The tactics used mean that without doubt we live in a police state. Do they have any knowledge, let alone understanding of the Human Rights Act 1998?What about freedom of expression and movement?

Cannot someone get Birnbergs down there and drag the buggers through the courts? May be if it costs them plenty they will think twice as they are supposed to be cash strapped these days.

Its private property Rosa.You dont have freedom of movement or expression on other people's private property. Try and grasp that concept if you can. The law states that if I went into your house with banner, locked on to your bedroom door and shouted slogans, I would be breaking the law. Why? because its private farkin' property!

Not sure if that's meant to be irony Ian or if you really are that stupid?

The ethical situation is very clear. Pseudo-private venues such as government and company buildings, transport infrastructure, shops, malls, clubs, pubs, etc, are not REALLY private in the same way as someone's house - they wouldn't exist if it weren't for mass PUBLIC use or activities. So in other words, they are PUBLIC places which are run despotically via the PRETENCE that they are equivalent to something which is only used by one person, a household, or a small group - in other words as MYTH. It has no real significance - otherwise it would just be possible to abolish civil liberties by privatising all the public space.

The legal situation is less clear. There are a lot of legal loopholes which allow repression in pseudo-private spaces. But this also does not mean that everything the police do is legal. If someone's only "offence" is being on pseudo-private property, this is trespass which is a civil offence. So police would either have to find some way in which the trespass is "aggravated", or find some other offence - and the other offence could not be something like holding a banner. So what happens is either fabricated charges, catch-alls or offences which are overly broad and open to abuse(such as breach of the peace and harassment), or forms of harassment short of arrest and charge, which protesters don't have to do anything illegal to be subject to (hence the "terrorism" searches). It's very clear that what's going on here is deliberate police harassment in order to disrupt and criminalise protest - anything else is pretext and excuse. And of course such deliberate attacks on protests are against the letter and spirit of human rights guarantees.

We all know very clearly that certain kinds of things are permitted in a liberal-democratic regime - these include things like the right to protest, to assemble, to carry banners, give out fliers, run street stalls, chant slogans, etc. That the government and police in a liberal democracy aren't supposed to try to squelch these things by laws, arrests, violence or intimidation. That this is the difference between a liberal democracy and a totalitarian state.

This said, it's very unclear what is legal and what is not in Britain - the British state has rushed in a whole raft of laws which are basically totalitarian in form (literally thousands) - most of these will take decades to be dragged through the UK and European courts before we have precedent on what they can be used for - and the courts aren't very reliable at striking down obviously totalitarian measures, partly because judges tend to be reactionary pricks and partly because the ones who aren't are very fenickety-technical and tend to defer to the government.

Hence we are very far from what increasingly look like the "good old days" of the 70s, or even the 80s and 90s, when police abuse could regularly be dragged through the courts successfully if a protester is sufficiently determined to stand up for their rights. To take a couple of examples - the old Public Order Act stop and search "power" was extremely abusive (stop and search is NEVER permissible in a free society, certainly not as a means to scare or disrupt protesters), but also very precisely worded so that police could often be taken to court for misusing it against protesters. The new Terrorism Act version is deliberately constructed so it is virtually unlimited in how it can be used, it isn't technically "illegal" for police to use it to search for something unrelated to terrorism, to use it without "reasonable suspicion", to use it based on profiling, to use it against people the police know aren't terrorists and so on. Which puts it in contradiction with several aspects of the Human Rights Act and doubtless will have it dragged through judicial review eventually, and maybe all the way to the European Court, but it could be twenty years from now before this finally happens.

Things can still sometimes be challenged. The destruction of photographs is probably illegal - there was a previous similar case in Nottingham over Indymedia journalist Tash photographing armed police at a train station (which is also technically "private property") - the problem being that it would now be difficult to challenge because the police could deny having done such a thing, and might claim that the person handed over the camera "voluntarily" (lies, but lies which are hard to disprove). Now someone has been arrested for refusing to cooperate, police could conceivably be sued for wrongful arrest on the grounds that the powers are being misused.

But in general we're soooo far past having a liberal democracy in Britain that expecting to be protected by laws guaranteeing basic freedoms just doesn't work any more - the state can no longer be constrained based on its internal logic, or its social contract with citizens (it doesn't really think it needs consent anymore) - it's a matter of whether it can be defeated from the outside.

* Organising unauthorised demonstrations is now a serious offence. There are people serving four-year jail sentences simply for organising demonstrations (in connection with animal rights).
* Certain ideological viewpoints are now criminalised as such. There are people serving three-year jail sentences simply for shouting slogans (in connection with Islamist protests).
* Dispersal zones are being used to criminalise protests in entire areas.
* Terrorism laws are being routinely abused against protesters.
* Companies are now able to get injunctions to ban or restrict protests against them.
* Protests offensive to the powerful can be and sometimes are deemed "harassment".
* Trying to alter corporate policies through campaigning is deemed "blackmail".
* The state bans certain people from protesting under ASBOs. ASBOs also destroy such rights as freedom of movement and expression (people are banned from going to certain areas, from wearing certain clothes, etc).
* Self-defence and circumstantial defences for resisting police have been removed (these existed as late as the early 1990s).
* Protest actions of all kinds - from symbolic picketing, through various kinds of civil disobedience and NVDA, to "violent" resistance - are all criminalised systematically and disproportionately.

Basically the situation in Britain is equivalent to that in "soft" totalitarianisms, such as eastern Europe in the 1970s, or Spain in Franco's last years - police will attack people in various ways simply for protesting in public, forming organisations opposed to the existing regime, and engaging in any kind of public action. As with these regimes, there are certain very limited conditions under which protests are "permitted" provided protesters jump through various hoops, but these are neither a guarantee of the right to protest (permission can be refused in a thousand ways), nor a guarantee of a right to protest (a permitted protest can still be interfered with in various ways). Since the legal system is integrated into the state apparatus, it is of limited use in challenging such repression - the state will basically legalise repression. Britain is not a liberal democracy anymore.

What is impressive is that protests and resistance continue regardless (as of course they did even in the worst totalitarian regimes). I have a worry, though, that protesters continue to act and talk as if we are in a liberal democracy. We are not. We need to find ways other than the legal guarantee of basic liberties to prevent our efforts from being repressed. The days when mass protests or actions can be organised, and public campaigns conducted, under the protective blanket of basic rights are sadly over (for now at least). Instead we need to look at how repression can be made costly for the state, prevented or resisted at the point of action, delegitimated, and generally pushed back. East European dissidents used the NVDA and civil disobedience models, but with a different symbolic effect, often trying precisely to expose the intolerance of the system through its own overreaction (i.e. they knew the protests would be smashed, but did them anyway, so as to discredit the regime through the appearance of its own action). In this case for instance, protesters might have gone along expecting to be arrested, with the intent to refuse to be searched or to insist on joining the picket.

A more viable alternative, I think, is the European autonomist model which responded to similar slippages towards totalitarianism. Remember what's been happening in Italy for instance, ever since the 1970s - basically the same kinds of provisions have been massively abused there for a long time (criminalising "subversive association", treating presence at a protest as a crime, locking up dissidents as "terrorist supporters", dragnet arrests), and the social movements have responded by becoming a lot more militant. In a case like this, protesters would turn up as planned, but refuse as a group to be searched, linking arms or forming up in padded armour; they'd then call for support, and the police would be surrounded by other protesters from outside, attempting to prevent arrests being made; if arrested, there'd be a mass demonstration outside the prison, and possibly barricades going up elsewhere - in other words, because repression would have consequences for the state, it has to be careful what it does. I think this is the only way protests have survived in Italy, and also Germany (where a similar attempt to criminalise autonomous social movements was pushed back in the 1960s/70s).