An update on the protests, and why we shouldn't trust the police

As mentioned in my last post, today is the NUS's designated "National Day of Action against [higher education] Fees and Cuts." True to form, this morning I encountered a marching column of protestors in central Oxford on the corner of Turl and High Streets, many holding Socialist Worker Party signs, chanting "Fuck fees! Fuck fees! Education should be free!"

I've already written extensively about the cuts themselves, but a couple of things caught my eye. Firstly, I spotted a young policewoman surreptitiously filming the proceedings on a small video camera. As the press has already reported, it is routine police practice in the UK, relying on the reams of enabling legislation enacted by the previous Labour government, to retain videos of protestors in police intelligence databases. If you have participated in a high-profile political protest, they probably have a file on you, whether or not you were ever charged with a crime.

This disturbing McCarthyish practice is, of course, only the tip of the iceberg. As in most countries, British police regularly arrest peaceful protestors and later release them without charge, as a means of intimidation. But under one of the last Labour government's more Orwellian schemes, DNA samples are taken - by force, if need be - from everyone who is arrested, and retained on the 5.1-million-strong central DNA database for ever. This practice has already been ruled unlawful by the European Court of Human Rights, but, as with so many ECHR decisions, Parliament has thus far taken no action to bring British law into line with our international commitments.

Whether or not one agrees that "education should be free" - and I certainly do not - the right to peaceful protest, whatever one's views, is a cornerstone of freedom. And if police are given an inch of power to regulate protests, they will take a mile. It's time to start standing up to the police, demanding the repeal of the innumerable authoritarian enabling-measures enacted by governments of both parties in the last twenty years, and refusing to comply passively with illiberal practices. And regardless of your opinions of the substantive merits of this protest, all of us should stand in solidarity today with the victims of abuses of police power.


As an unrelated addendum, I was also deeply disheartened to see so many SWP protestors proudly holding aloft signs bearing pictures like "Bad romance" and "Leave him, he'll hurt you in the end" alongside photoshopped images of David Cameron and Nick Clegg. Outside primary school, "HAHA UR GAY!!!" is neither a funny insult nor a clever one. And homophobic "jokes" do not become any more enlightened merely because they come from the left.