Freedom is in peril

Now stop worrying and enjoy your life

Have you seen the paranoia posters yet? In the foreground bin overflows with empty chemical containers – in the background, a woman is walking her child in a pushchair. The caption reads: “These chemicals won’t be used in a bomb because a neighbour reported the dumped containers to the Anti Terrorist Hotline.”

In the second, a street full of women and children and a token, flat hatted, bloke are happily chatting away, oblivious to the CCTV camera watching in the background. The caption tells us that: “A bomb won’t go off here because weeks before a shopper reported someone studying the CCTV cameras”

The strapline for both posters is “Don’t rely on others. If you suspect it, report it.”

It’s probably going a bit far to start phoning 0800 789 321 to report that some irresponsible twonk is putting up posters designed to raise paranoia and fear to no good end. If nothing else, that would mean the anti terrorist types have your phone number.

Obviously, contacting to your MP is a boring, but useful step in pushing back against deliberate attempts to intensify a climate of fear, but once you’ve done that, you can always resort to ridicule. So, check out James Holden’s fabulous poster generator and make your own version. If you come up with a particularly good one, post the results in the flickr group that’s been set up for the purpose.

If you’re feeling ambitious, the Met, bless them, have provided everything you need to make more comprehensive remixes. Just download the original PDFs and go to town with Illustrator. That Flickr pool is waiting for your contributions.

Ian Tomlinson is dead. Probably killed by a policeman.

I wish I could trust the police, but the videos that are coming to light give the lie to police claims that they had been trying to protect him, that they had shielded him from missiles thrown by the crowd until paramedics arrived.

The videos show Tomlinson, separated from the crowd and walking with his hands in his pockets. He patently didn’t see the policeman who swiped at him with a baton and pushed him violently to the ground.

It’s what? two years since the Met last killed an innocent man. They started off by lying about him too.

The spin about Tomlinson is that he was nothing to do with the protests, just a newspaper seller trying to walk home. But it doesn’t matter. We are shocked because Tomlinson was an ‘innocent’, not one of those dreadful police-baiting anarchists. But that’s like accepting the lie of the innocent haemophiliac AIDS victim; if we accept the lie, we somehow accept that other victims are guilty – that they deserved what they got.

The protesters on the 1st of April didn’t deserve the violence that was meted out to them. It’s only merest good luck that none of them were killed. Sure, they probably expected violence. They were, after all, being naughty in a built up area and there’s nothing that pisses authority off like public naughtiness. Obviously, there were people who intended more than mere naughtiness. I’m sure we could have a spirited argument about the percentages involved, how much was intended, how much provoked and all the other arguments that whirl around every protest that goes bad. Which is beside the point.

Ian Tomlinson is dead. There could so easily have been more.

This isn’t how I meant to start this site. I had intended to write about how these big, set piece, protests are a distraction. How, unless they are huge and sustained, they just let the usual suspects set the protesters up as The Other – less than human and deserving everything they get from the police. That kind of divisive reporting breaks down when the protests are large enough that everyone knows someone who was there.

In the end, it comes back to democracy. Like it or not, we are responsible for this mess. We are the people who voted these bastards in, and we are the people who can vote them out again. This country’s finest hour wasn’t when we stood up to Hitler and the Blitz. It wasn’t when we chopped a king’s head off and brought in a military dictator. It wasn’t even the Glorious Revolution, when we reminded ourselves that kings only rule by our consent.

The 1945 election. That was our finest hour. After a dreadful, but just, war we swept away the old guard and replaced them with the most progressive government we have ever seen. That government followed Beveridge’s plan and introduced universal health care and the welfare state. Obviously, it fucked some stuff up too. Governments are made of people, and people fuck things up from time to time.

This may be the most boring call to action imaginable, but if you think that the maintenance of Civil Rights, British Liberty, Freedom, The Rule of Law (pick your favourite phrase) is the most important duty of government, then contact your MP and tell them so. Tell them that if they don’t commit to rolling back the programme of oppressive legislation that has been introduced by successive governments, then they do not have your vote. Contact the other candidates. Ask them hard questions. When the time comes, stick your cross next to the name of the candidate that gave you the best answers. Even if you have to hold your nose and vote against a party you have voted for all your life. Even if you don’t have a hope of changing your MP. Turn out. If everyone who has given up voting in disgust turned out, the mandate would be huge, no seat in the country would be safe and maybe the world could be turned upside down. If we don’t vote, if we spoil our ballot papers, then we can be presented as a feckless, apathetic mass. The usual suspects will claim their majority as an honest to goodness mandate and continue to fuck us over.

And we’ll bloody well deserve it.

A man was killed on All Fools’ Day 2009. If we ignore that fact, if we continue to sleep walk into a surveillance state then we might as well give up now – close our eyes, stick our fingers in our ears and start singing “La la la la la. I can’t hear you!”