoolboy rugby player. They’re slowly getting their message across in spite of all the distractions. They’re a broad, consensus-based coalition which carries no universal ideological burden. The only point of cohesion is that they are all dedicated to true debate, to collective action and to direct, rather than representative/corruptible political self-determination. They are able to be all of these things because they live in a society where the cost of entry into the communications market is so low that normal people can play too. And they’re winning the spin war, so far. Being factual, organised and in the right really helps with that. Mr. Cameron, take note.

JQP in Brief

Allies

It may prove a strategic error for the Cambridge PD to have shown their collective asses right at the start of Blog Against Racism week. It practically guaranteed them the spotlight as “offenders of the week” at a time when thousands of honourable people were looking for a bigot to pillory. On the other hand, I didn’t even know it was IBARW until Jennie Rigg mentioned it: hat duly tipped.

Surveillance Societies

[ Editor’s note: This article was originally written for PSUK and appears here by permission of the editors. ]

---

Surveillance, it seems to me, comes in two categories differentiated by purpose; that is, all surveillance efforts will fulfill one, or both in some mixture, of two purposes. The first is the easiest, and the most etymologically obvious: surveillance is investigative.

A typical example of such surveillance work would be a phone tap. You initiate a phone tap to find out things you didn’t know before; it is an investigative tool. A point-to-point communication which should thus limit information exposure is compromised by external surveillance, permitting the watchers to learn things they would otherwise be unable to learn. But it is worth noting that this investigative function for surveillance is effective precisely in so far as it is covert; a subject aware of observation behaves differently.

JQP in Brief

So I’m back on the Metro run for the first time in a while, having spent 9 days in a field in Somerset making actual things out of wood. A short list of things I felt rant-worthy appears below.

Culpability VII: Bootnote

Liberal Democrat [ MP. –Ed ] Tom Brake says he saw what he believed to be two plain-clothes police officers go through a police cordon after presenting their ID cards.

Brake, who along with hundreds of others was corralled behind police lines near Bank tube station in the City of London on the day of the protests, says he was informed by people in the crowd that the men had been seen to throw bottles at the police and had encouraged others to do the same shortly before they passed through the cordon.
                                                — The Guardian

You know, I’m beginning to wonder about this journalistic integrity thing. It’s a bit odd for me anyway, since I’m an historian. As a discipline we’re inclined to the long view; we’re inclined to use a lot of caveats about data and provenance thereof, and we’re inclined to be very careful to leave room for new data to change our interpretation. It was in this spirit that I wrote the Feast of Fools and Culpability series; I kept seeing things in eye-witness reports which I either cited very carefully, noting that eye-witness reports were unsubstantiated, or left out altogether because there wasn’t enough data and I genuinely hoped they weren’t true.

Serve and Protect

This is a phrase famously associated with police officers in certain high-profile cities in America but it’s also a phrase I associate with the job of landlord. It’s a pun first made to me by the landlord at my local down in Southampton mumble years ago. The pub was a tiny Victorian establishment with a 2-barrel brewery that was visible through a glass panel behind the bar, so you could drink your Sweet Sensation [1] and watch the next batch brewing. I was told “Our job is to serve drinks and protect peace of mind. The brewer sells beer: the landlord sells happiness.”

Culpability VI: Law or Order?

Having gone truncheons to tasers in a generation, I also have to wonder what purpose the current Police Service has been built for? […] It looks like we have been built to violently confront and overcome people. I am not saying that is our mindset, but it is without doubt what we are equipped to do. Once people get over the quasi military kit, we are mostly approachable and pleasant people, it’s just that we dress like Imperial Stormtroopers.
                — NightJack, Winner of the Orwell Prize for Blogs, 2009

I’m going to repeat, at this stage, something I’ve said a few times through this fiasco but which I don’t think can be repeated often enough. I am not angry with constables as a class. I think there are some specific individuals who broke the law (the chairman of the IPCC agrees with me, btw) and need to be tried and jailed. I think that there is a policy from the highest levels which is flawed, arrogant, short-sighted and dangerous; but I do not and will not blame coppers for how they’re trained, briefed or ordered. The blame for those things lies squarely and solely with senior officers, the ACPO and the last four governments.

Culpability V: That which is seen

“Police brutality is not new”, say the right-wing blogs. Well, no. “Police brutality is worse elsewhere”, say the trolls. Well, yes; so what? We’ve been doing this Enlightenment thing longer than any other continuous democracy: we’ve had more chances to learn from our mistakes, and therefore we as a people cannot be excused from civilisation because we forgot to do our homework. So if police brutality is neither new, nor local, what has changed in the last ten years? After all, the police started a riot at Gleneagles and then violently subdued it, and there was none of this fuss.

Culpability IV: Punishment and Crime

The previous two posts have laid out a disturbing impression of police policy and culture. The culture and direction from senior officers is explicitly encouraging the avoidance of accountability, which is scandalous in armoured riot troops. Officers are systematically misusing the law, engaging in deliberate intimidation through the assumption that the public can’t follow the law, and engaging in both disingenuous and frankly laughable attempts to turn the innocent into an excuse for violence. These things are true of British policing across the country, all the way from football fans in Manchester to middle-class anglers in the Home Counties. The question I want to examine based on the Climate Camp report is whether there’s more to it than that when it comes to the policing of dissent specifically.

Culpability II: Long arm, no face

It has been apparent since the second of April that the rioting police in the Square Mile had hoist themselves upon their own petard. I heard a man had died circa one in the morning, via a mobile phone conversation one of my housemates had with our on-scene source. By the time the Guardian broke the first video of Tomlinson’s death, we had already heard rumours of police obscuring their faces and deliberately obfuscating their ID numbers. The video confirmed that it was one of these bizarrely secretive officers who had assaulted Mr. Tomlinson. I was not alone in wondering if the lack of easy accountability had contributed to the apparent culture of excess in the Met and their TSG units.

Culpability I: Causes for Concern

We have one specific request, which may seem a minor request but we believe it is an essential foundation for policing in which the public can have confidence. It is vital that police officers in riot gear have their identification on their fronts and back at all times in extra large font so it is clearly visible. There is currently no legal requirement for police officers to display their identification. This needs to be rectified as a matter of urgency.
                — Climate Camp Legal Team report, 18th April 2009

I’ve now read the report in detail but will take a little longer to formulate appropriate responses to some of the things I read in it. Some of the data is, however, sufficiently important that I want to highlight it now.

Feast of Fools IV: What a tangled web we weave…

This is a high-speed event update as I’m working a bar shift: more considered thoughts will have to wait ’til after the weekend, unfortunately. However, the continued saga of misconduct surrounding Metropolitan policing now sees the assaulting officer under suspicion of manslaughter:

“Following the initial results of the second postmortem, a Metropolitan police officer has been interviewed under caution for the offence of manslaughter as part of an ongoing inquiry into the death of Ian Tomlinson.” — IPCC spokesman

We knew that at the very least, the initial post mortem was dubious. We now know for certain that the police did not just make mistakes in the way they presented Ian Tomlinson’s death: they lied. We are now in a position to speculate as to why a man previously reprimanded for professional misconduct was selected to perform this autopsy.

We also now know that the assaulting officer is being questioned over manslaughter. That is entirely the correct response. Now we need to let the professionals do their work (and keep an eye on it!) while we do ours: holding the planners and policy-makers to account, rather than letting them use the death of Mr. Tomlinson to distract attention from the violent, unwarranted treatment of the Climate Campers.

Para-military 101

Strange and eldritch [1] things happen on the Dark Continent. This has been well known for centuries. I experienced one in 1992 when I was at a boarding school in Africa. One of my teachers, who we’ll call Mr. Albert, was a remarkable, quiet, careful and thoughtful man in his late 30s. He’d been a career policeman in the north of England. He eventually left the force, in part because of rampant Masonry [2].

That summer, a young man who’d recently left university came to join the staff at the school for some months. He was a Scouser, a burly, laughing lad and a hell of a footballer: let’s call him Robert. They were the only two young single men teaching at the school so they were allocated a flat together within the staff housing system.

I came upon Robert sitting under a tree crying. I was young enough that it hit me very hard; adults don’t usually do that without a good reason, but he wouldn’t talk to me and asked me to leave him be, so I did. I went to find his room-mate, to ask what was wrong. He was crying too. They had just had the conversation where they realised that Robert had lost a toe and two friends at Hillsborough and Albert had been part of the thin blue line.