The Police-Military Games –
formerly known as the London 2012 Olympics but now rebranded – are set to
challenge Berlin
1936 for the title of most authoritarian sporting event of all time.
News that the defence ministry
plans to site surface-to-air guided missiles on a block of flats in east London is only the latest
indication of a massive clampdown under way. The use of deadly “drones” – used
by the US as killing
machines in Afghanistan and Pakistan
– is also a possibility.
It is almost as if the state has
issued a challenge to would-be terrorists to, in the language of the US military,
“bring it on”.
Tens of thousands of armed police
and troops will be deployed in a ring of steel around the Olympic sites. Heavy
security will be imposed on public transport routes. And in a deeply sinister
development, activists are becoming targets for pre-emptive arrests and court
orders.
We saw this type of action last
year when, on the eve of the royal wedding, dozens of activists were arrested
before they had even protested. None had intended to disrupt the event – just
to show their political opposition which, they thought wrongly, was their
democratic right. Some are now challenging the legality of the
arrests.
On Thursday, democracy activist
Simon Moore will be up in court at Westminster Magistrates where the state will
try to make permanent an interim so-called anti-social behaviour order (IABSO).
This was served on Simon as he left Thamesmead prison after spending four days
in jail. (ASBOs were introduced by New Labour. They are civil orders, the
breaking of which is considered a crime).
The IASBO was imposed on Simon
after he acted to support the local community in a protest on Leyton Marshes
against the construction of an Olympic basketball training facility on open,
communal land without any sort of consultation or agreement.
He says: “The action which began the chain of events [resulting
in imprisonment] involved sitting in front of a lorry carrying cement at the
entrance to the construction site on Leyton Marshes and refusing to move when
asked to do so by a police officer. I have no remorse about my actions. I was
doing what I know to be right.”
The IASBO, signed by a magistrate and sought by CO11, the
Met’s notorious public order unit in charge of turning peaceful protests into
mini-riots, warns Simon that he could go to jail for up to five years if he
takes part in any activity that disrupts the Olympics, the state opening of
parliament next week, the queen’s jubilee events as well as the Trooping of the
Colour on June 16!
Simon absolutely insists that his peaceful demonstration on
the Leyton Marshes construction site was not “anti-Olympics” but an attempt to highlight
“a gross failure on the part of public bodies to represent the needs of the
local people in the areas that are being used to host the games”.
He adds: “By continuing my participation with the campaign
at Leyton Marshes I have been placed with a choice between doing what I know to
be right or obeying a law that deems my activities criminal and thereby ending
my participation. I choose to do what I know to be right.
“If this means breaking the law then that is what I will do
openly and transparently. If I am arrested and or imprisoned as a result, I
know that I have not broken my own sense of what I see as just which is truer
to me than any law no matter who has created it. Being in prison doesn’t change
that.”
Be warned: the hated, crisis-ridden ConDem coalition will
use the full might of the state around the jubilee and the Olympics to try to
generate a crude nationalism and intolerance this summer. Activists like Simon,
who is well known in the Occupy movement, will be turned into criminals at the
stroke of a magistrate’s pen if the authorities get half a chance.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
No comments:
Post a Comment