Masters and servants: the state at work

The notion that the police are, or should be, “public servants” is an admirable ideal. Unfortunately, it bears little relation to reality, as the policing of the G20 protests have proved.

Some in the liberal media, like The Observer, see the main role of the police as “keeping the peace”, describing them as “our police”, a neutral body which, according to the paper’s editorial yesterday, should not become the enforcers of government policy. This also reflects the views of Nick Hardwick, chair of the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) who told the newspaper that the police should be the public’s servants “not masters”.

The IPCC, however, is part of the same set-up that includes the police. It’s “independent tag” is purely nominal. Just like the Metropolitan Police, it had to adjust its statements on the death of Ian Tomlinson, allowing a second post-mortem. Hardwick runs a lame-duck organisation that, it will be recalled, did nothing to prevent police from evading responsibility for the cold-blooded killing of Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes on the Underground.

Hardwick, like The Observer, wants to limit the angry popular reaction to the policing of the G20 and other actions. So far the IPCC has received more than 185 complaints relating to G20 of which almost 90 were from alleged victims of - or witnesses to - police force. A further 52 relate to complaints about police tactics such as not letting people through an area.

Over the weekend, more graphic video shot by the Climate Camp showed further evidence of police brutality. Today, it emerged that another branch of the state had handed secret police briefings to the energy corporation E.ON in the run-up to last year’s camp near the Kingsnorth power station in Kent. Officials from the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) gave the company detailed information about protesters and their plans.

Kevin Smith, a spokesperson for the Climate Camp, said: "The proposed coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth is a source of both international climate embarrassment to the government and reputational damage to E.ON, so it comes as no surprise that they are colluding to undermine the growing social movement of people in this country who are determined to prevent it from happening ... We demand to know who is responsible for passing on this information and see them held accountable."

Liberal MP David Howarth, who obtained the emails, said "it is as though BERR was treating the police as an extension of E.ON's private security operation". Mr Howarth, you have hit the nail on the head – even if you don’t want to draw the conclusions from what has been established.

The apparatus of the capitalist state is at the disposal of the corporations and capitalism in general. From time to time, this means using force and mass arrests to intimidate and break up lawful protests; it also involves handing over unknown sums of taxpayers’ money to banks who have helped wreck the economy. Ministers and their cronies abuse the same state machine to destroy and smear opponents, as revealed in the notorious Damian McBride affair.

Far from acting as public servants, the institutions and personnel of the state are indeed our masters and it will remain that way whatever the outcome of inquiries and investigations that are allowed to try and take the heat out of the situation. They will be used to obscure the real issue in society – that the limited democracy we struggled for has been eroded by an authoritarian state that is beyond reform. How ordinary people have to become their own “masters”, in order to create new democratic forms beyond the present state, is the subject of A World to Win’s open discussion this Wednesday. Come and join the debate.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

Police raid is real conspiracy

The arrest of 114 environmental activists in Nottingham in the early hours of yesterday morning in a massive police raid on a school in the city, represents a sinister state crack-down on the right to protest and should be condemned outright by everyone who wants to defend human rights and civil liberties. 

How else can you explain the deployment of over 100 police from four counties, many in riot gear, to seal off a residential area of the city before launching what was essentially a political raid on a group of young people preparing for a protest action at the nearby Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal-fired power station? 

The employment of catch-all conspiracy laws to justify the mass arrests is also a serious turn of events. These laws, under which people can be sentenced to extremely lengthy jail terms, are normally used in the case of extremely serious offences carried out or planned by two more persons. 

In this case, the use of conspiracy laws is aimed at sending a simple, clear message from the authorities: you are allowed to march from A to B and then go home; but if you want to take direct, more militant action to reinforce your message, then the state can and will take pre-emptive action to stop you on the grounds that you are allegedly “conspiring” against private property such as a power station. The fact that the 114 have since been released on bail only reinforces this point. 

The police action in Nottingham also indicates that state agents had infiltrated the eco-campaigners group and supplied information to the police. Perhaps these agents even encouraged certain kinds of action in order to try and justify the police raid. Naturally, the power company E.On, which owns Ratcliffe, was extremely happy with the police action, claiming without any evidence that what had been prevented was a “a very dangerous and irresponsible attempt to disrupt an operational power plant". 

A pattern is rapidly emerging in Britain whereby the state is using its mailed fist to hit out at activists. Last summer, the Climate Camp in Kent was subjected to systematic intimidation and harassment in a multi-million pound police operation involving helicopters and countless police photographers. 

During the G20 economic summit in London, protesters in the City of London were corralled inside a small area and prevented from leaving the cordon by thousands of police. A passer-by, newspaper vendor Ian Tomlinson, was shoved to the ground by police and eyewitnesses also say he was hit with a baton before he collapsed and died. 

In these circumstances, it is simply not good enough for Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, to circumscribe her remarks over the Nottingham raid by reportedly saying: "In the light of the policing of the G20 protests, people up and down the country will want to be confident that there was evidence of a real conspiracy to commit criminal damage by those arrested and that this was not just an attempt by the police to disrupt perfectly legitimate protest per se." 

No, Shami, we are not confident in the police “case”. And why should we be? If the police knew so much, why didn’t they stop people at the power station perimeter fence? Instead, the police preferred to devote huge resources in a co-ordinated police raid that is normally used on anti-terror operations. No wonder really serious crimes go unsolved. 

The real conspiracy is that the state is protecting a government that is doing nothing effective about climate change despite scientists stepping up their warnings about the dire consequences of inaction. Little wonder that young people in particular feel that something more dramatic than signing petitions is required, even if direct actions in themselves can’t really alter the situation where New Labour insists that the same economic forces that produced global warming will somehow solve the crisis. 

We must halt the march to full-scale authoritarian rule that the Nottingham arrests signifies and redouble efforts to campaign for a new, democratic state that actually guarantees and enforces human rights in place of a capitalist state that is obliterating them one by one. 

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor