SOUTH DORSET CALL FOR PUBLIC INQUIRY INTO POLICING TACTICS THAT LED TO DEATH OF G20 BYSTANDER

Although the last national demo I attended was the Stop the War March in 2003, demonstration was almost a pastime in my teens & twenties & I watch with growing incredulity the increasing number of restrictive measures taken to limit the right to protest since 1997. That’s not just in terms of legislation – removing the right to protest outside Parliament for eg ( heaven forfend that MPs might actually need to know when the public feel strongly about an issue !! ) or removing Walter Wolfgang from the Labour Party Conference on spurious counts – but the range of activities that seem to be being conducted by the Police as part of their treatment of those engaged in the perfectly legal action of non-violent demonstration.

This year’s climate camp produced a plethora of such over zealous techniques - journalists photographed & monitored by the police; close surveillance of demonstrators not breaking the law; over restrictive behaviour such as kettling , apparently considered to be completely justified by the level of injuries suffered by the police, the most serious of which included ‘shutting my own finger in a car door’ & ‘ being stung on the hand by a wasp’.

Those who took part in last week’s G20 demonstrations in the capital were forewarned by their networks – not all of which are anarchist or terrorist by the way ( I myself am on the contact list of Avaarez ,an ethically sound outfit that protests against human rights abuses all over the world, from Mugabe, to Darfur, to Tibet, to the blockade on Palestine & which organised members to demonstrate in London at the G20) –to expect unusual levels of police heavy-handedness. But what actually occurred ( the apparently unmotivated assault on a member of the public returning home from work ) seems more akin to our expectations of military or police behaviour in Tibet, Zimbabwe or Burma.

What is more worrying is the apparent attempt to cover over the facts by the Met.

I’m not implying that the police were angels in the Miners’ Strike, or the Anti Poll Tax Riots, or the CND marches – but where there is complicity by government of such tactics, we all need to be concerned.

We need a Public Inquiry into relevance of the type of tactics being used routinely against protest today. The principle in British law that ‘the end justifies the means’ is clearly being abused: protestors at a climate camp are not the same as Islamic terrorists; demonstrators have as much right to be on the streets as a man walking home from work. Whilst the truncheoning of Mr Tomlinson was totally unmerited, so would the similar truncheoning of any individual engaged in lawful & peaceful demonstration be similarly reprehensible.
Just as an addendum – isn’t it interesting that Boris Johnson has eschewed all responsibility of the death of Mr Tomlinson – whereas he was only too keen to implicate Ken Livingstone in the poor policing that lay behind the equally unnecessary death of Jian Charles de Menezes