Welcome to the Police State:
Scotland Yard will consider asking the Home Secretary to ban further student marches should the levels of violence which have marred the recent protests continue, Britain's most senior police officer said yesterday.
Labour were bad on civil liberties. And in the wrong hands their legislation is being abused.
Goodbye to freedom of association and the right to protest then.
Except the truth is people will protest if they want to, whether the police like it or not — and nothing will stop them. Police states always fail in the end. But do we really have top test this hypothesis in the UK?
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Is there a right to protest? Or is it a priviledge?
@Justin
UN declaration of Human rights:
Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
^ Top
Article 20.
(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
(2) No one may be compelled to belong to an association.
There is no right to riot
There is to protest
I will never condone violence
Including police violence
I have a strong suspicion the police had much to do with a lot of recent trouble – you can’t “kettle” and not induce fear – and they know that
@Richard – and if the HMRC consultation proposals on PAYE are implemented, all salaries will need to be paid gross to the HMRC, them paying them on to employees.
Sounds like a planned economy to me.
It’s the 1986 Public Order Act which gives the police the right to ban marches/protests for up to three months.
@Tim Worstall
Trust you to know
And I note with some comfort we have Thatcher to blame
Indeed I would know….I was arguing that that was a breach of civil liberties all the way back then (when I was a student demonstrator type).
Sadly all the intervening governments have decided to keep the power.
I think the Coalition would be absolutely barking mad to try to ban demonstrations, even temporarily. Instead of a series of demonstrations, they’d then have a potential revolution on their hands. I think the knowledge that the right to protest was being taken away would incite a LOT more people to protest. Instead of thousands on the streets we’d have millions.
Come to think of it, maybe it’s the quickest way of taking the Coalition down. Although there is a danger we might end up with martial law – remember Solidarity in Poland in 1980… 🙁
Hyperbole in the article in the Independent topped by your own, Richard.
Stephenson says that asking the Home Secretary to ban a march is a power that he has and that he has not ruled out asking – but goes on to recognise that that may exacerbate the problem rather than resolve it.
I don’t think that this is a power that ought to be used, except in very serious cases. I am not even sure that I like the power existing at all – but I also recognise that there are circumstances where people behave so badly that their freedom to protest is abused and they protest with violence alone – which by the way is not what has happened with the student protests.
But just because Stephenson says that he recognises that he has the power and that he won’t rule out asking for a ban but that he recognises that there would be other problems does not equal “a Police State” or anything like it. More like, “Police Chief Constable fails to recognise that he cannot simply say what he thinks otherwise people will misrepresent what he says for journalistic effect!”
Yup as a youngster I used to go to Stonehenge Festival along with 30,000 other people. They banned that and brought in new laws which they can now use to ban other stuff. Nobody cared when a bunch of hippies got beaten up…
@Tim Worstall Tim I’m with you.
What a rum business that Scotland Yard can ask the Home Secretary to ban protests. If the Home Secretary does, he is accused of being authoritarian. If he doesn’t, the police batter the protesters and the Home Secretary gets the blame for not banning the protest as the police recommended. It does put the Home Sec in a lose/lose scenario.
Justin – it’s a duty to protest; a civic duty.
If I was in the Coalition, I would let the protest go ahead. It’s inevitable that the angry mob (not the students) will be violent again and completely wreck any sympathy or support that the students may still have remaining. Apologies for the realpolitik here.
Richard, may I pose a question to you here? If, as independently shown (I know that you have little sympathy with the IFS, but please amuse me), the new system is “progressive” what do you have against it? If someone wants to get to university then they will go – the level of the fees now was called a deterrent in the past to students from poorer background yet we still have record numbers of applicants to university.
People need to look around and see what is happening at the moment:
A number of MPs have breached the ‘contract’ between themselves and the electorate in the severest way possible.
Last year, more than half of them were caught helping themselves to as much tax-free money as they could claim.
A man is in prison because he *might* be charged with an offence.
There are calls from our ‘special relationship’ ally for him to be assassinated. Who by? The state?
There are more calls for his publishing house to be listed as a terrorist organisation.
Last week, the Prime Minister announced to the country that a police officer was pulled off her horse and beaten at the student protest and promised retribution. Nothing of the sort took place.
Evidence that war crimes have occurred has been popping-up all over place.
The small minority of reckless gamblers who brought the country to its knees have been allowed to have another go.
We are seeing government policies emerging that will rob from the poor in order to give to the rich.
We’ve invaded two defenceless countries and killed their citizens in the last ten years.
Our scientific community are forecasting a climate catastrophe and our politicians are doing very little about it.
The solution: ban the marches.
@Tim Worstall
Very weird to find us on the same side for once
@Richard
Oh come on – there’s progressive (a proportional relationship) and absolute barriers to entry
Please don’;t offer me simplistic analysis
Or claim that we have record numbers now before the new system comes in#
That’s just bizarre and totally false logic
They came first for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up.
“Very weird to find us on the same side for once”
Not really: I am a liberal after all. Just a classical liberal: thuhs I agree on the goals largely, just often disagree on the methods. But not even that on civil liberties.
@Tim Worstall
As is being proven quite often these days there are liberals and there are liberals
@Richard Murphy Do I have the ‘civil liberty’ to not be undercut by VAT avoiders ? I know many people who’s liberty to trade freely without abusive competition has been curtailed.
@Tim Worstall Ooops sorry aimed at Tim…
Tim I know many people who’s liberty to trade freely on the UK mainland without abusive competition (LVCR Abuse) has been curtailed. There is no way out of it for them…not much liberty there..