labour day: Do You Know This Man? The Police and their Agent Provocateurs

I have been on demonstrations and marches for a variety of entirely peaceful causes in my time. What has frequently been striking is the heavy-handedness of the policing of these - even when no violence occurs, you are filmed by cops in full body armour. On the anti-Iraq War protest way back in early 2003, the most sinister aspect of the day was the men in black outfits on rooftops with long lens cameras snapping at citizens exercising a legitimate, democratic right to call on the Government not to go to war in our name. But yet again, without permission or explanation, thousands and thousands were filmed, photographed and filed.

The police use face recognition software to identify people, categorise them and eventually act against them. The "anti-terror" laws brought in both in the UK and the USA following 9/11 were allegedly to protect us from wild-eyed bearded mullahs intent on wrecking our "civilisation". The Bush Administration even spent many hours with a speak and spell working out a handy acronym for the new laws called the PATRIOT Act. Geddit? Anyone opposing that was immediately a suspicious potential spy or traitor. And Obama of course has done nothing to reverse these rules, and nor have the supposedly freedom loving Con Dems in the UK.

And in consequence, who have these rules really been used against?

No, not al-Qaeda, its supposedly James Bond-villainesque web of power a largely fictitious invention - indeed, isn't Bin Laden increasingly akin to the "Emmanuel Goldstein" hate figure Orwell warned of? Far more a foil to shut up opposition rather than any real threat? Even Colonel Gaddafi finds him a useful bogeyman to invoke.

The anti-terror laws have instead been used to criminalise political opponents of the British Government. There have been some ludicrous examples in 2005, the arrest of Holocaust-survivor Walter Wolfgang for daring to boo the Home Secretary during a debate at the Labour Conference; Derby Council used the laws to allow them to tape record "noisy" children in secret; and the case of the man arrested and prosecuted as a terrorist for tweeting a joke about his frustration at an airport delay. There was even the recent case of a 12 year old boy pulled out of his class to be warned off picketing outside PM David Cameron's constituency office about cuts to his local youth centre, with the threat of armed police attending if he want ahead. These represent dreadful breaches of human rights and the right to privacy, and they are far from the only instances the laws are also being deployed to remove the right to dissent and freedom of speech.

Not exactly "good evening all" any more.

For example, the laws are written in such a way that the cyclist groups that sometimes meet to "reclaim the streets", especially in London, by undertaking mass cycling to protest about city motor traffic, can be declared terrorists. Indeed, environmentalists as a whole have increasingly become a target for police using the terror laws, in spite of the almost entirely pacific nature of the green movement. Mirroring developments in the USA , including the appalling case of Marie Mason, jailed for 22 years, British laws have been deployed to convict people with "crimes" such as reading out the names of the British soldiers killed in Iraq at the London Cenotaph , or to restrict environmental protesters at energy plants.

Even more insidious of course have been the agent provocateurs embedded by the police in the green movement. The most well publicised case was the recent one of Mark Kennedy. Kennedy infiltrated the movement, encouraged and organised protests and worked to up the ante in terms of potential violence, before calling his police mates to come and arrest people who were then charged with planning violent activities, even although none of them had been involved in discussing any such with Kennedy. The trial collapsed at great cost to the taxpayer after Kennedy himself had a change of heart, but it then emerged that there were five more of his ilk, hidden in the green movement, plotting and winding up aggressive protests to the chagrin and opposition of many of the people they were seeking to get charged. One of them had even married someone he was spying on - the Stasi would bow down to the sheer gall of the British police.

This may be but the tip of the iceberg in terms of police manipulation of protesters. In both the student demonstrations before Christmas and the recent anti-cuts demonstration, many of those taking part have described strange groups of people and individuals who suddenly turned up, fomented violence against the police, and then vanished. Organisers of the protests insisted these were police agents, but what little coverage was given to their claims was met with howls of derision from the Government and the media - the BBC being especially complicit in this.

And yet the footage below, broadcast live by the BBC, suggests the truth of the organisers claims. Watch how one of the protesters is particularly aggressive towards the police, then steps back for a moment, then walks up to a policeman, shows him a card, receives a pat on the back and goes through the police line to stand at the back.

The implications, if this footage is what is appears to be, are immense, though in the light of previous cases, hardly surprising.The Police Commissioner of London on the same day called for more police powers to handle the "mob", even although by any standards it had been a fairly peaceful day - with just 200 arrests out of 250,000 people taking part.

But of course, if the gentleman in question would come forward, perhaps he could be eliminated from suspicion, along with some of the concerns of peace and freedom loving citizens as to just where this is all heading.