I’m disturbed that NMP was targeted but not entirely shocked. In some ways it might be seen as a positive reflection on our effectiveness in exposing cases of police misconduct and how worried senior officers had become about the damage that the actions of some of their officers was inflicting on the Met’s reputation. I certainly know the police have never been able to get their heads around what motivates independent grassroots activism: how campaigns emerge from practical casework rather than, say, an attempt to recruit people to a party and how supporting individuals and families suffering injustice makes the anger that drives a desire for answers feel very personal.

Furthermore, the fact that a decision was made to spy on an organisation whose events were open to the public and whose activities were reported in great detail in our annual reports and publicity says more about the Metropolitan police than it does about NMP: it illustrates the deep level of resistance to accountability within London’s police during the period when the Special Demonstration Squad were snooping around our activities.

However, I’m appalled and angry too, that campaigns NMP advised and supported that were set up and sustained by bereaved families struggling for justice for their loved ones after a death in police custody – always in the face of overwhelming hostility from every part of the criminal justice system – may have been targeted for covert surveillance, for no other reason than to try and undermine them. I can only imagine that, in the absence of any actual ‘plotting’ by these campaigns, undercover officers were simply busy trying to find out more about families’ legal strategies or looking for gossip and rumour that they could use to smear ordinary people forced into extraordinary circumstances by grief and the need to find the truth.

On top of the allegations of serious sexual misconduct and betrayal by undercover police and the stories of identities stolen from dead babies, the shameful targeting of the bereaved now means the case for an independent public inquiry is overwhelming. The Home Secretary’s insistence that the current investigation by Derbyshire’s Chief Constable is adequate lacks any credibility. We need a far-reaching and robust inquiry to find out what so-called ‘intelligence’ was gathered by officers, who ordered the surveillance and how it was used. Just as importantly, we urgently need to know to what extent the successors to the Special Demonstration Squad, such as the National Domestic Extremism Unit, are still secretly targeting campaigners.

Personally, I and other NMP activists also really want to know the fake identity and the real name of the officer that we may have inadvertently worked with in good faith. I want to know what kind of person pretends to support campaigns for justice but instead was secretly working to try and prevent the truth from ever emerging. For the sake of the transparency and accountability we have always demanded, the Metropolitan police owe all of us that, especially all the people we have supported over the years.

The media is starting to wake us to the potential consequences of the capital’s lockdown: over the last ten days, because I have been writing about Olympic security, I have had numerous requests for interviews and comment from journalists all over the world. However, describing what we can expect from the largest police deployment in London since the Second World War is all very well, but the real question is what can we do in practice to protect the fundamental liberties of both protesters and local working class communities living on the doorstep of the Games?

This is why an event on 20 May at the Bishopsgate Institute in London is one of the most important in the weeks preceding the start of the Olympics. The ‘Kettling Police Powers’ conference is organised by the Network for Police Monitoring – which brings together activist groups like Climate Camp’s legal team and Green & Black Cross with community organisations such as Newham Monitoring Project. It will provide campaigners, lawyers and others working at the sharp end of challenging unlawful, violent, racist or excessive policing with a chance to discuss the impact of London’s new ‘Total Policing’ concept and what that will mean this summer.

Speakers include Alfie Meadows (who was struck on the head with a police baton during December’s student protests), Marc Vallee (one of the founders of the ‘I’m A Photographer Not a Terrorist’ campaign) and Rob Safar (one of the Fortnum & Mason 145 defendants), as well as the experienced lawyers Simon Natas and Kat Craig. Most importantly, the conference will enable activists to debate how to best respond to the most draconian, heavy-handed policing operation we have ever experienced.

I hope as many people as possible can attend. To register, visit the Network for Police Monitoring website.

Kevin Blowe argues that we should vote ‘No’ to help break the Tory-Lib Dem coalition

There are many more important expressions of democratic involvement than voting. There are inherent dangers in placing our limited reserves of hope and energy into handing politics over to a professional class – one that has repeatedly sought to maintain the status quo – and then blindly legitimising their control over our lives by turning up at a polling booth every few years.

That’s why I feel distinctly underwhelmed by a referendum to tinker with the way we choose between competing Westminster professionals.
At least, tactically, a genuine proportional representation system might allow more space for voices from beyond the mainstream. But the proposed Alternative Vote (AV) system isn’t proportionate. Instant run-off voting is designed to make the current ‘first-past-the-post’ system seem more acceptable, but like all elections where the winner takes all, it only creates the false impression of majority support. In fact, AV is more likely to squeeze out any minority parties, reduce the impact of protest votes and reinforce the blandness of political debate.

Even commentators such as Martin Kettle in the Guardian, who is supporting the Yes campaign, acknowledges that AV is a system that no one supports. But it was central to the coalition negotiations last May, ‘the prize that finally persuaded the Lib Dems they could go in with David Cameron’.
Politically, this leads to an obvious conclusion for those of us who don’t much care which of the mainstream parties stand to gain or lose from AV. The outcome of the referendum will, one way or another, have an impact on the increasingly fragile bonds between the two governing parties. A ‘Yes’ vote will strengthen the coalition, while voting ‘No’ against a voting system that isn’t proportionate and that no one supports may help to break it.

So perhaps, for once, there’s a reason for voting in this one after all. The arguments put forward by the No2AV campaign may represent a reactionary endorsement of the current electoral system, but the same isn’t necessarily true of every individual ‘No’ vote. Rejection of AV can also represent a deliberate act of mischief, a considered rejection of Tory attempts to buy the complicity of Clegg’s Lib Dems in their destruction of public services.

Hilary Wainwright says we should vote ‘Yes’ to help break
our undemocratic system

Why should someone deeply sceptical about parliamentary politics, at least as we know it, lift a finger for AV? My starting point is Thomas Rainsborough’s powerful argument for extending the franchise, irrespective of wealth and property: ‘The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he . . . every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under the government . . . the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under . . .’

Four centuries from Rainsborough’s declaration, eight decades from the suffragettes winning the universal franchise, UK prime ministers govern without a mandate of the majority, and governments regularly implement policies that benefit the rich or the corporations and over which the poorest effectively have no say – the dismantling of the NHS being the latest such contempt of the voter.

In other words, a democratic victory – the winning of the universal right to vote, opening a dynamic towards more radical democratic reforms, has been turned into new system of elite rule.

The ‘winner takes all’ electoral system has been important in this process, contributing to the mythologies of democratic rule that have veiled the nature of the UK’s unwritten, monarchical constitution.

These opaque arrangements in turn have protected the financial interests of the City that have shaped what are and aren’t allowed as policy options in public debate. No wonder the financial and political establishment is now closing ranks to ensure that this guard against genuine public accountability stays in place.

Evidence of the mass disenfranchisement that is part of this electoral system is overwhelming and well publicised. But another, less publicised consequence of first-past-the-post voting has been the slow death of a critical political culture. It underpins the pull of electoral competition towards the political centre. Instead of enabling representative democracy to, as Raymond Williams put it, ‘re-present’ the plurality of views held by the population, it effectively excludes or politically kettles the wide range of alternatives to ‘the mainstream’.

This has got worse under corporate globalisation, which has transformed the hidden rules of political debate. The power of the global market has meant that policies in its favour are presented as unavoidable, turning politics into a process of technical economic management.

A challenge to this process requires a concerted expansion of the argument and debate that is necessary for political creativity. Instead, the New Labour leadership – whose legacy is proving difficult to dismantle – treated open debate as beyond the bounds of legitimate politics. Now, sucked into the quicksand of the centre ground, the Lib Dem leadership does the same.

So I’m viewing the referendum as an opportunity to open up a process of structural political change, an opportunity that is a result of us, the voters, refusing to place our trust in existing political options. In answer to Kevin Blowe, it’s far more important than punishing Nick Clegg. Clegg’s clinging to the coat tails of Cameron is a product of the present system, and he and the Lib Dems will not be able to control the dynamic of change that even the minimal opening of AV represents.

AV is not proportional and it’s not the solution. But it will force an opening up of political debate. Alternative views, previously marginalised or excluded, would become a legitimate part of the political process – perhaps in a minimal way at first, but with an angry, alienated and determined electorate there would be a real possibility of it opening up an uncertain dynamic. AV will enable voters to demonstrate their true first preferences, which currently are masked by the absence of alternatives and because many people have to vote tactically or abstain.

For example, the growing resistance to the idea that ‘there is no alternative’ to the cuts could, through AV, make itself directly part of the political process. The kind of electoral challenge made by Dr Richard Taylor in Worcester could become a powerful political force, since such campaigns can attract support from broad stretches of the community. True, smaller left parties would continue to find it difficult to win seats: that would require genuine proportional representation (PR). But AV could challenge the main parties to relate to forces outside of Westminster, strengthen the ability of parties like the Greens to better identify their support at local level, and lay the foundations for new progressive alliances in the future.

A ‘No’ vote to electoral reform would send out all the wrong messages, and be trumpeted as evidence that the British public is broadly content with our politics. Worse still, it might derail existing commitments to see PR introduced for the second chamber. It wouldn’t so much weaken the coalition as confirm our own powerlessness in the face of the interests that guide its agenda. It’s not for nothing that the head of the Taxpayers’ Alliance has given up his time to lead the ‘No’ campaign.

I will grasp the opportunity of the referendum to vote for AV as a vote for change, to initiate a dynamic of change driven from below not just for genuine proportional representation at Westminster but for a participatory constituent assembly to produce a democratic written constitution, the objectives of which could well incorporate the egalitarian spirit of Rainsborough.

How does AV work?

There is widespread public support, too, for the principle that a healthy democracy depends upon on the basic right to protest. However, it’s a sad reflection of our lack of collective memory that, not long after criticism of the policing of the G20 summit protests and the death of Ian Tomlinson in 2009, so many people are apparently still shocked by the police tactics used against student protesters, especially ‘kettling’ or enforced containment.

Curbs on the right to protest have existed for as long as there have been governments to create them and over the last twenty years, the powers of the police to control and limit demonstrations, often by force, have grown increasingly broad and repressive. What the student protests therefore tell us, if anything, is that despite the pledges made by the Chief Inspector of Constabulary Denis O’ Connor in a review into public order policing in 2009 after the G20 protests, very little has fundamentally changed.

In the coming months, this means that anti-cuts campaigners can expect a heavy police presence and a readiness by the police to use their powers extensively at any protest that isn’t firmly contained within a prescribed route – which in London usually means a low impact, ‘self kettled’ stroll through the streets from Embankment to Hyde Park. It’s the kind of restriction that we’d obviously want to avoid, but a risk of sustained police heavy-handedness is that, as Johann Hari suggested in the Independent in December, potential demonstrators may increasingly be frightened off from taking part in anti-cuts protests.

Cuts in police numbers might instead tempt senior officers to ban protests altogether. This was mooted by Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson after the tuition fees protests. One police officer, a Sergeant Dan Stoddart writing in the magazine Police Review, has gone as far as suggesting a limit on the size of protests, saying that “having tens of thousands on the streets seems to have become an expensive luxury” and questioning whether ‘modern pressure groups’ need to protest at all when “instantaneous global communications and media… puts any message into the palm of your hand”. If nothing else, this illiberal argument should hopefully provide a sobering warning to those who place such great emphasis on the value of online campaigning.

Then there are the lessons we can learn from the spate of undercover police officers who have recent been unmasked after infiltrating green activist groups. In his interview with the Daily Mail, former undercover officer Mark Kennedy acknowledges that the peaceful climate campaigners he spied upon “had no intention of violence.” However, they were still targeted in the kind of operation normally reserved for drug dealers and criminal gangs, presumably because their campaigns focus on disrupting major economic and business interests such as power stations and airports.

If activism grows against corporate tax-dodgers like Vodafone and Top Shop, which is difficult to police because it invariably involves nothing more than trespass (which is a civil, rather than a criminal offence), might groups like UKUncut start to face the same kind of surveillance and infiltration? It’s far cheaper than intensive public order policing and as I suggested in a short piece for Manchester Mule last year, the government may be persuaded of the benefits of “targeting potential troublemakers” through greater use of intelligence, as a cost-effective way of using reduced police resources.

Finally, those expecting a change in attitudes as, for the first time,  the cuts hit the police too will almost certainly face disappointment. It’s important to remember that in general, the police do not institutionally share public perceptions of the importance of dissent. Protests are seen as a nuisance, a distraction from the maintenance of order and, as an episode of the Channel 4 series ‘Coppers’ showed in November 2010, demonstrators are often viewed with contempt. The naïve idea that the police can somehow be ‘shamed’ into better treatment of protesters by actively opposing cuts in their numbers – what one campaigner recently called ‘proving our moral superiority; – represents a failure to understand the deep-rooted prejudices against dissent that exist within the culture of the police.

Unfortunately, as Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution sets out to explain, there are one or two problems with this rosy picture of capitalism solving climate change on its own terms. To begin with, regulation has been an almost complete failure, as we saw with the collapse of the talks last year in Copenhagen and more recently in Bonn. It has failed not least because the bigger problem is the most obvious one: a system of production based on endless growth and expansion is incompatible with a long term reduction in energy consumption.

Technological fixes such as carbon capture or agrofuels, which essentially seek to maintain consumer demand and continued fossil fuel dependency, are an appealing way for rich nations to avoid making hard choices about their unsustainable consumption. Meanwhile, the growing energy crisis is resulting in huge profits for oil companies.

The result has been rising prices for basic necessities, the kind of environmental disasters we see in Nigeria and the Gulf of Mexico and a greater number of economic refugees, who are either exploited as cheap labour or excluded entirely from the world’s centres of wealth. From this perspective, the battle to shape the transition to a post-petrol world is just as much about class as any of the struggles that have preceded it.

Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution is not, as it confesses, a ‘book of soundbites’, not least because there are no easy answers. At more than 650 pages spread over 59 chapters, it is also a book that is almost impossible to read from cover to cover. Its real strength is as a comprehensive reference guide to the huge range of interconnected issues facing climate activists and to the struggles for the control of energy taking place around the world.

Its mix of essays by frontline organisations, academics and campaigners means that anyone looking for arguments about whether a ‘green new deal’ is possible, or how a just transition for energy-sector workers might be achieved, or what the impact of privatised ownership of new technologies has been on indigenous communities, will find concise, thoughtful contributions.

Together, they help explain why long-term solutions are indeed possible, but ‘green capitalism’ certainly isn’t one of them. An essential book for the committed climate campaigner, then, but probably too dense and too overwhelming for anyone new to the subject.

This poses something of a problem for Lucian Randall in filling a book that has his subject’s blessing but not his cooperation. It is an achievement that Disgusting Bliss manages to draw out stories from fiercely loyal friends and to sort through the often improbable myths surrounding Morris’s career, but stretched over 250 pages it often seems bogged down in the detail of radio and television production. Yet when a more detailed perspective of the power of the media would have been welcome – on the controversy surrounding the humiliation of celebrities and MPs by Morris’s Brass Eye series and especially the storm of protest about the now infamous special on paedophilia, Randall left me wanting to know more. When a comedy is condemned by government ministers in parliament, it probably deserves more analysis and a wider range of contributions than Randall has managed to muster.

Definitely a biography for the committed fan, then, and after reading it I went online and bought The Day Today and Brass Eye DVD box sets. Although some of the early sketches look a little dated, Brass Eye in particular is still brilliantly savage; the real-life absurdities of television news are, if anything, even closer to Morris’ mocking vision with the advent of 24-hour rolling coverage. The thing is, you can pick up both series for about the same cost as Disgusting Bliss and for my money, they say about as much – and as little – as Randall’s book reveals about Chris Morris as a writer and performer.

Kevin Blowe