Parliament passed a law stating that we can't protest in central London without first asking for permission from a certain Commissioner Ian Blair. Should you ever wish to ask for permission, you'll have to fill in the application form and submit it by hand six days before you want to protest. PLEASE DISTRIBUTE this application form to those who would like to protest.
The UK government has passed a law making it illegal to have an "unathorised protest" in central London. I feel this is the most insidious of laws imaginable as it sets up a psychology of feeling "We can't do as we wish without their permission" and "We need their authority before we excercise our free wills".
Not knowing how hard it would be to get permission, I rang Charing Cross police and asked them. They sent me the attached forms. Please distribute these forms far and wide to any who might wish to protest in Central London but who have stopped protesting because of this law.
I personally feel the questions they ask us are highly intrusive but think we should all have access to the questions to know what info they are gathering. I do not believe in the authority of Ian Blair and do not believe in the spirit of this law.
Please download and comment especially if you can think of any clever way to nip this and other anti-social laws in the bud.
Not knowing how hard it would be to get permission, I rang Charing Cross police and asked them. They sent me the attached forms. Please distribute these forms far and wide to any who might wish to protest in Central London but who have stopped protesting because of this law.
I personally feel the questions they ask us are highly intrusive but think we should all have access to the questions to know what info they are gathering. I do not believe in the authority of Ian Blair and do not believe in the spirit of this law.
Please download and comment especially if you can think of any clever way to nip this and other anti-social laws in the bud.
Comments
Hide the following 6 comments
sean
23.08.2005 17:23
Would it be possible to get permission for every day of the week for seperate demonstrations, thus rendering the law useless?
I guess the important thing would be to find out on what basis they can refuse a demonstration. That'd be how I plan a legal workaround.
Out of interest, have any of the arrests resulted in charges under SOCA 2005?
Cheers!
magoo (no, the REAL one!)
Permission
23.08.2005 18:35
Magoo,
Maybe learn how to use GnuPG... You'll be able to digitally sign your posts here and whoever has access to your public key (which you share with everyone) can verify the originator of a post. when you sign your posts and comments to the newswire, we will know it was you. hope that's helpful. the other thing to do is to encourage a java geek to modify the mir source so that people can password-protect their usernames, if they wish to.
on with the show -
I feel the legislation has a deeply powerful psychological impact. The new rules attempt to put a layer on top of our freedom so that when we want to do something, we have to seek permission. I'm much more of an anti-authoritarian than anything else, and feel their attempts to construct this pseudo-layer of protector above us is extremely damaging. It must be stopped. It seems to me to be an insidious attempt for the power-mongers to consolidate their power by construction of an artificial layer of authority above you and i.
You ask, "Would it be possible to get permission for every day of the week?" There are 2 people, Brian Haw being one of them, who fill in forms 1 month in advance. The copper I spoke to told me "Haw asked to have 'until I die' on the form" but this is not a date. They instead put the 31st of august on the form.
I don't believe the law can be rendered useless in this way... e.g. it is not legal for you to go there and protest the destruction of virgin rainforest just because I have permission to be there and protest an arms fair. if you want to protest the destruction of the rainforest, too bad, coz it is too late now to organise a protest for this weekend. they want six working days - effectively giving them about 2 weeks to plan. plus they want to know where you will be meeting to discuss the protest.
funnily enough, the copper on the phone told me that if i went down there and clearly joined in brian's protest rather than start my own, that i would be permitted to do so. this is yet to be tested.
also not tested - moving protests. i am curious as to the next critical mass. when is it? has there been one in august yet?
You write "the important thing would be to find out on what basis they can refuse a demonstration." the cop on the phone said they couldn't refuse a protest but they can restrict numbers, size of placards, noise levels & crowd movement. effectively, you are allowed to have a very small, very quiet protest, but only if you ask in advance. if you estimate 150 people will turn up, and 300 turn up, you will most likely be refused your right to protest.
"have any of the arrests resulted in charges under SOCA 2005?" I understand there are 11 people facing charges. they had their preliminerary court cases last week. They are still facing charges. I suppose the only way to beat this law is to have these charges rendered invalid and have them dropped. This is the ideal outcome. the 11 arrested have pleaded not guilty.
Here's a quote from parliamentprotest.org.uk regarding Ian Blair's probable involvement in the stockwell cover-up:
----"Now, in August, in order to peacefully protest at this scandalous situation, the demonstrators have now to apply in writing beforehand, to the "Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis" i.e. to Sir Ian Blair himself, the very man that they are protesting against."----
so if you want to protest blair, you have to ask his permission. how can this be good for one's soul i ask you... but, i think you're asking the right questions and more of us need to be asking them. let's just focus on getting the charges dropped for the "parliament eleven" and see if we can beat this...
blogged some more thoughts on this here:
sean
Sean
Sean
23.08.2005 19:07
It irks me that technically we now do not have the automatic right to protest and freely assemble wherever we wish. Morally, this should be at odds with human rights legislation, but I'm guessing we both already know that EU HR law is shot through with enough governmental get out clauses to render it nothing more than a joke.
I was rather hoping to hear that at the worst they were facing simple Public Order charges (a sign the CPS had no guts to test the law and lose a handy dispersal tool). Who is representing the 11 accused? Have the CPS disclosed their case yet? Sorry, I'm not hot on criminal protocol...
Sounds like the frontline plod as pretty unenthusiastic about it too.
Thanks for the tip on GnuPG... I also found something called "Entropy Gathering Daemon" hahahaha! Sounds like Slayer's next release. I'll make my project for tonight to actually understand the readme.txt hahaha!
Thanks for keeping us up to date on this.
RE: Ian Blair. Not to get wildly off topic and attract the Zionist brigade. I reckon there were two units working that day with two sets of orders... But I reckon it'll out in the wash. Shooting a foreign national was a BIG fuck up. Their diplomats won't let it lie, hopefully. But, as someone pointed out elsewhere, they sack him and they'll just get another sock puppet in!
Lest we not forget Blair invoking the Parliament Act re Hunting with Dogs. Irrespective of what side of the fence you are on, it was a pretty fucked up manouvre.
Well we're living through "interesting times" as the Chinese proverb goes!
magoo
Extra Extra
23.08.2005 22:05
It is obvious that over the last 20 years there have been numerous reasons for larger sections of society to become increasingly fearful of the police. In particular since the miner's strike and the battle of the beanfield there has been very little trust of the police force. coppers are no longer a part of the community as much as they wish they were. the majority of them i suppose are little more than political pawns these days when it comes to suppressing dissent. there is little in the way of police and community interaction. basically we're scared of them coz they gang up and have power over us.
Now with this extra fear in our hearts, it's only natural people don't want to give up their details to the police when we want to stage a protest. But the protest application form insists the applicant gives their name, where and when we will be meeting (both before and after the protest), our full home address, our protest start-time, the end-time and a date in which the applicant-to-protest is willing to meet with the police.
Few people are going to want to give this info over to the police - why the fuck should they - so the natural outcome is a decreased number of people protesting and therefore a decreased level of participation in our so-called democracy. dissent is silenced. let's go have a cup of tea.
Let's make it clear for the record - it is none of the polices' business what my name is! and no, i don't want to meet with them before i go to an anti-war demo!
i believe it is worth experimenting with this application form, leaving some fields blank and seeing how much freedom we really do have. the cop on the phone said no applications had been refused thus far, but they have set up a very effective method of spying on would-be-protestors where the one who protests is now forced to hand over all personal details (six working days in advance).
i'm in rant mode a bit, but hopefully you get the gist of my issue here.
Sean
Sean
23.08.2005 23:15
Now, before I start sounding like Norman Tebbit. I do however recognise that the present system is nowhere near perfect and travelled further all the time.
As you point out there is no true democray in the legal system (politicians elected by the minority and corporate sponsored bills pushed through with kickbacks/ 3-line whip), the Police and Armed Services are woefully antiquated in their structure (despite being the ONLY scenario I can defend the authoritarian chain of command structure).
The funny thing is I have had experience with people within the police and army bemoaning just the same thing (albeit sometimes inadvertantly as a social class issue). I think there can be an element of direct democracy employed in deciding who gets what position, but essentially the chain of command needs to inplace otherwise you'd have a free for all.
You are right that as the legal constitution functions, it doesn't represent the interests of the people, but rather of the elite. And I think THAT is the fundamental problem, and it's a problem for everyone of any every political persuasion (barring the elite).
That being said, I don't think that makes coppers a legitamte target for random violence or abuse- not if you believe in practising human rights. It's a shit system, but not as shit as having nothing and still a darned sight better than Saudi!
The problem is how the fuck do we devolve power away from the shit system? Revolutions tend to always end in disaster. If you try to opt out the government comes after you. You to reform from within and they corrput you???
The scariest thought is "What if it NEVER gets any better than this???"
I see the Thatcher years (Miners, Steelworkers et al) as being the start of basically heading back towards the feudal system. We are being battery farmed. They took away social cohesion and replaced it with something called "The Service Sector", Orwellian workhouses full of skilled artisans made to enter data on why some shit product made in some 3rd World country was fucked. Not only have we been robbed of cohesion, but of pride, of power to organise labour and THAT is why I reckon crime and mental health has been developing as it has.
But hey, WTF do I know I'm just a Blairite, right-wing spook cop troll hahahaha!
My theory is that for direct democracy to come about people have to start replacing the state.
If someone can't get the housing association to fix their roof, start a roof fixing collective and so on and so forth.
And that'd scare the shit out the Establishment more than setting fire to someone's Jag.
Well, it's nice to dream!
To swing back to topic: one of the saving graces of this country was the kind of verbal contract on identity. I don't need permission to exist. And your right, they are trying to rob us of that last luxury. And I ain't having it!
magoo
Just noticed this bit... tired eyes now.
23.08.2005 23:20
Yeah, definitely. I was also thinking that if we could some legal advice in terms of how far we could push the letter of the law. Can they refuse a demo based on numbers? At what point does it become illegal to submits numerous applications. etc etc etc.
Making the law a (nice and legal) pain in the arse for the Met could be an approach. That being said, I have never met a line manager that doesn't drool at expanding his staffing levels hahahaha! What's the social demography of Westminster council tax payers???
Magoo