Short Film on the Police Targeting Anti-Fracking Protesters, Particularly the Disabled

Yesterday, Christmas Day 2018, Mike also put up a piece and a short film, about ten minutes long, Targeting Protesters, produced by Gathering Place. The film-makers have been working on a long form documentary about fracking in the UK, during which time they have observed some features of this issue they found ‘surprising’.

They contacted Mike after he put up a piece last week about how the rozzers were reporting disabled people at anti-fracking protests in Lancashire to the DWP. The assumption seems to be that any disabled person out on protest is committing benefit fraud, as if their condition was genuine, they would be in no condition to attend. The DWP’s response to any allegation of fraud is to suspend benefits during the investigation, so that disabled people are automatically denied the money they need to live on before the Department has made a decision on whether or not they are guilty. Opponents of the police’s actions have called it ‘ableist’, and stated that it’s based on a very simplistic view of disability. Not all conditions, that mean someone is unable to work, are obvious, and the severity of many of them can vary from day to day. They have also argued very persuasively that the police seem to be doing this to intimidate disabled people as a deliberate strategy to prevent them going on these demonstrations.

Mike quotes the film’s publicity, which states

“The police have identified and targeted prominent anti-fracking campaigners, key protest organisers and invariably protesters with disabilities – in order to undermine or neutralise their effectiveness in challenging the interests of the shale oil and gas industry.”

The film has been posted on social media by Netpol, the Network for Police Monitoring, and features their coordinator, Kevin Blowe. Blowe explains that the police have a deliberate strategy of targeting particular individuals for arrest. These are people, who are respected by the other protesters. They are either in a position of leadership, or can make critical decisions and actions when the moment comes. They also stop people travelling to the protests. The film shows an example of this, in which a carload of people are stopped by the cops at the side of the road. A woman, one of the crew, asks why they have done this. The policeman states that they are stopping them because they have information that their car contains a tripod. It’s a trumped up charge, and the woman asks them if they really think a tripod can fit in her car. The cop doesn’t respond and simply walks away. Later in the video Raj Chada, a member of a firm of solicitors, states that the cops’ charge that a woman was using a car illegally was complete ridiculous. The police haven’t charged her, or applied to the courts about it. Their arrest is simply a way of stopping free speech, which is unacceptable. It’s against the culture the police should have, which should be about facilitating those, who want to protest. The video also shows Labour’s John McDonnell talking to a group of protesters about the way they’ve been harassed. The film shows another woman, who has been grabbed by the rozzers, just as they release her. She says that it’s the second time that day the police have grabbed her.

Blowe states that the police target particularly influential people. This may sometimes involve arresting them, and pushing that arrest right up to taking them to court, even though the accused person would normally get off in other circumstances. If the targeted individual is local, the cops may continually go round to their homes or disrupt their business, deliberately making it very clear to them that they are under scrutiny.

While many fracking protesters are local, some do come from outside the area. They are also deliberately targeted by the police, who will visit their camps and make it clear that they are being targeted for arrest. They will also claim that any public order offences are due to people from outside the area. One protester from elsewhere in the country states that not only do the police target them, they also target anyone who associates with them, and that they can’t go anywhere without having a police escort. McDonnell also states that he’s concerned about the level of physical force used by the police, and particularly the incident where the police tip a disabled man out of his wheelchair. The film shows this happening, and the man says that it has happened to him three times already. McDonnell explains that the people on these protests are locals concerned about fracking in their area, and that most of them have had no interaction with the police before. The cops’ actions have shocked them, just as they’ve shocked him. The video shows another disabled man, in an orange T-shirt, being seized by the police, who then appear to strap him down physically into his chair. Blowe explains that the police will target someone, who appears vulnerable, in order to show that they will do absolutely anything possible to stop this person being as effective as they could be. Another disabled man tells the camera how the police told him that they had informed Motability that he was using his car for illegal purposes. The same man appears a few minutes later telling John McDonnell that the police have tried to stop his benefits, and passed on to the DWP a years worth of footage of him and other protesters. McDonnel states that this is unacceptable, and that this person should take it up with their MP, so that it can be discussed in the House of Commons. It appears to be done to prevent disabled people protesting, when they should have the same rights and ability in society to protest as everyone else.

Blowe also explains how the police will try to create ‘a situation’ where they can start arresting people by picking on someone vulnerable, like someone in a wheelchair or an older person, so that the other protesters will react. This is done so that the fracking lorries can get through. Sometimes the police is reactive, such as when the police on the day arrest particularly influential people. But they will also target otherwise unlikely targets, like women. They also target the young in order to give them the message that they are vulnerable, and the police consider them to be at risk of getting sucked into extremism. But it’s also a way of letting that person know they’re on the cops’ radar, and they have identified them for harassment. Blowe’s comments are accompanied by footage of a tall, long-haired young man being seized by the police, and forced onto the ground with his head all but in the gutter, before being dragged off. The man then briefly explains in a piece clearly filmed later that he was frightened after this happened to him in the short term, but in the long term absolutely not. Blowe then continues, explaining that this is all about identifying the key people to disrupt and end the protests.

Keith Taylor, an MEP from the Green Party, appears, and makes the point that many people still remember Orgreave from the miner’s strike, and that when the police follow orders, heads get broken. This is not the future that either he nor the community groups want to see.

John McDonnell then appears in turn to say that some form of inquiry into the conduct of the police is needed, and the evidence he’s seen is deeply worrying, and he believes other people seeing it will feel the same. There’s a level of physical force that’s unacceptable, and that therefore needs to be addressed.

Blowe explains that it’s all done to reduce the level of protest in an area, to cut down their duration time of months or weeks, to cut the numbers of people on these protests down to numbers they can manage, and to stop the mass opposition to fracking.

The film ends with the young chap, who was arrested, stating that he knows it’s all done to put people off, and that knowledge itself completely overrides any fear they would try to put upon him or others.

https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2018/12/25/watch-this-short-film-about-the-way-the-police-target-disabled-people-at-protests/

Taylor’s right when he says that it will remind many people of the miner’s strike. It seems very similar to the way Thatcher used the police in the 1980s to break the miner’s union. This was very much a political strategy on the part of the Tories. They remembered and resented the way the miners had defeated Ted Heath’s government in the 1980s, and were determined not to let this happen again. I can remember going to a meeting of the Fabian Society in Bristol, where one of the speakers explained how the efforts of the police, the Tory government, and Tory local authorities were very carefully coordinated and planned, with the same Tory politicians and activists appearing again and again around the country to try to break the strikers and the picket lines.

As for targeting women, they tried doing it to one of the members of my family. One of my female relatives was amongst the people protesting against the poll tax in London, and the police tried to grab her and pull her away, but her friends managed to hold on to her and pull her back. And I can very well believe that this is done deliberately to provoke the crowd to violence, so that the police will have an excuse to crack heads and arrest people.

The police did very well under Margaret Thatcher. They were well paid and given a range of benefits, like cheap or subsidized housing. Since then many very senior police officers have made it plain that they regret how they were used, stating that they were used by Thatcher as her private army. Recently the police have been decimated under Cameron and May through cuts in funding, which have led to a drastic fall in the numbers of police officers. Because the Tories clearly don’t think ordinary people and their homes and property are worth protecting as much as the rich. And they still probably believe that twaddle about neighbourhoods funding their own policing through hiring private security guards.

It is clear, however, that the link between the Tory party, the police and private industry still remains strong, at least as regards the fracking industry. Such politicised policing is a threat to the environment and democracy. McDonnell is right. We need an inquiry. Now.

RIPA and the Further Erosion of Free Speech and Democracy

The Coalition’s ‘Secret Courts’

Mike, Tom Pride, the Angry Yorkshireman, Johnny Void and other left-wing bloggers too numerous to name have all raised the serious concerns presented by the Coalition’s legislation expanding Britain’s surveillance state. These have included secret courts, a Kafkaesque travesty of justice waiting to happen, where the defendant may not even know the charges against them if this is deemed a threat to ‘national security’.

Internet Censorship

Under the pretext of trying to protect vulnerable children from online pornography and paedophiles, the Coalition has also tried to introduce censorship onto the internet with measures so loose and ill-worded that it threatened to stifle mature political discussion and contemporary pagan religion and alternative spirituality and occultism. Tom Pride suffered censorship at the hands of the Net because his blog had ‘adult content’. It has, but not quite in the way the term’s used by censors and the media, where it’s become a euphemism for nudity and sex. Pride’s ‘adult content’ is more in the way of dealing with adult issues using satire and scorn.

This has been waaaay too much for the forces of the Right. More recently he’s had Daily Mail journalists harassing his friends and trying to out him as a Conservative Brit living in Poland. This shows, if nothing else, how desperate they are to smear him.

Police Harassment of Greens and Film-Makers for UKIP and the Frackers

And then there was the case of the local Green activist, who had his collar felt by the rozzers on the behest of the local branch of UKIP. And last week NetPol, the campaign against police surveillance, reported the case of a documentary film-maker, who was interviewed by the police because she had been filming an anti-fracking demonstration, and was therefore considered a dangerous terrorist.

Derby Council’s Surveillance of Workers Talking to Journos

This fortnight’s issue of Private Eye (28th November – 11th December 2014) carries another sobering story about the way RIPA, the new legislation introduced by the government to allow the authorities to snoop on ‘terrorists, fly-tippers’ and people, who don’t clean up the mess when their dogs foul the pavement, has been used in Derby to spy on a local journalist doing her job. According to a speech to the House of Lords by Lord Black of Brentwood, the disgraced former head of the Telegraph group, Derby city council tried to use the new powers to spy on a group of serving and former council employees, who met Kirsty Green, a reporter from the Derby Evening Telegraph, in Starbucks. A senior council employee apparently stumbled on the meeting when he went in there. He reported it to the council, and then invoked the act to have two ‘investigators’ come to engage in ‘direct surveillance’ as part of ‘an internal personnel investigation’. The spies were, however, recognised by the group when they entered the shop, and Green and the employees left.

The Eye’s piece concludes that this episode is ‘more Clouseau than Ceaucescu, perhaps, but sinister nonetheless.

Local Councils and the Campaign against Free Speech

In fact, this has been only one of a number of case where local authorities have wasted time and tax-payers money clamping down on local dissidents, like some jumped-up petty Gestapo. The more infamous cases include how one northern city spent hundreds of pounds of council tax trying to find out who the ‘Mr Monkey’ was posting critical pieces on the internet so they could sue him and close him down. Private citizens and shopkeepers have been threatened when they put up posters criticising the local authorities on the windows of their own homes or businesses. Ten years or so ago, one of the councils in Kent got very stroppy with one individual who dared to put up posters denouncing a technology deal between the council and Richard Branson.

Hitler is Alive and Well and Living in Compton Dando

One of the most ludicrous and petty attempts to stifle free speech in a very local area was reported by the Eye a few years ago. A Conservative member of the parish council for Compton Dando had been infuriated by anonymous posters put up around the village portraying him as Hitler. He therefore demanded the police find arrest the culprit. Such is the vanity and totalitarian need to control of even some of the most minor politicos. Of course, it goes without saying that by demanding the police act to arrest a political opponent, the Conservative councillor therefore proved his opponent’s case: he was like Adolf.

There’s thus the real danger that RIPA will lead to more attempts by the authorities to stop the free discussion and criticism of their rule. It’s another step in the gradual erosion of free speech in the UK.