The recent police prediction of a forthcoming ‘summer of rage’ was widely reported in the bourgeois press, with Superintendent David Hartshorn of the Metropolitan police stating that he expects to encounter ‘footsoldiers … intent on coming onto the streets to create public disorder’. The recently-exposed tactics used by police against protestors at the demonstration outside Kingsnorth power station last August show that the state is desperate to make this prophecy self-fulfilling and is gearing up for the expected protests against the G20 demonstrations planned for early April.
The ruling class expects ‘violent protests as anarchists threaten to bring chaos to the Group of 20 summit meeting in London’, with banks urging employees to ‘dress down’ to avoid becoming targets. Some 10,500 police shifts will be worked in London that week, with officers drafted in from Bedfordshire, Sussex, Essex and the Thames Valley to work alongside the Met, British Transport Police and City of London forces. All police leave has been cancelled and all 2,600 special constables called up in an operation estimated to cost £10m.
It is clear the police are desperate for confrontation, already provoking demonstrators and spreading propaganda to pre-justify their planned heavy-handed approach. Senior police commanders have said the 1 April demonstration will be ‘very violent’, that they are ‘up for it, and up to it’ and that anti-terrorism legislation may be used.
The tactics used against the Kingsnorth protestors, which included sleep deprivation and psychological operations, give some indication of what is to come. Activists were woken early in the morning when the pigs blasted The Clash’s ‘I fought the law and the law won’ at top volume and exposed to frequent dawn raids and low-flying helicopters at night. The same helicopters were used to disrupt speeches and workshops. Throughout the protest, police attempted to provoke confrontation, deliberately setting out to create a media image of ‘individuals’ who will ‘seek to vent their anger through protests this year’. By demonising activists as ‘minority groups’ of ‘violent anarchists’ or, as Jack Straw recently said, ‘Muslim Trotskyists’, the state can cover up its political oppression of the working class.
The estimated cost of policing the Kingsnorth protest was finally revealed at around £6 million. 1,500 officers were called in from 26 forces and £4,000 per head was spent on intimidating attendees. Police accounted for this massive expenditure by saying the protestors had caused 70 injuries to officers; only months later were they forced to admit that most of those injuries existed only in their febrile imaginations and the few that did occur were mainly due to mosquito bites and toothache! Only four of the 12 reportable injuries involved any contact with protesters at all and all were at the lowest level of seriousness with no further action taken. The police fabricated a ‘violent minority’ who they said had ‘criminal purposes’, but the Home Office has now admitted that was complete fiction.
At the time, however, this was used as justification for illegal police searches of individual protestors, often two or three times, before allowing them to enter the camp, and police were authorised to carry batons for two days of the protest. Videos shot by the campers show cops using these batons brutally and, it’s obvious from the footage, unnecessarily. Assistant Chief Constable Gary Beautridge of Kent police denied all claims of heavy-handedness.
Rather than holding the police officers and their master, the Labour government, to account, the bourgeois press instead reported police claims of a weapons stash. These claims were proved to be entirely fictitious when at the end of the operation the list of confiscated materials included no weapons but, rather, board games, rolls of toilet paper and a clown costume. Police claims that environmentalists at a camp allowing only vegan food had hidden ‘makeshift weapons’ with the intention of ‘causing harm’ to ‘the horses or dogs we are using on patrol’ are preposterous lies.
In our fight against imperialism we must also be ready to fight the imperialists’ puppets: the police, the army of the state. If you were involved in the miners’ strikes, if you are young, black or politically active you will certainly know that the police are not here to serve the community; they are here to control the working class.
Whose streets? Our streets!
Defend democratic rights!
Luke Lucas
FRFI 208 April / May 2009
