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.

From the USA, an even more obvious attempt to infiltrate a G20 demonstration fails spectacularly:

When the Porterhouse Blue comes to Westminster

In the excellent Channel 4 TV adaptation of the Tom Sharpe novel, "Porterhouse Blue", the deferential College Porter Scullion, played by David Jason, reveals what in 1982 was seen as the ultimate scandal: a British university was selling university places for money!

How times change, when we hear this week the apparent "news" that nearly every English University has put its  fees at or near the new, trebled maximum of £9,000 per academic year, to the apparent shock of the Con Dem Government. It seems no one mentioned it too them - or, rather, they truly were deaf to the protests of students that were so violently suppressed by the authorities last autumn on the streets of London.

The Government is now clearly panicking on two fronts - there is a wealth of evidence that, contrary to all their platitudinous assertions, the new fees policy is deterring potential students from applying for courses. Nil points for social cohesion and mending "broken Britain".

Secondly, and far more galling to this regime of neo-conservative financial pygmies is the prospect that the Government won't be able to afford its own policy! Sound strange when we've heard so much funding is being slashed from Universities, including public support for the humanities - apparently pointless subjects like History, English, the Arts - being reduced to absolutely nothing, zilch, not a penny?

Well, in the debt-ridden world of contemporary students, the Government is committed to lending them the cost of their fees up front, expecting them to pay it back, with interest, through most of their working lives. But it has to find the money first, and with so many Universities taking the increasingly incompetent Vince Cable at his word and charging the maximum permitted, the Government's bill is soaring. It had banked on Universities charging an average of £7,500 per student - not the 20% higher rate that is emerging.

Hence the panic this week.

Scullion: the Nick Clegg of Porterhouse?

Of course, they were warned, but they ignored their opponents, preferring to cast honest young people as bloodthirsty anarchists and revolutionaries. We face the surreal prospect that British Universities are increasingly enrolling more and more overseas students with the cash to help them survive, while the hysterical rightwing press, who supported the Government's policy changes, carp on about too many foreigners in UK educational establishments. Meanwhile, with India now emerging as a new world superpower, its well-regarded Universities are offering British students degree courses which will cost them 40% less than going to a UK establishment. Even the Mexican President has offered sunnier university options at lower than the UK cost to British students - immediately after talks with Clegg.

So well done to Vince and the Cleggeron. If there is any advertisement more clearly speaking against Coalition Governments, its this hybrid Lie that passes for the British Government. They are dismantling our Welfare State, our NHS and our education system piece by piece allegedly to save us from a non-existent economic catastrophe. The levels of outright dishonesty are beyond belief.

But of course, just as Scullion ends up as the enfeebled puppet of the Establishment in Porterhouse Blue, so the Liberal Democrats have sold their souls out even faster than they have sold the country down the river. As the Dean says in the final scene to the stricken Porter-become-Master, "Master may not have been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but he will certainly die with one in it."

And die they will, starting with the elections on 5 May. And deservedly so.

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On the day Parliament debated the new fees regime for English Universities, thousands of young people and their supporters demonstrated peacefully in London. The only significant casualty of the day was student Alfie Meadows, who was left brain damaged after being assaulted by a police officer who has never been identified. Watch the horsemen cometh on this video, see the fear induced on the faces of British citizens asserting their right to stand and protest. This is Liberal Democrat Britain. I hope they are proud of themselves while they still can be.

The Party Is Over

As I write, a Facebook group is holding the Liberal Democrats' Funeral in cyberspace. This follows on from yesterday's debate on tuition fees when the Lib Dem MPs split three ways over the proposed trebling of charges on students' attending English universities (devolution means different arrangements apply in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland).

The press today (once it got over the attack on the Prince of Wales car by students chanting "Off with your heads!") has been full of speculation about the implications for the party. Some have suggested the split - roughly between the "Orange Book" free market liberals under party leader Nick Clegg, and more progressive social liberals - is damaging but, now that the debate is over, can be put behind them. Others have suggested that the divide shows that the "real" Liberal Democrats, 70% of whom feel they are left-of-centre progressives in sharp contrast to the decidedly right wing agenda of the Coalition Government, have stood up and will begin to assert some degree of independence or at least a clearer identity for their party.

Clegg - full steam ahead to oblivion

Yet the real damage to the Lib Dems is not that they split - bad though that looks. Rather, the damage is that the proposed changes got through and the Government is unaffected in its further drive to dismantle not only education, but the NHS as we know it and the wider Welfare State, with punitive measures being introduced against disabled people and the long term unemployed. Clegg has suggested that now that tuition fees are dealt with, there are no outstanding disagreements within the Lib Dems and the Coalition will progress with its full programme - cynically, Lib Dem strategists believe that the public will have forgotten all about the tuition fee debacle by the election due in spring 2015.

So what we witness now is the real, truly strange death of the Lib Dems as a progressive force in British politics. Those who voted against the tuition fees (or perhaps even worse, the worm tongues who abstained) did so in the full knowledge that the measures would almost certainly pass. Their opposition therefore was a self-serving luxury - so they can insist to students that "it wasn't me guv" while continuing to support one of the most ideologically right wing governments in British history. Lib Dems are now at the heart of a project which is dismantling the legacy of great Liberal reformers like Keynes and Beveridge, and even Lloyd George, who played such seminal roles in establishing the Welfare State that has served Britain so well for the last sixty five years.

It is because the Coalition has survived that the Lib Dems should be afraid. Had it collapsed or been transformed into a less cohesive project, they may have been able to reassert some degree of their independence from the Conservatives, to re-establish something distinct about their contribution to the government. As it is, they are now forever sucked deep into the Clegg-Cameron programme, where they provide useful human shields for the worst Conservative reforms, cravenly defending them on dubious grounds of economic necessity. Clegg insists the Lib Dems did not win the election and so have to submit to not getting their policies adopted by the Government. Fair enough, but with barely 35% of the vote and no majority in the Commons, the Tories did not win either - so why do the Lib Dems yield again and again to policies which clearly have a deep blue imprimatur? On a whole slate of issues, they are driving through extreme liberatrian policies which even the Thatcher Government did not attempt back in the 1980s - and increasingly they are not even deploying their previous pleas of financial need. Rather, they simply do what they ideologically want to do.

The reason for this adoption of what in American terms would be seen as a pretty neo-liberal stance is straightforward - the Lib Dems are not in essence a progressive force. There are progressives in their ranks, no doubt, but as a party they have long since shed any progressive core in their thinking. Pragmatism in their coalitions and pacts at local level over local issues has perhaps infected them so badly that it has led them to both abandon all principles and attract people to join them who are essentially apolitical. To many Lib Dems politics are viewed as either a career choice or a part-time hobby rather than a belief or set of values about how society should function. For the ambitious, it is an alternative to banking; for the more casual, it can be a toss up between Focus leafleting and the local amateur drama society. Politics is largely absent from their activities or thinking.

And so, now that they are no longer in the position of being able to oppose everything, they are like rabbits in headlights, startled and overwhelmed by the choices and responsibilities facing them, clinging to Cameron's coat-tails to give them some sense of direction, however perverse that is set against their claimed progressive identity.

Freefalling to 8% support in the latest poll - barely a third of what they achieved at the election in May, a Lib Dem funeral is wholly appropriate. The party is unlikely to disappear completely, but it clearly faces massive losses in elections for the foreseeable future as well as a decline in membership and financial support. The fantasy peddled by Clegg's faction that they will be strong enough to have a further Coalition with the Tories after 2015 will remain just that - unless, as happened in the 1930s and 1940s, the Conservatives give a few favoured Lib Dems a free run in some constituencies in order to project themselves as part of a wider movement than the Tories alone.

But more than ever the question that will be most relevant about the Lib Dems will be : "What are they for?"

And answer there will be none.



Let's hope that at least it's a Co-op funeral - it might salvage a little social credibility for them at the very end; and there should be a cracking Afternoon Tea afterwards...

The Lib Dem Funeral 

"Say Goodbye To Broken Promises" - probably the most ironic and cynical party broadcast in history.