MPs have a curious habit of passing laws and then believing they don’t really apply to them. No more so than the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, sometimes referred to as the ‘Brian Haw law’ as it was framed specifically to kick out the veteran peace protestor Haw from Parliament Square. Socpa, as it’s fondly known, requires us to get permission from the police should we wish to demonstrate in an area of London that spans from Tate Britain to the Mall and over Westminster Bridge to the South Bank of the Thames.

This is the law that Maya Evans was arrested under for reading out the names of the Iraqi and British war dead at the Cenotaph. She did not have permission and was convicted of taking part in an illegal demonstration.

But this is just the start of the Kafkaesque madness of this law. One person with one banner counts as a demonstration and must get permission from the police six days in advance of holding said banner. I have had to apply for, and have been given permission, to wear a red nose on Red Nose Day in Parliament Square as this is classed as a demonstration. I have got permission to stand holding a small banner saying ‘Support the Poppy Appeal’, as this too is deemed to be a demonstration.

This law is not just idiotic, it is totemic. Nowhere is the relationship of the citizen to the state so clearly defined as here. We have to account for ourselves to the state, while the state becomes less accountable to us. This is not the way things work in democracy.

However, MPs who rushed this law through parliament with little heed to what it really meant could now find themselves on the receiving end of it. On 29 August 2007, when Gordon Brown, along with Ken Livingstone and Nelson Mandela, unveiled the Mandela statue in Parliament Square, they took part in a political demonstration. They celebrated the life of a man who ran the armed wing of the ANC, dedicated his life to the collapse of apartheid and made political speeches.

Did they have permission from the police under Socpa? No. They have broken the law.

Wrexham MP Ian Lucas spoke about the need to redesign the Union Jack flag to include the Welsh dragon on 6 November 2008. He was then photographed holding said flag in Parliament Square. Did he have permission under Socpa? I think not. And if I need the police to say I can wear a red nose, then he needs them to say he can wave a politically contentious flag.

As there is no definition of what constitutes a demonstration you have to turn to the Oxford English Dictionary, which states a demo can be ‘an expression of opinion’. Thus each time an MP speaks to the TV cameras on College Green they could be breaking the very law they blithely rushed through parliament. They are, after all, expressing an opinion, vocally and intended for public consumption, in an area where they need to write to the police six days in advance for permission.

Just before Christmas my lawyers wrote to the Director of Public Prosecutions asking them to investigate MPs, including the prime minister, for breaches of Socpa. The DPP insisted that the police should judge if there was a case to answer and the matter is now in the hands of D/Supt Peter Newman of Westminster South Division.

Will the police bring charges against Mr Brown and Mr Lucas and a host of other offenders? I doubt it, which is why I am preparing a legal fund to challenge any decision not to prosecute.

Here is how you can help dear reader. You can buy a badge – I put Gordon Brown in the dock – online at www.markthomasinfo.com for £2. All monies not used in the legal case will go to Index on Censorship.

You can also go to www.shopanmp.com and report any MPs you see on the news giving interviews on College Green or Parliament Square, so we can constantly update D/Supt Newman with a list of fresh offenders. If luck is with us, Jack Straw won’t be picking a shit-kicking fight with prison officers over no strike agreements – they could be locking his cell door if he is not too careful.

The Goal Keeper\’s Revenge

Bill Naughton (Puffin Books, 1961)

I read this book of short stories at school when I was12. The tales are set in the northern working class of the 1930s. The story of 17 Oranges alone would qualify this book for greatness. Here a docker gets caught stealing 17 oranges, is locked in a shed while the police are called and realises his only way out is to eat every part of every single orange. It was the first book that I was forced to read at school that I actually liked.

Homage to Catalonia

George Orwell (Secker and Warburg, 1938)

Orwell’s personal story of being part of the struggle against fascism in Spain, the wonder and thrill of being in the place at a time when ‘the working class were in the saddle’. There is a resolute honesty to this book, as it details the unexpected boredom, the in-fighting of the Republican movement and the ordinary moments of life and death.

To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee (HarperCollins, 1960)

My 12-year-old son Charlie read it while we were on holiday this year and
became adamant that I would love it and should read it. He was right. It’s the
story of beacons of human decency shining through a vicious world of racism in America’s deep south, innocently told through the eyes of a young girl, Scout, caught in the maelstrom of small town ignorance and hatred. I finished reading the book on a train heading from Penzance to London; I was sharing a table with three strangers and had to duck my head away from them to hide my tears.

The Bible

I became an atheist at the age of seven or eight, mainly due to the stupidity of one particularly inept preacher. But coming from a family of preachers, even today I feel at ease with church culture and reckon the Bible to be full of great stories. Jesus throwing the moneylenders out of the temple! Samson and the fight with the jawbone of an ass! Moses and the scary snake stick! These were the first stories I heard. My mum used to read them to us at bedtime. It’s just a shame they had to ruin a bunch of good yarns with a belief in an immortal tyrannical creator.

Lowest of the Low

Gunter Wallraf (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1985)

Above and beyond any book this one recalibrated what I wanted to try and do as a performer and activist. Wallraf, a German journalist, went undercover for a year, posing as a Turkish guest worker. The subsequent story of how workers were denied basic health and safety rights, abused and treated like vermin changed the law in Germany and saw companies in the dock. The book is also extremely funny. At one point he runs a sting on a contractor who hires out illegal immigrants to clean up a fictional accident at a nuclear facility in the full knowledge that the task will kill them. It is the art of story telling combined with the righteous passion of a journalist who knows it is not enough to report the world but also to be part of the change.

The Caucasian Chalk Circle

Bertolt Brecht (original English translation by the Sterns and Auden, 1960)

This play changed my life. It’s a rewriting of the story of the judgement of King Solomon, where a nursemaid travels a war torn land protecting her abandoned charge before reuniting the child with his natural mother. The dilemma is: who should keep the child? I loved the story but by the end of the play I had had my opinions neatly reversed and I was stunned by the revelation that a play could change my mind.

Midnight\’s Children

Salman Rushdie (Jonathan Cape, 1981)

Put aside the ‘showbiz Salman’ and photos of whatever wife he is on, likewise the ‘Fatwa Salman’, and what you have left is Midnight’s Children. The magical story of the human links that bind a dividing nation as India undergoes Partition. Hyperbole comes easily when describing my feelings about it. The writing is dazzling.

Mark Thomas’s Serious Organised Criminal DVD is available now, and his book selections can be purchased here.

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