The right to protest

Just before 11 pm on the night of 1 April I was speaking by phone about events at the Climate Camp protest at Bishopsgate to the Metropolitan Police officer who was second-in-command at the G20 protests. According to reports I had received from the scene, police officers seemed to be launching violent assaults on a protest that, as I had seen for myself earlier in the day, had been perfectly peaceful and non-violent.

The police officer's argument for breaking up the Climate Camp by forcible means was that it was illegal under section 14 of the Public Order Act 1986. He did not claim that there was any public disorder at Bishopsgate, which is one ground on which that section can be invoked, nor that that serious criminal damage going on. It was merely that the protest was obstructing the highway and, according to him, constituted significant disruption of the life of the community’.

In other words, he was saying that he was justified in using violence—with all its risks to the protesters' lives and well-being—just to make it possible for a few delivery vans to take a short cut. At that point, I did not know about the death of Ian Tomlinson. But what makes the police officer’s responses even more alarming in retrospect is that he must have known about it. And yet he consciously took the risk.

That conversation sums up many of things about the police attitudes that I object to. The first is a scale of values that sees traffic flow as more important than democratic protest. It is true that protests and traffic are usually incompatible uses of the highway (apart from protests that confine themselves to walking briskly along the pavement in single file - but even when I took part in a protest that did exactly that—against English student tuition fees in Cambridge—I still found myself being videoed by the police). But the police automatically assume that the problem is that protest gets in the way of traffic. A democratic police force, one that had deeply internalised democratic values, would see the problem the other way round: that traffic gets in the way of protest.

Similarly, the police often talk about making sure that protest does not interfere with people going about their everyday business. That remark assumes that protest is not everyday business. In a democracy, public protest should count as normal and acceptable. The police assumption that shopping is legitimate but protest is not belongs not in a democracy but in the People's Republic of China, the home of capitalism without political freedom.

The second objectionable feature of the police's attitude to protest revealed by the 11 pm conversation is the view that if a protest is technically illegal in any way, full-scale riot police violence is justified against it. We do not see the police beating up motorists who have parked on double yellow lines or 'kettling' crowds of Christmas shoppers who have strayed on to the road. The only obvious difference is that protesters, unlike drivers and shoppers, are openly disagreeing with government policy. The obvious dangers for the police of appearing to be politically biased do not seem to have occurred to them.

The third objectionable feature of the conversation is perhaps one that affects lawyers more than anyone else, but it is still aggravating. The police officer argued that obstructing a small part of the road at 11 pm in an area of London well-known for not attracting night-time crowds amounted to "significant disruption of the life of the community". That is not legally sustainable. In fact, it is close to bizarre. But the officer seemed not to care whether his legal argument was correct or not. He appeared to think that the law is a kind of word magic in which all that matters is correctly pronouncing the words of a spell.

A similar desperately crude view of law arose later in the week when the police repeatedly claimed that the courts had decided that their controversial ‘kettling’ technique was lawful. In fact, the House of Lords merely decided (in a case that itself is now on appeal to the European Court of Human Rights) that confining protesters and passers-by could be lawful as long as eight specific factual conditions applied – including the condition that the confinement “was necessary as many of the demonstrators were bent on violence and impeding the police, and its imposition was in no way attributable to policing failures."

Those conditions did not apply to the climate camp protest at Bishopsgate, and, as more evidence comes in of what happened at the nearby protest at the Bank of England, it seems increasingly doubtful that they applied there either. In addition, the police action at the climate camp was not confined to cordoning off the protest. It also included forcibly compressing the protesters into a smaller space and, later, violently breaking up the protest itself.

The following morning I wrote a letter to the police officer concerned outlining why I found what he had said so disturbing. I have yet to receive a reply.