Where’s the megaphone?
Caroline Lucas on police behaviour at Kingsnorth Climate Camp:
Sitting in a teepee in the peaceful Kent countryside, surrounded by campaigners from across the UK mulling over the future of renewable energy and swapping vegan cake recipes, you could be forgiven for temporarily forgetting the outside world and its many woes. Perhaps, then, we must also forgive the police at the climate camp in Kingsnorth this week for losing their grip on reality, as the sense of perspective which should have underpinned their policing strategy for the event flew straight out of the canvas window.
The police – primarily from the local Medway force but Metropolitan officers are also in evidence – have raided the camp twice now, confiscating items that included crayons, disabled access ramps, marker pens, banners, radios for relaying fire and medical emergency information, the nuts and bolts holding toilet cubicles together and blackboard paint. They have found it necessary to use pepper spray without provocation, and several campers have been arrested and bailed off the site for “obstructing” increasingly aggressive police officers.
Everyone who enters the site is being searched. Police officers are taking anything away that “could be used for illegal activity”, with efforts being made to strip protesters of such hardcore weapons of choice as bits of carpet, biodegradable soap and toilet paper. In the absence of any serious threat, the police clearly found it necessary to justify their presence with an unprovoked attack on personal hygiene.
Perhaps the government would like to explain how this isn’t an abuse of that anti-terrorist legislation they claimed would never be abused? The protestors at Kingsnorth are demonstratably peaceful; they’re serving food based in the notion that killing anything is an abhorronce, and want to educate.
There was some talk of trying to disrupt productions at Kingsnorth, yes. But that, surely, would justify (in terms of the law, rather than what’s necessarily right) little more than a police cordon around the power-station? Enough to protect the site, but allow those protestors within the camp their democratic right to protest. And yet the police have turned out in full riot gear, regularly harrassed the protestors, and confiscated private property which clearly presents no danger whatsoever; they claim wax crayons are accessories to terrorism. Given the pacific nature of the camp, that simply reeks of an attempt at intimidation and political policing.
Which must, of course, be resisted at every level.
EDIT: Via Stuart Jeffrey comes the manual issued to police officers at the Camp. I wonder how many of those charges they’re guilty of themselves…