We? Who are ‘we’? Well, though it was civil liberties or (as I would prefer it) human rights that brought everyone together, and not just in London, we were a diverse crowd in composition and experience. We were lovers of rock, football and the countryside, we were Tories, lefties, liberals, anarchists. Above all, many of us were young; and we were all fed up with the cumulative loss of liberties and the intrusions on our privacy, identities and lives by an overbearing state. This was far from the usual ‘we’ of political and pressure group life.

We plainly did not all agree, and we have different priorities. But the great majority of us were united around the urgent need to gain and regain liberties, to re-take our identities and to work for a constitutional settlement that can protect them. One of the main purposes of the convention was to bring together the organisations that argue and campaign for liberties, human rights and democracy and to strengthen them: first, creating an atmosphere of change within which they could work more confidently; and second, enabling them to recruit new people.
The huge surge of energy the convention inspired cannot be switched off. That would be a betrayal of all those who came and said, ‘What next?’ There must be a ‘next’, a wider and widening popular movement, or ambience, or current – call it what you will – in actions, argument, local and national events, the media, the blogosphere, wherever, that can continue to unite as many people as possible. If you like, we should seek to create a new zeitgeist – or even hopefully, to take advantage of a zeitgeist that is already emerging.

Existing organisations would benefit, but we ought not to conceive of it in terms of simply channelling all the energy into their campaigning activities. Not all of us are joiners. Not all of us share their particular priorities. Many of us want something new, or to make a new way forward. Alliances are already being made, as Red Pepper knows well, for it is at the centre of a new initiative on the police.*

The organisers of the convention, most notably Anthony Barnett, Henry Porter and Phil Booth, the organisations that participated and the bodies that provided funds, must come together to create collaborative working arrangements that will build on what has been achieved. I don’t know quite how this movement, for want of a better word, could be organised, or even what its activities might be. But clearly there are immediate tasks through which they can begin devising a long-term process. It could, for example work immediately to stop clause 152 of the Coroners and Justice Bill that will enable ministers and state officials to evade all limits on their use of private information within the database state.

Possibly the greatest obstacle to making common cause with existing human rights organisations lies in differing attitudes to the Human Rights Act. Plainly, the act has failed to restrain this authoritarian government’s assault on human rights, except at the margins, largely for systemic reasons (as I argued in my last column). But it is doing much to protect the rights and dignity of many of vulnerable groups, as the British Institute of Human Rights continually reminds us.

It is, if you like, a ‘battered shield’. But it would be foolish to cast it aside at this juncture, when civil liberties and human rights, need all the protection they can get. Those who blame the act for the losses we have sustained since it was introduced need to identify the real villains and structural weaknesses – most notably the over-mighty state and its dominance over parliament – rather than seek an easy scapegoat in ways that may strengthen the enemies of the principle of universal human rights in both main political parties. This is a principle that we all need to hang on to for dear life.

It is a principle that the act embodies. There is already vigorous debate about its future and dubious proposals for a ‘British’ bill of rights that will not be embedded and may not be universal. But we cannot argue for it, as we should, in a spirit of denial. We should argue back vigorously and freely, but taking care to respect what the act stands for and its potential.

Porter is bewildered, as his recent submission of evidence to the parliamentary joint committee on human rights (JCHR) shows. His account of the losses we are sustaining is shocking in its detail – but that’s not what he’s bewildered about. What astonishes him is that there has been scarcely any parliamentary or public resistance to a draconian trend that in the 1980s would have had people protesting in the streets. (There is, of course, a lot of resistance but it is fragmented and barely visible.) Clearly Henry Porter feels he is on his own.

Porter partly identifies the root of the problem – executive dominance over parliament – and analyses why there has been so little parliamentary and public concern. He also finds scapegoats – the human rights committee itself (too calm), parliament, the media and, astonishingly, the Human Rights Act (HRA).

‘The truth is that we may have taken a false sense of security from the presence of the HRA on the statute book,’ he writes. ‘Indeed, there seems every reason to suspect that the act has served the executive and civil service as an alibi while the balance between state power and individual freedom has been critically altered in the state’s favour.’ Porter says the HRA ‘has allowed the executive and civil service to roll back individual choice, liberty and privacy and has done almost nothing to defend the British public from the accumulation of centralised power’.

This is an odd and potentially damaging notion. The act has done nothing. It is failings elsewhere that the government is exploiting. What has let us all down, as Porter also says, is the absence of coherent analysis, scrutiny or opposition in parliament, of debate about the direction of our society, and of understanding and exposition in the media. I think he is unjust to the JCHR: the committee has published accurate analysis of the odious counterterrorism laws, and much good work elsewhere – using the HRA, incidentally, as its yardstick. Parliament has raised its game, but MPs too often pass the buck to the House of Lords. Porter thinks the judges have performed well, but Keith Ewing’s lectures at the Institute for Advanced Legal Studies make remorseless criticisms of their weakness.

That said, it is true that we have all underestimated the growth of the database state, a phenomenon that is hidden behind the debate on ID cards and disguised by the way in which inroads on our privacy and the right to ‘respect for private and family life, home and correspondence’, as set out in article eight of the HRA, have been accumulating piecemeal. Behind ID cards lurks the national identity register, which will require 49 pieces of information covering important transactions in our lives, and behind that lurk plans for a ‘transformational state’, centralising and sharing the information the authorities hold on us. In other words, an almighty surveillance structure is envisaged, through which the man in charge, Sir David Varney, admits that the state will know ‘a deep truth about the citizen based on their behaviour, experience, beliefs, needs or desires’.

Porter also tells of a new proposal to collect 19 pieces of information, including mobile phone and credit card numbers, from people travelling abroad. The government plans to use them to ‘fight terrorism and international crime’, and for ‘general public policy purposes’ – mass surveillance.

A broad-based convention on liberty and human rights is being organised in November at the Logan Hall in London to try to piece together all the urgent issues that confront us, arouse and inform public opinion and help to unify and spread the many sources of resistance (see opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom for details). I believe that those of us who care about civil liberties and human rights must frame a concerted response to the losses we are suffering from both the counterterrorism laws and the less obvious dangers inherent in ID cards and the database state. This should be the main task.

I also believe that the HRA should be strengthened to encompass ancient protections, such as trial by jury, and new elements such as economic, social and cultural rights. At the same time, its crucial balancing act, embedding the protection of human rights and liberties in a partnership between parliament and the courts, is a vital democratic solution to the age-old problem of relying on unelected judges to protect them. In the end that is our job, as citizens.

The measure was only pushed through the Commons by massive arm-twisting of Labour MPs, playing on their fear that defeat would destroy Brown’s remaining authority, and by the shabbiest of deals with the Democratic Unionists. And it has demonstrated the bankruptcy of the Blairite tactic of making up policy to wrong-foot the Tories, which has sunk Brown’s credibility since the autumn.

David Davis’s decision to resign his seat and fight a by-election on the issue was variously described as maverick, wrong-headed, self-indulgent and a waste of public money. It won support across the political spectrum, however, for two main reasons. The first is that it chimes in with a widespread feeling that our distinctive liberties are being eroded across the board, with Labour’s restrictions on freedom of expression and assembly, the extension of mechanisms of surveillance, invasions of privacy, development of databases of all kinds, the plan for biometric ID cards and so on.

No doubt there are arguments to be made to support aspects of these developments. Jill Saward decided to stand against Davis on the platform ‘The liberty to live without fear’, especially women in fear of rape, and argued that the national DNA database and CCTV surveillance have provided essential tools in the fight against serious crime. Yet we should resist the extension of the DNA database to the whole population, as she has proposed, and demand much more effective safeguards to ensure that surveillance is not used for trivial or improper purposes.

Again, no threat to liberty may be entailed in the idea of identity cards as such, carrying basic personal information. I still have the identity card issued to me in the second world war, number LFZF 324/3, later transferred to my national health card. I carry such cards for identification in all kinds of situations – passport, driving licence, bus pass, European medical card and so on. What is wrong is trying to roll all these into one for administrative and personal convenience, and adding a whole lot of personal information, which no one can trust the government to gather correctly, to keep safe when gathered or not use for improper purposes.

So we need to get the balance right, and David Davis has tapped a widespread concern that the government has got the balance wrong, even though we may not agree with him on every detail.

A second concern that Davis has tapped into is the widespread distrust of parliamentarians and the political class as a whole. They are seen as unprincipled, more concerned with holding onto power and its personal benefits than doing what they believe to be right. The methods by which a Commons majority was achieved for the 42-days law epitomised these failings – and won support for Davis as someone prepared to sacrifice future cabinet office for a principle he believed in.

However, what Davis has not said, because as a Tory he is unable to do so, is that for the past 25 years parliament as an institution has proved a broken reed in defending the liberties of the subject in the face of executive encroachment. It was for this reason that the Labour government in 1997 found it necessary to introduce the Human Rights Act and give UK courts the power to enforce it against the executive and to caution parliament itself against potential legislative breaches.

The Tories have not been backward in accusing judges who do so of acting undemocratically, and have proposed to amend if not abolish the Human Rights Act. Yet the independence of the judiciary is an essential component of a democratic system, especially when it is defending the basic rights and freedoms necessary for citizens in a democratic society.

If Davis’s action serves to strengthen the liberal tendency in a future Conservative administration, then it may have served a useful purpose. But don’t hold your breath.

This paranoia is hugely overblown, our chances of becoming victims of terrorism tiny. Yet, we are all victims in losing our ‘essential liberties’, with new anti-terror legislation (and the mentality that goes with it) reducing our freedoms and abolishing safeguards against arbitrary injustice.

This goes far beyond the confines of Guantanamo Bay, it’s here in the UK with 28- or 90-day detention without charge, ‘control orders’, national identity cards, new stop-and-search powers and the demonisation of anyone with a brown skin.
 
It even extends to the Big Green Gathering (BGG), a five day family camping event combining education on sustainable lifestyles with entertainment. The disproportionate security provisions we had to put in place this year to get our licence approved by Mendip District Council have caused a financial crisis, threatening to kill off the event.

The BGG is not a terrorist target. It is a very peaceful event, full of peaceful people enjoying themselves in the summer sunshine and exercising their traditional liberties of freedom of assembly, freedom of speech and expression. In 14 years of virtually trouble-free operation it has built a reputation as probably the most family-friendly event on the summer festival circuit.

The licensing process this year has been a nightmare. The costs of
satisfying the security concerns of over £200,000 were forced on us just a few weeks before the event. We had set the ticket price the previous November on the assumption costs would be no more than £100,000. A figure considered adequate because of our good record on health and safety and the recommendation by the previous police inspector that the Big Green Gathering did not needed policing.
 
Sadly, this year we have a new police inspector with a completely different attitude. He seems to have absorbed the antiterrorist vocabulary, with an often-repeated insistence on the need for us to “target-harden” our event. Demanding additional security measures, including extra security patrols, watchtowers and steel shield fencing.

The associated costs left us with a shortfall of around £75,000 on this year’s event – about 10% of our total annual turnover. When added to a similar deficit over the past two years we may be forced out of business, unless an emergency rescue appeal can save us.
 
Last year the government’s new Licensing Act came into effect and the BGG needed a licence for the first time since its inception in 1994, pushing up costs for security personnel by around 50% (about £80,000).

The new Licensing Act was designed for pubs and clubs, now applies to anywhere music is played or entertainment performed. Even places serving tea or coffee after 11pm. The government has admitted its had a disastrous effect on many outdoor events but says they have no plans to amend it.

We were not alone. There is a growing list of long-established events which have not taken place this year because of the increases imposed by the new licensing regime.
 
Combined with the security paranoia and control-freak mentality fostered by the ‘war on terror’, it is potentially ruinous to the Big Green Gathering. We do not want to make the BGG unpleasant and financially unviable by turning our site into a fortress.

The steel fortress and security provisions of the Glastonbury Festival site should not become the model for smaller, more laid-back events which have neither the security problems to justify it nor the financial resources to pay for it. The 2005 Licensing Act, as it relates to festivals and outdoor events is in urgent need of amendment-surely an issue worth a letter to your MP?

Otherwise, as Benjamin Franklin said, ‘They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security.’         
 

If you can help rescue the Big Green Gathering, please send donations to the BGG Rescue Fund, The Old Clinic, 10 St John’s Square, Glastonbury BA6 9LJ www.big-green-gathering.com

These are questions hardly anyone dared to ask in public, until British punk rocker Aki Nawaz and his group Fun-Da-Mental produced their latest album, All is War (The Benefits of G-Had). It is an explosive mix of the kind of politically powerful lyrics that could have MI5 knocking at your door. It is so contentious that Nawaz’s own record label has refused to support it and the distributors decided not to touch it.

‘I’m not just a musician, my political tentacles are up,’ says Nawaz. He is a veteran punk and despite the name, Fun-Da-Mental are many years older than the recent spread of religious fundamentalism. Nawaz began his career in the 1980s as the drummer with Southern Death Cult (better known in a later incarnation as goth rockers The Cult), and then became a hero to many British Asian teenagers who grew up in the 1990s listening to his angry lyrics packed with feelings of cultural detachment and disaffection.

He secured a place as the founding father of British Asian music many years ago when he created Nation Records, a label that gave a home to artists such as Asian Dub Foundation, Natacha Atlas and Talvin Singh when no other record company was interested in them. While these musicians went on to stardom, Fun-Da-Mental stayed true to their radical political roots and have maintained a small but devoted following ever since.

I last interviewed Nawaz two years ago, after the Iraq war began and before the London bombings. A seasoned anti-racism campaigner, he was showing signs of weariness and considered leaving Britain to live in Pakistan and do charity work. Instead of moving abroad, however, he has spent more than a year making All is War. It is his attempt to shake up the system and he admits, with a smile, that he has willingly crossed a line.

The album’s release date was uncomfortably close to the anniversary of the London bombings – not the wisest move – and the media reaction has been unsurprisingly vociferous. ‘Fury at suicide bomb rap,’ proclaimed the Sun, echoed by the Guardian and NME. The BBC went so far as to contact the Home Office to find out whether Nawaz was in contravention of the Terrorism Act.

‘They’re so consumed with finding the bogeyman. I stepped out of the box of acceptability, so they went after me,’ says Nawaz. Most of the fuss has been over two songs: ‘Che Bin’, a track that compares Osama Bin Laden to Che Guevara, and ‘Cookbook DIY’, describing the steps taken by a terrorist in assembling a chemical bomb:

I’m strapped up ’cross my chest, bomb belt attached

Deeply satisfied with the plan I hatched

Electrodes connected to a gas cooker lighter

It’s not easy listening, but to pick out single lines from an entire album for attack is unfair. Some internet blogs have suggested that Nawaz is only trying to court publicity by writing songs about suicide bombing and terrorism. But there is plenty of evidence of Fun-Da-Mental’s musical abilities in All is War, particularly the use of Quwaali singers, dhol drums, and African rhythms, alongside a variety of strong voices and languages.

The songs take a ride across so many different countries and cultures that the finished album is almost a world music compilation. There are some masterful mixes that bear testament to Nawaz’s global journeys from Kashmir to Brazil.

All is War follows the same vein as Fun-Da-Mental’s earlier albums, with dark and melodic sounds laid beneath tough, chanting lyrics. The band’s political tone, however, has shifted away from simply issues of identity and race towards those of Muslim persecution and the relationship between terrorism and war. Producing another truly global album has allowed Fun-Da-Mental to step outside the British experience of terrorism.

‘I was in the Amazon last year, in the middle of nowhere,’ Nawaz says of a recent trip. ‘All the people in the lodge where I was staying told me, “Viva Osama!” – after the Americans had left.’

For someone in Britain to suggest that Osama Bin Laden is anything other than a bloodthirsty terrorist is tantamount to denouncing yourself as a fully paid-up member of Al-Qaeda with a bomb under your mattress. But for many in the Arab world and beyond, Osama is already a hero. It is an uncomfortable truth, forcing questions that western governments haven’t been brave enough to confront. Indeed, new legislation against the glorification of terrorism has put a stopper on any discussion even before it has begun. Nawaz says he is trying to open up the debate, even if it means landing himself in prison.

‘I wouldn’t mind the terrorism laws if there had been a debate before they came in. I don’t think the glorification of terrorism law would have been passed if there had been a debate first. I make it my business to sit and talk with people right across the spectrum, from the hardcore to the liberal,’ he says.

Nawaz has travelled the world speaking to everyone from Islamic scholars and academics to young Muslims in an effort to understand the root causes of the fury that has lead to violence. One could argue that there are few people better placed to understand such anger than a punk rocker. He is a liberal Muslim and has studied the Qur’an and sharia law to try to sift the facts about his religion from the fiction. His conclusion is that terrorism perpetrated in the name of Islam is all about politics, not religion.

‘There’s a complete and utter denial of the relationship to this with foreign policy,’ he says. ‘On 7 July last year my son was on his way to King’s Cross. For anyone to think I would condone the attacks on London is ridiculous. I just understand the catalyst. My anger comes from the causes of terrorism.’

His grievance lies with those who he says have hijacked the debate and turned it into something other than a political problem. ‘Parasites’ is a track that describes what Nawaz says is the ‘blood-sucking nature’ of the government and Muslim community leaders who misrepresent the people they claim to protect:

Gold glitters in their mouths

Most of them corrupt

They lay claim to be your countrymen

He wears a crown of knowledge, preaching morality, decency and deceit

This is political poetry at its rawest, and repeats a charge made widely about some establishment figures who have exploited their arbitrary position as spokespeople for the British Muslim community to voice opinions that many fellow Muslims don’t share.

Far from advocating terrorism or suicide bombing, Nawaz says that he wants to create a fresh political debate that addresses the neglected issue of Western foreign policy. He argues that righting the wrongs of Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan is the key to ending Muslim resentment, not racial integration. ‘I Reject’ articulates the frustration he feels:

Reject your thieving foreign policies

Reject your elitist congregation

Reject your mini skirt liberation

Reject your concept of integration

His efforts, as he puts it, to broaden the debate with songs like this have been met with only criticism so far. ‘What disappoints me most is the silence,’ he says. ‘Unless we talk about it, things will get worse. Something will happen; someone will blow up the queen. My question is: how do we put the handbrake on?’

The case raises far larger concerns about the accountability of policing in Britain. For without a parliamentary word being spoken, or a community organisation being consulted, the police were able to make a substantial change to the legal limits of their use of force. Law and order, it seems, trumps democracy; and, where ‘terrorism’ is at stake, the police seem to be a law unto themselves.

The British tradition of policing has long presented itself as being governed by the consent of those it serves: the impartial rule of ‘citizens in uniform’. But state power is rarely neutral and, from Britain’s first police forces in the mid-19th century, maintaining the peace meant keeping a watchful eye over the activities of the ‘criminal classes’. Upholding the rule of law required social control, and a significant part of the police’s role was to break up political meetings and spy on emerging working class movements.

Much has changed since then, of course. The local autonomy of the 19th century gave way to a nationalised structure, formalised by the 1964 Police Act, which gave the Home Office ultimate control. Methods of policing have changed too, shifting the emphasis from street patrols to detection, and placing greater faith in the efficient uses of new technology. In recent years, these trends have continued, with central government targets constraining the independence of Britain’s 52 local police forces, and the development of new national agencies to police serious crime. At the same time, there has been renewed emphasis on ‘local engagement’. ‘Community’ and ‘neighbourhood policing’ have become buzz phrases under New Labour.

When David Blunkett spoke of community policing during his time as home secretary, it was easy to conjure up the image of a modern day Victorian out to discipline today’s ‘criminal classes’. And when Tony Blair launched the Building Communities, Beating Crime white paper last November, he proposed neighbourhood policing as a way for the ‘law-abiding citizen in the community’ to take control against ‘the minority who want to cause trouble’. This is Blair’s vision of community: an essentially conservative population, which seeks protection from the dangers of today’s hoodied, ASBO’d youth.

But this should not blind us to the fact that, in principle, community policing should be good for democracy – if it were to provide a genuine way of holding the police to account – as well as being a relatively successful means of maintaining social peace. ‘Effective policing requires the support of communities,’ says Jenny Jones, Green Party member of the Greater London Assembly and a member of the Metropolitan Police Authority. ‘If you don’t have the trust of the community you won’t get the information you need to combat terrorism, or to fight gun crime properly.’

So why is it, then, that community policing in Britain consistently fails to match up to this standard?

Law and order policies are an important part of the story – with ASBOs, fixed penalty notices, curfews and the like tending to address the symptoms of alienation rather than their social causes, as well as handing the police additional powers without adequate democratic safeguards.

But they do not tell the whole story. Another condition for effective community policing is that there must exist meaningful channels of democratic accountability. And the picture here is decidedly mixed.

On paper, London in particular has seen a great improvement over recent years, with the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) established in 2000. Prior to that, the home secretary had retained direct control of the capital’s policing, which allowed for no direct scrutiny by Londoners.

But, as Jenny Jones explains, making the Met more accountable has still been a struggle: ‘When the MPA first started we weren’t allowed to ask any questions, we just got a report.’ Five years on, authority members can now directly question Met commissioner Sir Ian Blair, but the police themselves have often resisted changes: ‘There’s a tendency within the police to keep things quiet, and they haven’t really adapted to the idea of open government.’

For Asad Rehman, chair of the anti-racist Newham Monitoring Project and spokesperson for the Justice4Jean campaign (see Day in the Life, page 8), the birth of the MPA is not much of a victory: ‘In the 1980s we were arguing that local people should be able to hold the police accountable for operational and policy issues, rather than just having to answer to a hand-picked or appointed group of people on the police authority. The response has been to give us the Independent Police Complaints Commission and the MPA, but they’re not robust enough to hold the police truly to account. Some people say that the new bodies have given the police another breathing space, because they can now say there are new arrangements, we should give them a few years, and so deflect criticism.’

At a more local level, Police Community Consultative Groups (PCCG), which are meant to give citizens a channel to discuss policing, come in for similar criticisms. Ruhul Tarafder of the 1990 Trust, a black community organisation, argues that: ‘A lot of the existing structures are talking shops. They’re mostly about managing and controlling the community rather than representing it in an equal partnership.’

Asad Rehman adds that with no direct power over operational policy or policing priorities, they are ‘little more than PR exercises’. Although some PCCGs have been able to forge an independent role for themselves, complaints abound that they remain unrepresentative, too close to the police – with local authority funding and staffing encouraging this hand-in-glove relationship – and even, at times, racially divided.

‘One of the biggest problems that the official mechanisms for police-community accountability suffer from is an imbalance of power,’ says Kevin Blowe, of the United Friends and Families Campaign, which works on deaths in custody. ‘There have been some real improvements in policing policy over the past 10 to 15 years, including on domestic violence and hate crimes, so in theory things have improved. But the real test of how people view the police is how they actually behave – and that has shown little change.’

Take the example of police stop and search powers, which have long been a flashpoint for police-community relations. The Brixton riots in 1981, although symptomatic of wider social and economic exclusion, were triggered by the racist use of ‘sus’ laws, a stop and search measure originally passed in 1824 to make vagrancy an arrestable offence.

The 1984 Police And Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) modified this, requiring that the police must have ‘reasonable suspicion’ before conducting searches. And the Macpherson Report, which followed the death of Stephen Lawrence in 1993, led to further transparency in the reporting of stop and search statistics. But these measures have so far failed to prevent the disproportionate targeting of minority ethnic communities. Black people remain eight times and Asians five times more likely to be stopped than white people, according to 2004 Home Office figures – proportions that have increased since the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry.

Statistics tell only part of the story, however. For Zareena Mustapha of the Newham Monitoring Project, ‘The problem with stop and search is not only disproportionate targeting but also the manner of the searches, which are often fraught with fear, suspicion and sometimes quite severe violence. For a lot of young black kids it’s routine, a part of their criminalisation.’

The MPA itself has recognised the problem, publishing a study in May 2004 showing that disproportionate stop and search has increased distrust, trampled on human rights, and ‘cut off valuable sources of community information and criminal intelligence’. It concludes that stop and search practice continues to be influenced by ‘racial bias’, ‘stereotyping’ and ‘institutional racism’.

Although most stop and searches are authorised under PACE, there has also been a significant increase in the use of Section 44 of the 2000 Terrorism Act (see Guerilla Guides, July 2005). This measure has been used notoriously to curtail the right to protest against the DSEi arms fair in east London and at Fairford airbase in Gloucestershire. It has also been used increasingly against British Asians.

In the aftermath of the London bombings, transport police have been given operational orders to search suspects of ‘Asian, West Indian and east African origin’. As Ian Johnston, chief constable of the London Transport police, put it: ‘We should not waste time searching old white ladies. It is going to be disproportionate.’

The message seems to be that exceptional times call for exceptional measures. But there is not a shred of evidence that such tactics work – and there has never been a terrorism conviction resulting from a stop-and-search. All too easily, the exception can become the rule, undermining the possibility of community cooperation by criminalising whole communities.

‘There’s a real climate of fear at the moment,’ says Ruhul Tarafder, ‘with a community that’s facing a backlash. We need community policing that’s built from the bottom up, but how are we going to achieve that when we’re treated with suspicion by the media and politicians?’

The biggest block in the road to genuine community policing lies here. For all the consultations and scrutiny groups, the problem remains that the police exist to establish the ‘rule of law’ of a state that is not neutral because it is itself not under effective democratic control.

The Daily Telegraph, the country’s biggest selling broadsheet, complained that the campaigners are ‘exploiting his death to criticise the police and the Government. One man’s tragedy is becoming everybody’s circus.’ The Sun, the biggest selling tabloid, described the campaigners as ‘Marxist agitators’ ‘using the tragedy.’

Meanwhile, in the USA, Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a US soldier killed last year in Iraq, has been staging a vigil outside Bush’s vacation ranch in Crawford, Texas, demanding a meeting with the president and the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. She has been joined by thousands of supporters from a wide variety of backgrounds, and her direct challenge to the President has revived the grass-roots anti-war movement. The White House’s defenders have hit back by denouncing the grieving mother as a dupe and tool of ‘outside agitators’ with a ‘hidden leftist agenda’.

In Pakistan earlier this year the government blamed its embarrassment over gross violations of women’s rights on meddling ‘foreign-funded’ NGOs. Similarly, Honda attributed its recent troubles in Gurgaon, India to ‘outside forces.’

The tactic is transparent. By suggesting that voices of protest are somehow alien and inauthentic, those in authority seek to cloud the issues and evade accountability for their own actions.

What’s most pernicious is the assumption that the victims of injustice lack the wit or the will to challenge their superiors, that they are incapable of acting on their own grievance and rationally choosing their allies. Presumably, in the absence of the outside agitators, the de Menezes family would have graciously accepted the slaughter of their son as a sad but unavoidable by-product of the war on terror.

The outside agitator ploy depicts the victims as muddled and passive and their allies as furtive and Machiavellian. Sections of the British media would like us to be shocked to learn that the people assisting the de Menezes family have been active in anti-war, anti-racist and anti-globalisation activities. Why shouldn’t the de Menezes family draw on their skills and experience? Would it be better if they hired a PR firm?

The two activists singled out for attack in Britain – Asad Rehman and Yasmin Khan – are British Muslims. Confusingly for a media addicted to stereotypes, they are not jihadis but independent leftists with a broad commitment to human rights. The same people who noisily demand that Muslims ‘integrate’ into British society then attack individual Muslims when they engage energetically with the democratic process, when they insist that the summary public execution of an innocent man poses urgent questions for us all.

Campaigns against injustices are never ideology-free. The real crime of the de Menezes campaigners and those supporting Cindy Sheehan is not that they have an ideology but that they do not share the ideology of the powerful.

The snarling attacks on outside agitators are signs of panic. In the USA, the unexpected ramifications of Cindy Sheehan’s protest have taken professional commentators by surprise. Because they haven’t predicted it, they treat it as the result of a conspiracy. The reality is that because the occupation of Iraq is proving a nightmare increasing numbers of US citizens are coming to agree with Sheehan’s call for immediate withdrawal. Bush’s apologists hope to dampen the fire by suggesting that this call has its sources in an alien, duplicitous force. And they are joined here by people who oppose Bush but who are eager that anti-war protest should remain within the safe confines of the bi-partisan political elite.

In the UK, there’s clearly anxiety at the highest levels over the unraveling of the de Menezes killing. In recent weeks it’s been revealed that, contrary to initial police statements, the victim was not wearing a puffy jacket nor had he vaulted over the turnstile. It’s now also emerged that police fired (eleven times) without issuing a verbal warning, and that they sought to prevent the Independent Police Complaints Commission from investigating the shooting. Having been so discredited by their own behaviour, the police now seek to discredit their critics.

The facts of the de Menezes killing are also highly inconvenient for the British government, which wants to use the 7 July bombings as a pretext for increasing police powers, curtailing civil liberties and prosecuting the war on terror. To make their case stick, they have to ensure that people in Britain see the de Menezes shooting as merely a ‘tragic mistake’ rather than the cumulative result of high-handed, wrong-headed policies. For them, the de Menezes family, active and sceptical, aided by ‘outside agitators’, are an obstacle and a threat. Which is precisely why their refusal to slink away is good news, in Britain and well beyond.This is an edited version of an article originally appearing in The Hindu.

Welcome to this civilised country where those suspected of terrorism without any evidence are shot dead in the back, eight times. The police and politicians state that this is only the beginning, and that there will be more shootings. The officer responsible for pumping bullets into the back of an innocent man has been rewarded with a free family holiday. Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Ian Blair said that over the past few weeks there were 250 cases which could have ended up like that of the hapless Brazilian electrician. There were seven occasions when the police almost opened fire. British minorities, especially Muslims and in particular young men, are now faced with police death squads, who shoot first and ask questions later.

Racist hysteria

The racist hysteria has resulted in 86 per cent of the population supporting the shoot to kill policy. Fascist organisations like the British National Party and marauding gangs of racists buoyed on by Tony Blair’s speeches, whose anti Muslim venom is only just hidden in words carefully crafted by his army of spin doctors, unleashed a wave of violence that has already resulted in at least one recorded death, that of Kamal Raza Butt, who came as a visitor this country only to end up battered to death in Nottingham. Around 1000 racially motivated incidents have been recorded since 7 July. There has been a 500 per cent increase in these attacks. Gurdwaras as well as mosques have been set alight. Muslim women wearing Hijab have been refused entry onto buses. An Arab woman, whose brother treated many of the London bomb victims, was attacked for singing in Arabic whilst pushing her baby in a pram. Underground carriages have emptied when Asian’s or ‘Muslim looking’ men have got on.

There is much in the racist backlash to the London bombs that has echoes to what happened decades ago in the country. During the 1970s and 1980s Britain was faced with a wave of racist violence. This included racist ‘Paki’ bashing gangs, often of drunken white youth, for whom ‘Paki’ meant any Asian. Many people were murdered, including taxi drivers, students and restaurant workers. Mosques, Gurdwaras and temples were attacked. Fascist organisations like the National Front, often protected by thousands of police officers, tried to march through Asian areas. Asian youth of that period began to organise, and fought back against the racists. In this process they came into conflict with the police.

I was among the many hundreds of youth who organised. I learnt that the reason I was in England was because of a colonial history. That the reason we were poor was not due to religion. That the poverty of my family was born out of the fact that we had been robbed over hundreds of years by British colonialism. That we were here, in the UK, because they were there, in the countries of our origin. We had to learn many lessons not least that we were Asians only in the West. There were no Asian’s in Asia, only people belonging to different nations and countries.

The media then, following the lines thrown down by the politicians, blamed angry young men for fermenting trouble in the community and blamed Asian generally for not ‘integrating’ into the British way of life. During the 1970s and 1980s a whole host of self appointed community leaders, many of whom gave unintelligible statements on behalf of the ‘community’, condemned the extremists particularly amongst the youth. The issue in the 1970s and 1980s was not of integration and it is not one today.

Notwithstanding the garbled apologies of the ‘community leaders’, youth of the 1970s and 1980s pointed out that the issue was racism. We pointed out that ‘integration’ implied there was something inherently wrong with us. But the problem is with the deep rooted racism of British society.

We all lost life

Tony Blair has created an ‘Us and Them’ situation in this country – ‘Us’ being white people and ‘Them’ being ‘Us’ from the rest of the world. But he is doing this through a clear targeting of Islam. Any questioning of his foreign policy he condemns outright. He told a Labour Party meeting on 16 July, ‘It plays on our tolerance and good nature; it exploits the tendency to guilt of the developed world …It is founded on a belief, one whose fanaticism is such that it can’t be moderated. It can’t be remedied. It has to be stood up to.’

The British media has been ramming home the linkage between Islam and terrorism. This has been justified by a whole host of self appointed ‘Muslim leaders’ who have been popping up on the television screens and in newspapers apologising on behalf of Muslims for the carnage of London. Luton mosque organised an ‘Islam against terrorism’ conference, other Muslim groups are planning marches and resolutions along the lines of ‘Muslims against terrorism’ or ‘Not in Our Name.’ All of these are implicitly accepting the linkage of Islam as well as Muslims with terrorism, that there are ‘good true’ Muslims and ‘bad Muslims, who are not real Muslims.’ This is feeding directly into the racism of British society and the political agenda of the Labour government.

The apologies of these Muslim ‘leaders’ for what happened in London is like bowing in front of a devil because of the actions of a demon. Barbarism has bread barbarism. Muslims should not apologise as Muslims for what has happened on the streets of London. Religion does not determine any community’s humanity. Any apology implies an acceptance of Blair’s dictum – ‘them and us’. It means, ‘we’ are sorry for the loss of ‘your’ life – when we all lost life.

Lest we forget, if we put all those who died at the hands of those who have been called terrorists by the Anglo-American governments over the last hundred years, they could not match the three million deaths caused by the Americans in Vietnam alone.

Civil Liberties

Whilst the current wave of racist hysteria and paranoia is set against the background of invasion and occupation of Iraq, the British police have been killing people with impunity in custody since 1969. Since then over 1000 people have been killed in police custody. Some of these have been found by juries to have been unlawfully killed, but no police officer has ever been convicted for any death in custody. This was before the official sanctioning of the shoot to kill policy.

In 1981 I was arrested, along with 11 others, and charged as a terrorist on conspiracy to cause explosions and endanger life. We said we were not terrorists but victims of terror. Many people said the only conspiracy was police conspiracy. At that time people came out in their thousands to defend us. We were all acquitted. Now if people talk in support of those the police declare as terrorists, they can be arrested, and locked up indefinitely without trial and without even the knowledge of the evidence against them – in this very civilised of societies.

Even before the bombs of 7 July, basic human rights in this country were under severe attack. Apart from curtailing human rights in this country, the ‘war on terror’ and in particular the London bombs are being used to delegitimise the just struggles for national liberation across the world. Already over 20 organisations, including Palestinians and Tamils, have been banned. The ‘war on terror’ is being used as a smokescreen to deny people living in this country the right to support struggles for justice. The government is now planning to make it a crime even to support the struggle of Palestinians by making any form of support direct or implied for ‘suicide bombers’ unlawful. But as Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London pointed out, ‘if a young Jewish boy in this country goes and joins the Israeli army, and ends up killing many Palestinians in operations and can come back, that is wholly legitimate, but for a young Muslim boy in this country, who might think: I want to defend my Palestinian brothers and sisters and gets involved, he is branded as a terrorist. And I think it is this that has infected the attitude about how we deal with these problems.’

Organise

We now need to stand up to the racist Labour Party and the war mongers. Those who voted for the Labour Party at the last general election, even its anti-war MPs, should re-examine their position. A vote for Labour or Tory, or any party that did not actively oppose the invasion of Iraq, is support for the destruction of Iraq a death of tens and thousands of Iraqis. Iraqi life is no less important that the life of westerners. All people in the UK, irrespective of their religion or background, should demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of British troops from Iraq.

Why talk of integrating into the British way of life when it is becoming increasingly unsafe even to walk on the streets? We must not live here in fear. As in the past, people who are attacked have the right to defend themselves. But we cannot do so on our own. Muslims need to organise themselves but also work with others. The lessons of the past are that only by organising together, irrespective of race, colour or religion can we hope to build a better world. This is true today more than ever before.

On 23 March 2005 Mr Justice Tugendhat deemed that the police tactic of surrounding and holding 3,000 protesters in Oxford Circus was reasonable in order to prevent violence and damage to property. Protesters now fear that the judgement will encourage the police to use the method in future, specifically at the G8 Summit in Scotland this July.

The case was brought by Lois Austin and Geoffrey Saxby. Protester Lois Austin, 35, was prevented from leaving Oxford Circus to collect her child from a crèche despite telling police that her daughter was lactase deficient and needed to be breastfed. Geoffrey Saxby, 48, happened to get caught up in the demonstration while collecting money on behalf of his employer. The pair claimed that the police’s actions were unlawful and breached their human rights. One hundred and fifty other claims for damages depended on this test case.

Austin said: ‘This is a disappointing judgement for people who protest. It criminalises protesters when the real criminals are the people who prosecute illegal wars, ensure that millions of people are condemned to poverty, and promote environmental destruction. We’re very worried that this will enable the police to further impede protest, and it comes at a time when the state is increasing its powers and attacking civil liberties.’

The pair’s solicitor, Louise Christian, believes that the judge was wrong in law to say that everyone in the area of Oxford Circus could be reasonably suspected of violence because of a small violent minority. She pointed out that the judge had conceded that the protesters were effectively imprisoned, but had decided that this was justified on the particular facts of the case.

‘The police are looking at this as a test case on whether they can detain people in other circumstances,’ Christian said. ‘Hopefully the court of appeal will take a different approach, otherwise the problem will be that the police will see this as a green light to use this tactic again.’

The Metropolitan Police issued a statement saying that they ‘were duty bound to protect public safety through implementing this containment in Oxford Circus. For us not to take this action would have run a very real risk of serious injury to the public and our staff, looting and widespread criminal damage’.

In his ruling the judge said: ‘It is obvious from the videos of the three previous English demonstrations that on May Day 2001 there was a real risk of serious injury and even death, as well as damage to property, if the police did not control the crowd’. He agreed with the police that protesters’ literature, which used phrases like ‘sale of the century’ and ‘smash and grab’, ‘could reasonably be understood as incitement to looting and violence, and it was hard to understand it in any other way’.

The judgement will have serious implications for the policing of future demonstrations, providing a precedent for the police to cite. Before the case was brought, the police had no clear legal authority to detain protesters in such a fashion.