Photoshop for freedom - how YOU can beat the Parliament Square crackdown!

This is just another idea for how we might work to highlight the absurdity of Blair's criminalisation of peaceful protests in Parliament Square.

Under Section 132 of the 2005 "Serious Organised Crime" bill, any person doing or saying anything political within 1km of Parliament, without Police, permission can be arrested and prosecuted. Earlier this month Maya Evans was the first person to fall foul of this law, after she stood at the Cenotaph and read the names of dead British soldiers without permission from the authorities.

It's time for mass action! This is just one suggestion for a simple, quick, low-cost method of peaceful resistance.

1. Get hold of:
- A placard (or T-shirt) saying something political (eg. "Balls to the ban on free speech in Parliament Square", "Maya Evans is not a criminal", "Give Speech A Chance" etc.)
- A copy of one of today's newspapers
- A digital camera
- A willing volunteer
- A computer with Photoshop (or equiv) and internet access

2. Go to Parliament Square, stand in front of Big Ben, and pretend to be a tourist while your friendly volunteer takes a couple of pictures for effect.

3. When the Police are not looking, whip out your placard or T-shirt slogan, hold up your copy of today's paper (to prove that this happened AFTER the crazy law was brought in), and get another quick picture.

4. Do a runner.

5. Upload the picture(s) to your computer, edit them to disguise your face, then distribute them widely on the internet (Indymedia, Urban 75 etc.)

*If this takes off, it will quickly become apparent that this illegal law is completely unenforceable. There's no way the Police can stop and question every person who wants to have their picture taken in front of Big Ben, so there's really no way they can tell who is and isn't a protestor without shutting the whole place down, and even Blair doesn't yet seem that bonkers.

Vorsprung Durch Technik!!!

Boadacea

Comments

Hide the following 14 comments

what a good idea

22.12.2005 14:14

what a great idea that is i have to say its a stroke of genius, i would rather some mass (not organised) accidental meet up (you know what are you 2000 people here all at random) but its a good start

badger

another idea

22.12.2005 16:21

decide a message

eg

Blair

get a group to wear a t shirt/item of clothing with a prominant letter
[could be luminous at night]

[in this case a group of 5people with B, L, A, I, R]

assemble the group in various situations
for a photo that looks like a tourist pan-back/ landscape

then rearrange

to spell B-LIAR

publish both photos

he he

Let's brainstorm!

22.12.2005 16:31

Hi there Badger! Glad you like the idea - I basically think that the more suggestions we can come up with better. I like your one about the accidental meet up. Maybe 2,000 people who all happen to be wearing "Bollocks to Blair" T-shirts could all accidentally meet in Parliament Square. I know it's a highly improbable event, but it is statistically possible. After all, we know that if you stick a sexed-up chimpanzee in front of a typewriter and leave him there to bang randomly at the keys for long enough, he'll eventually hammer out the entire text of a Foreign Office briefing alleging the existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq...

I definitely think that this "undercover" T-shirt + digital camera combo is an interesting one just because it's so hard to suppress, and yet it could make for great media coverage, particularly if we get some funny ones. Big Ben is a nice iconic image, too... Maybe we could even start a competition! I was thinking of doing some sort of thematic series, like a different T-shirt slogan every day or something.

Or perhaps we could produce a T-shirt with all the names of the British Iraq casualties on it... OR... 97 different T-shirts, each with one name in big letters. A 97-day series. Hmmm... Any thoughts?

If no-one else wants to go first, I'll try and sort something out in the New Year... I do think this could be the peace-activists' answer to "happy slapping", though!!

Boadicea (or however you spell it)

Even Better Idea

22.12.2005 16:46

Stop paying your union subs.
They wont be able to give NEW LAB £40 million to fight the next election.
NL will loose and the silly law will be overturned when the meglamaniacs loose power.

Hey Presto
Direct action

DONT LIKE IT...DONT FUND IT !

Mendip warrior

BLAIR/BLAIR idea

22.12.2005 16:50

Love that B-L-A-I-R / B-L-I-A-R idea - specially the glow-in-the-dark letters!!!

Boadicea

A small token

22.12.2005 17:27

Bodacea

I see your point but only a small number of people on sites like this will see such images. If you instead did a demonstration elsewhere for several hours then hundreds of people would see. I think the only way to beat this law is mass arrests but are enough people willing to go through the arrest/court process?

Rich

Mass arrests etc.

22.12.2005 18:32

Rich,

I agree that a mass-protest would have an even greater effect but I don't see this as an either/or. My feeling is that every little action contributes to the general current and helps to spur people on to bigger things. Think about Brian Haw - he's just one man but his persistence has inspired to thousands.

I don't honestly know if we can persuade thousands of people to risk arrest, but I do have a feeling that a small cohort of cheeky monkeys could help to get valuable publicity for this issue, and be a real thorn in the government's side. Some of these photos (if they were good enough and funny enough) might find their way into the mainstream media. It's kind of the guerilla tactic as opposed to the head-on assault. Big demos are great but small ones can work well on the effort/output ratio. Yesterday's Xmas Carol thing involved less than two hundred people, was mostly organised by one person in the space of six days, and got mainstream news coverage on the BBC TV, radio plus all this lot

http://news.google.com/news?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=RNWE,RNWE:2005-06,RNWE:en&tab=wn&ncl=http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-12/22/content_3953678.htm&hl=en.

Here's another cheeky monkey who already made his own contribution last week:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/4527686.stm

So anyhow, I suggest we keep this discussion going... Any suggestions for the name of this little project? I'm thinking of something Bush-esque, maybe along the lines of "Operation Enjoying Freedom", "Operation Cheeky Monkey", or else maybe..... "Operation T-shirt of Truth"

Boadicea

pedantic point (maybe)

22.12.2005 19:50

Have all MP's got permission from the police then to, well, be politicians within the 'exclusion zone' or is mass citizens arrests a possibility?

Oi!

politicians etc

22.12.2005 21:07

I THINK that the ban applies to everyone - so any MP or Lord making any kind of political speech outside the Palace of Westminster could potentially be arrested! At present there's no ban on MPs saying political things INSIDE Parliament, but I'm sure Charles Clarke's working on that one!

B'cea

Genius

22.12.2005 21:39

Let's have a rogue's gallery of these (did I say rogues? Anyone protecting the hard-won liberties of this nation against the pedants in power is a hero, not a rogue!) and get 'em into newspapers. The Independent and the Guardian are obvious targets.

Postmodern protests...you are ahead of the game!

SOCPA is a disgrace. It is not only stupid in theory, it doesn't work in praxis. It makes nobody safer except for government mandarins whose paper-circulating jobs are cemented with the exponential growth of aimless cautions and arrests.

Singing carols, incidentally, is not a 'protest'. And 'inviting' implicitly contains 'notifying' within it.

"Unnecessary laws weaken the necessary laws" - Montesquieu

"The more laws, the less justice" - www.reprieve.co.uk

Matthew Edwards
mail e-mail: matthewedwards999@yahoo.co.uk

lack of ideas

23.12.2005 09:51

A mass demo and form a human ring around the 1 mile zone, draw a chalk line around the zone, ?
Raise awareness

Fred

there IS a plan to encirle the zone

24.12.2005 14:22

re fred's comment about encircling the zone, try www.pledgebank/protest where 170 of the 6000 people needed have already signed up for a mayday protest. (well, it's a start!!).

also there will undoubtedly be other mass actions before then.

try checking www.peopleincommon.org and www.j-n-v.org for future info on protests and disobedience.

encircler

when obscuring your face

27.12.2005 21:56

If you were to obscure your face, using photoshop, it would be a terrible shame to use some scribbly blob of paintbrush. For best effect, adopt the visage of, some celebrity.
then, having done so, offer to sell the produce to the gutter press for some ridiculous amount.

Maybe not. But photoshopping in a celebrities face on a picture might serve to both make the point and make the "quality" of the image as "evidence" quite questionable.

It would mean you could reasonably say - "It looks to me like XXXX opposes the exclusion zone".

stupid celebrity fetischist

Help the police by pointing out anyone who may be making a protest

28.12.2005 01:33

Please help the police by wandering around Parliament Square and informing officers of anyone who may be making a protest? Be thorough and ensure you include:

- Any American tourists you may overhear saying that Big Ben is not big enough.

- Anyone you see wearing a charity wristband.

- Anyone carrying a newspaper with a political headline.

- Anyone overheard conversations that may have any political content.

- Any politicians giving news interviews. These are especially good because the police can use the TV pictures as evidence.

Together we'll nail these Serious Organised Crimimals.

Boris