by I Fought the Law- A Riotous Romp in Search of British Democracy (epub)
I was intrigued to hear what Jim had to say, but a few years on the fringes of journalism has taught me that if someone wants to tell you something you have to let them do it in their own time. If they suspect you’re pushing them for information they’ll simply back off out of fear. He began to ask me questions about who I was and what I did. I told him about this book and he seemed interested. I could see he was becoming more and more desperate to talk about something. I added that whatever he had to say was probably nothing relevant to Britain anyway and suggested he go home for a coffee to sober up. ‘Oh my God, you’re joking!’ he replied. I changed the subject again, but he could manage only a few more seconds before he began to open up. ‘You don’t have recording equipment on you, do you?’ he asked. Now I was itching to know what it was he wanted to say.
He looked around, then plunged in. ‘In fifty years’ time the two biggest issues in Britain and the world will be the supply of energy and water. The energy industry has no answers when oil runs out. We don’t know what the fuck’s going to happen. Everyone’s looking for places to go. The only place in Britain with any water will be Scotland, but it will be much colder than it is now because the Gulf Stream will be finished. Energy-wise, there’ll be some wind power, but that will be bugger-all use. The Dordogne in France should be all right for water, and the Western Sahara and New Zealand. Everywhere else is fucked.’
I told him he sounded like a paranoid lunatic and asked why I should believe such a portent of doom. He showed me his business card to prove that he knew what he was talking about. It revealed the name of a well-known energy company, his name and his position as an expert in future energy sources. It still sounded a little dramatic so I asked him about his political leanings within the energy industry, specifically whether he was some kind of left-wing conservationist. He laughed for quite a long time after that. ‘There’s no politics,’ he said. ‘It’s fact. There will be no more energy or water in Britain in fifty years, period. It’s fucked. How old are you? Do you have kids?’ I told him about Wilf. ‘Well, you’ll probably be dead so you won’t give a shit, but he’s fucked and so are your grandchildren.’
I then asked him why he was so terrified of MI5. He looked at me as though I was mad. ‘I work for the energy industry! Of course I’m paranoid about MI5!’ A few weeks earlier I’d met a well-known ex-MI5 agent in Parliament Square who’d given an assessment of our secret services that didn’t seem to warrant Jim’s sense of agitation. This ex-spy was handing out DVDs to anyone who would take them that posed a few unsettling questions about 9/11 that had apparently been ignored by the official inquiry. It was like being doorstcpped by a conspiracy-theorist Jehovah’s Witness. It took a while for me to understand exactly what it was he was saying because I was too stunned by the fact that he could have gone from being a spy on the front pages of all the national newspapers to talking to a complete stranger about the ‘CIA Zionist conspiracy to attack New York’.
He went on to describe a policy adopted by MI5 which he called ‘deliberate incompetence’: people are promoted within the secret services specifically because they are known to be useless and will therefore fail to protect us from terrorist attacks. And why should they want to do this? According to this man, it is to safeguard their future funding by government. By this point my jaw was on the floor and I’d decided he was some kind of fruitcake, but he hadn’t finished. I happened to meet him the day after the report about the 7/7 bombings was released by the government. He had a few thoughts on what had been divulged about surveillance on one of the bombers. ‘The reason terrorists get through is because MI5 officers are terrified of getting themselves killed,’ he said. ‘They just want to stay behind the safety of their desks. After all, MI5 officers don’t even have powers of arrest. If they want to nick someone they have to call in Special Branch to do it for them.’
Before leaving him to his conspiracies, I told him that he’d totally shattered my image of MI5 agents as people like James Bond or the characters from Spooks. ‘Think computer boffins with even less social life, that’s your average MI5 agent,’ he said. ‘Those are the people supposedly safeguarding this country. Some of them are really good people who want to do everything they can to protect Britain, but they are in the minority.’ So much, then, for the faceless ‘experts’ protecting our security.
Perhaps Jim shouldn’t fear MI5 after all. But one thing was for sure: he certainly drank like someone who believed the world was fucked.
Chapter 8. Britain's Ten Worst Laws
The laws that take away our freedom are not restricted to a thousand metres around Parliament Square. I met a man called David Mery on my journey who was accused of terrorism three weeks after the 7 July bombings. His story is a warning to us all. If you take comfort from the fact that if you don’t demonstrate about anything the laws won’t affect you, then think again. If you’re not bothered about having an ID card because you’re a law-abiding citizen who never gets into trouble with the police then think again. David wasn’t protesting about anything. He was just going about his business, leaving work to go for a drink, when he discovered more than he wanted to know about the police’s new powers.
He was planning to meet his girlfriend in Hanover Square, and went to get a train from Southwark underground station, carrying a small black rucksack he used as a workbag and wearing normal and unremarkable clothes. He walked through the barrier, past a policeman, and went down to the platform. A train entered the station, then suddenly police officers began to swarm around him. They handcuffed him behind his back and took away his rucksack. They told him he was being held for his own safety under the Terrorism Act, that they found his behaviour suspicious from direct observation of him and from watching him on CCTV: he didn’t look at the policeman when he walked through the gate, he was wearing a jacket ‘too warm for the season’ (despite the day before being the coldest day in July for twenty-five years), he was carrying a rucksack and he looked at people on the platform before playing with his mobile phone. All, it seemed, were the actions of a terrorist.
David was led away from the platform, where trains were no longer stopping, to the emergency staircase. Two Bomb Squad officers walked past him and one of them jokingly called out, ‘Nice laptop!’ A police officer then apologized to David on behalf of the Metropolitan Police. David’s handcuffs were removed and they began to hand David back his possessions. But then another officer appeared and explained angrily that this was not the required procedure, so the cuffs were put on David again. Then a police van arrived and he was told to wait in the back. Five minutes later he was arrested for suspicious behaviour and being a public nuisance. David had no idea what was going on.
He was taken to Walworth police station where Polaroid photographs of him were taken, along with his fingerprints and DNA swabs from each side of his mouth. He called his girlfriend, who was crying and kept repeating, ‘I thought you were injured or had an accident. Where were you? Why didn’t you call me back?’ He was put in a police cell where another officer told him that his flat would now be searched under the Terrorism Act. The police agreed to call his girlfriend to warn her of their arrival, but in the end they didn’t bother.
At the flat his girlfriend was questioned. David later wrote, ‘They took away several mobile phones, an old IBM laptop, a Be Box tower computer (an obsolete kind of PC from the mid-1990s), a handheld GPS receiver (positioning device with maps, very useful when walking), a frequency counter (picked it up at a radio amateur junk fair because it looked interesting), a radio scanner (receives shortwave radio stations), a blue RS232C breakout box (a tool I used to use when reviewing modems for computer magazines), some cables, a computer security conference leaflet, envelopes with addresses, maps of Prague and London Heathrow, some business cards, and some photographs I took for the fifty years of the Association of Computing Machinery conference. This list is from my girlfriend’s memory, or what we have noticed is missing since.’ When I met David five months after the even
t he still did not have permission to travel to the United States, which was impacting on his job as an IT specialist, and the police had still not returned some of his possessions. He had no idea if the record of his arrest on suspicion of terrorism had been passed to any outside agencies like the CIA or Interpol. ‘I just get really nervous when I fly now in case something happens to me at Immigration.’
You see, it wasn’t just our politicians running around like headless chickens after the 7 July bombings, the police had got in on the act too. A week before David Mery’s arrest, on Friday, 22 July, I was sitting in my office daydreaming when Rob, a designer who rented one of the desks, appeared looking flustered. He had just been caught up in a security alert at Stockwell tube station. ‘I was on the train and people started shouting “Bomb!” at a bag that had smoke coming out of it in the next carriage. Then I heard loads of firecrackers, people started screaming, and everyone began running to get out of the station.’ The firecrackers turned out to be the sound of gunshots: the police fired eleven rounds, six of which went into a young Brazilian man’s head. The ‘smoking bag’ must have been the product of confused Chinese whispers.
In the report that followed a year later it was clear that the police didn’t really know what they were doing that day, and their new powers to execute a shoot-to—kill policy led to tragically brutal consequences. Even the Israeli police have to be sure that explosives are present before shooting a possible suicide bomber. Jean Charles was wearing a light denim jacket and wasn’t even carrying a bag. The incident proves that under pressure the police can misuse excessive powers if they are granted them by government. It is not for the police to stop and question whether or not a law is justified. They are given powers and will be judged harshly if they are found not to have used them if it turns out later that they could have saved lives, regardless of the way these laws impact on civil liberties. The more powers you give the police, the more likely they are to overreact to the ‘worst-case scenario’ to cover themselves rather than allow common sense to prevail - something, as we will see in a moment, that resonates strongly with anyone who attempted to protest outside the American airbase RAF Fairford during the Iraq war.
Most people were horrified at the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes but at the same time understood the pressure on the police to prevent another suicide bombing. This was the context surrounding David Mery’s arrest too, so perhaps we should give the police a break. Putting to one side the moral questions that should be asked about the police adopting a shoot-to-kill policy in the first place - and the legality of keeping on a database the fingerprints, DNA and photographs of an innocent man who has never been found guilty of any crime, not to mention being able to search and remove articles from his house under terrorist legislation in the absence of intelligence or evidence of any kind that he was a terrorist — the atmosphere in London was on the verge of hysteria at the time. We were all bracing ourselves for another attack, and the police clearly were too. They were frightened and had no idea how to combat such an invisible threat. According to Andrew Gilligan in the Evening Standard, the police had been granted the power to shoot to kill ‘entirely in secret, at a meeting of the police, MI5 and civil servants. The bodies supposed to set policing policy, Parliament and the Metropolitan Police Authority, were not even told.’ There was clearly panic on the streets of Whitehall.
But while we can perhaps forgive the actions of the armed police on the scene who believed they were dealing with a genuine suicide bomber, we must have no sympathies for our government behaving in the same confused manner in the weeks and months that followed 7 July. Our MPs act as a barrier to protect our rights and freedoms in the absence of a written constitution. It was a time for clear thinking; instead we got a catastrophic overreaction that produced reams and reams of freedom-eroding legislation. They built on the foundations of the Criminal Justice Act of 1994 with terrifying consequences.
The government’s policies are supposedly just a question of opinion as to what does or does not constitute an acceptable amount of freedom in the light of the terrorist threat. As we have seen, ladders are a significantly greater threat to public safety than terrorism. And would their authoritarian policies prevent terrorism anyway? ID cards won’t, according to Charles Clarke, who was Home Secretary at the time of the July bombings. This is absolutely not an ideological battle or a matter of opinion. It’s about whether or not the government has proved to the public beyond reasonable doubt, through the use of evidence, that their new laws arc actually necessary and will prevent terrorism. That is what it all comes down to. Is there sufficient evidence that these pieces of legislation are actually necessary to protect us, and will they work? Those are questions not one of the MPs who voted for these laws has answered in the civil liberties debate. Never mind the cost, which also has to be considered (£18 billion for ID cards, according to analysts, though the Home Office claims it will ‘only’ be half that amount).
Our civil rights and freedom to protest have been attacked by so many bits of legislation since Labour came to power that I risk boring you by detailing them all here. Instead I contacted Liberty, one of the UK’s leading human rights and civil liberties organizations, and asked them to help me compile a top ten list of the most unjustified and outrageous laws currently on the statute book. Liberty are keen to point out that a lot of the legislation in the following Acts and Orders is necessary, but there are ‘sections’ tucked away in each of them that impact severely on civil liberties with no justification. As with the exclusion zone set out in Section 132 of SOCPA, these sections often have little or nothing to do with the main contents of the Acts within which they are contained. In the words of Liberty’s policy director, Gareth Crossman, ‘When you become a legislation train spotter like me you see the Government chipping away at our freedom all the time.’
I met Gareth and Liberty’s press officer, Jen Corlew, and told them about what happened to David Mery. Gareth leant over his coffee. ‘That situation is typical of this government’s mindset when it comes to legislation,’ he said. ‘They see a problem that is frightening the public before drawing up legislation that in their view will combat it that is as wide-reaching as they can possibly get away with. Only to then say, “But don’t worry, it won’t be misused.’” On the one hand that kind of reassurance is simply not good enough when we should have rights to protect us. On the other, in a frightening number of cases, it’s plainly untrue.
Here, then, are the top ten Crap British Laws:
10. The Sex Offences Act 2003
A perfect example of the heavy-handed way in which our government draws up new laws. Section 9 prohibits sexual contact with a child, which is obviously justified, but when applied with Section 13, which lists all the offences that are crimes, including if they are committed by people who themselves are under sixteen, it actually makes it a criminal offence for two teenagers to snog. So in Britain, kissing is now an offence if you’re under sixteen. Fact.
Section 71 makes it an offence for anyone to have sex in a public lavatory. It may not be the most tasteful thing you could ever do, but is having sex with a consenting someone in a public toilet really a criminal offence? The absurdity of this law would be brought into focus if you decided not to have sex in the cubicle itself but outside, up against the wall of the lavatory, instead, which is perfectly fine according to the law.
If you were convicted of any of these crimes your name would be entered on the sex offenders register that every- ^ one associates with those who have committed acts of sexual depravity on children. Not the ideal reference to get if later in life you applied for a job that involves any contact with people under sixteen.
9. The Children Act 2004
This piece of legislation includes unnecessary information-sharing powers brought in after the tragic death of a little girl called Victoria Climbie. Lord Laming’s inquiry into Victoria’s death - Social Services failed to protect her from abusive and ultimately murderous carers - de
scribed ‘a catalogue of administrative, managerial and professional failure by the services charged with her safety’. According to Gareth Crossman, ‘The worst possible way to introduce legislation is on the back of someone’s death. There is no doubt that the information-sharing powers that already existed would have allowed information about Victoria Climbie to be shared. It’s just that the staff weren’t trained how to use them, they didn’t have the resources they needed, and they made mistakes. In my view the new powers of information-sharing in this Act are utterly counterproductive because it means social workers are going to be recording every single thing in case something comes up that they should have spotted. Huge files will be built up on all our children and they won’t be able to see the wood for the trees so the children who are actually in danger will be missed. This makes it the worst type of legislation because it totally undermines familial privacy and at the same time increases the chance of tragedies occurring. ,yThey have these wonderful justifications for recording information, “anything that might give rise to a cause for concern”. Well, if you’re the one who has to decide if something is a cause for concern, you may as well just say “anything”. This Act creates another level of bureaucracy that staff will have to waste time wading through instead of looking out for threatened children.’ Jen Corlew added, ‘It’s the worst-case scenario because you’ve got information-sharing between all the different agencies, which could lead to false conclusions. As a result of this law we’re now seeing cases of children being taken away from their parents because of such false presumptions.’
8. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 Orders