Article 20

I've written a blog on the intrusion of our government on to our civil liberties before which can be found here (along with all the other blogs I used to write on mystalk), this one may cover a few of the same things but I'm meaning to cover a specific subject with this and not just a over-view. That said, my views on this whole issue I wrote about last year and they haven't really changed so read that if you want, if not, here goes.

On the 1st April a series of protests were organised across London. They were designed to be the day before the G20 London Summit, so as to maybe have some effect on the decisions made the next day when the leaders of the 20 largest economies met at the ExCeL Centre - there was actually more than 20 heads of state at the summit, but that's irrelevant to what I'll be looking at. These protests had been preceded with unprecedented media coverage of the build up with the Daily Mail saying that "Thousands of City staff told to stay at home next week" and a bizarre article claiming that “G20 anarchists use Google Streetview to target the City”¹ - why they couldn’t use their own photos is beyond me, lazy “anarchists”. By the end of the day police had arrested 63 people, out of a possible 5,000 who had been pushed around, beaten and – to use the new word on all the kids’ lips - kettled. Oh yeah, and some guy died...

Ian Tomlinson, a newspaper vendor, 47, was on his way back from work on the evening of the protests; I’d like to say that again, he was not a protester. Initial reports (from guess who) said that he had collapsed in a police cordon and that protestors had been throwing bottles at police medics² who tried to help him. The first post-mortem allegedly showed that Tomlinson died from a heart attack. However further reports showed that if he had collapsed, it might have been because he was hit with a baton and pushed to the ground³. This report was then followed by a second post-mortem ordered by his family and the IPCC (Independent Police Complaints Commission, note Independent). This surprisingly found that he didn’t die from a heart attack, in fact the cause of death was found to be an abdominal haemorrhage, i.e. internal bleeding. Granted the cause of this is unknown but from my medical knowledge of knowing that organs don’t just rupture for no reason, you’d think that maybe being beaten to the floor might just cause trauma sufficient to do that?

And what if the police realised this? Would they happen want this not to get out? Perhaps allow a false post-mortem and altered news reports to be released? Maybe I’m getting a little conspiracy theorist here but it’s not like they didn’t lie in the first account... The original police report said that there was no CCTV footage of the incident, even Nick Hardwick the chair of the IPCC went on Channel 4 and said "We don't have CCTV footage of the incident... there is no CCTV footage, there were no cameras in the location where he was assaulted”. However in an inspired piece of investigative journalism, the Evening Standard went to the and looked at streets around the Royal Passage Exchange and incredibly - in the city with the highest concentration of CCTV cameras in the world there just so happened to be some covering the incident! Well fancy that! Makes you wonder what else in the report that happens not have maybe, quite, perhaps been completely accurate doesn’t it…

Whilst Tomlinson’s death is more likely to be the main focus of these protests, it wasn’t exactly an isolated incident of violence committed by the police. Just look at the article I linked at the bottom, all of them examples of police brutality, examples of a new cultural change that has started to consume not just our police force but the whole of the political structure of our country. The whole point of taking a public office is to serve the public, whether that is a police officer, civil servant or member of parliament, they are meant to serve us. The system that this government - by that I mean the Thatch rite government that’s been in power for the past 30 years (see “30 Years of Thatcher”) – has created has put people in the office of public service, above the public that they are meant to serve. What this does is create a society which destroys the whole foundations of democracy; it puts the power of the country in the hands of a few. It’s allowed to exist because it’s happened over so long that people can’t even see that it’s happened.

Now, I’ve been writing this for about 6 hours on and off and it doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere. I just wanted to put across the idea that this isn’t democracy that we’re living in. Democracy, well actually, the Universal Convention on Human Rights, Article 21 (I think, check me on that), entitles every man, woman and child to the right to peaceful assembly, this right was impeded by the public order measures used by the police on 1^st April, but is that what’s reported in the media? No, just the “anarchists” that turned the protests violent. It’s a problem with our media, but most of all, it’s a problem with how we view our leaders, because we view them as leaders! Each MP works for their constituent. They have a responsibility to serve their constituents, you in fact! Hence why they should be held responsible for their actions, but like the police, they are not. The MPs that voted for the illegal war in Iraq; are still in office. Jack Straw, the minister who authorised the extradition and torture of British citizens; is still in office. I could go on but I really can’t be arsed.

My point is, they need to know that they’ll be held accountable. They need to know that if they fuck up, they’re out, like it is in a normal job. To do that, they need to fear us. When I worked in a shop, I was pretty scared of my boss, he was a cock, but I would fuck him around because I’d get sacked. Politicians should be afraid of us, we’re their bosses!

Email them, vote, and make them do their jobs; make them serve you.

1. I’d like to point out that I don’t read the Daily Mail (I’m a snob you see) just that I was looking for examples of the coverage and they seemed most appropriate.
2. If this did happen, they might have a reason.
3. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/15/g20-protest-police-videos-catalogue - Fourth video down. If anything, this page of videos says more than any amount of words I could ever write.