Society
Mark Thomas - the toothbrush terrorist
Published 07 April 2003
In Morpeth, police threatened the Public Order Act against 70 sixth-formers who wanted to hold a march. Did they fear Osama would use it as cover for an attack?
I don't know who did it or how they did it, but someone slipped my TV a suppository, for there is an inordinate amount of shite coming out of it. Like GMTV cheerfully guiding us through the night's carnage amid the makeovers, Hollywood gossip and coffee tables that turn into computer-enhanced battle maps.
I expect to see Lorraine Kelly trilling: "Och, ye 'no what it's like when ye get chaffing on yer biochemical suit."
It is also worth pointing out to the "specially extended news" teams that continually cutting to a fixed live camera in Baghdad is neither "news" nor "special". Neither is a US military person claiming to have found chemical weapons of mass destruction that later turn out to be boxes of Harpic.
Nor are references to "precision laser-guided missiles" that end up in "Iran": getting the first three letters right of the country that you are supposed to be bombing doesn't count as precision.
So great is the level of media compliance with the propaganda effort that when Donald Rumsfeld said that Syria was arming Iraq, not one journalist stood up and said: "Well, you started it . . ."
Not surprisingly in the "fog of war", the erosion of civil liberties at home has gone by and large unreported.
On 24 March in Morpeth, the Northumberland police threatened to apply the Public Order Act, which requires six days' notice to hold a demonstration, to a group of roughly 70 sixth-form college students. Their heinous crime was to plan to march down Morpeth High Street and assemble outside the town hall.
For this crime, the police threatened not only to arrest the students, but also to sue them. No one has yet explained what the police would sue the students for. Sixth-formers can sometimes sneer in a devastating way, but if it causes any lasting damage to the well-being, reputation or emotional stability of any police officers, I would suggest that they are in the wrong job.
Given that most students can't get out of bed at the right time, what exactly was the threat they posed to public order?
Al-Qaeda was unlikely to use the cover of 70 sixth-form students to launch an attack - common sense alone dictates that. We are talking about Morpeth. Bin Laden is not sitting in a cave somewhere, lecturing his followers: "Yesterday the twin towers, today Morpeth - tomorrow, who knows? Maybe even Caithness, Allah willing."
On 22 March in London, riot police were brought in to deal with peaceful protesters blocking Oxford Street.
"Well, so what!" you might say, in response to the police overreaction. But the right to protest is more important than the right to shop unimpeded in Selfridges food hall.
If the Islington Labour dinner-party set wants to dispute this, it can organise a counter-demonstration with placards proclaiming: "Canapes for the many, not just the few!"
As Neil Clark reported in the New Statesman last week, three coaches carrying peace protesters from London to RAF Fairford were stopped en route, searched and then forcibly escorted back to London with the peace protesters still inside - in effect kidnapped by the police.
At the base itself, there were so many riot police and horses that it looked like a scene out of the miners' strike in 1984. Police here have used the Terrorism Act, Section 44, in a series of intimidatory and surreal ways. They have searched protesters' sandwiches. I know Osama is a cunning and twisted man, but he is not going to be found crouching between the Marmite and the cucumber slices on a bit of wholemeal!
The tales told by activists at Fairford are bizarre; one had a pen taken from him and has been charged with "going equipped with intent to cause criminal damage". Another had his toothbrush confiscated under the Terrorism Act.
Well, what a relief the police did that: we obviously have no idea of the threat that regular plaque removal poses to peace and order.
In Edinburgh on 22 March, a protester was arrested for having a large Stars and Stripes flag, held upside-down, with a reverse swastika painted on the stars and the words "FUCK BUSH" written on it.
He has been charged with incitement to racial hatred, even though the target was clearly a single American and not the American people.*
This change in police practice not only endangers the right to peaceful protest against a war that is plainly illegal, but it also sends out a clear message: "You've had your say, you have been ignored, now shut up!"
As the head of the Metropolitan Police said, there is a time and a place for everything and now is not the time for protest. Perhaps he will tell us when the police would like us to demonstrate next.
* More information on this at www.mtcp.co.uk
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