A Taxing Question of Proportion

Today's front page of The S*n: Main story with emotional response instructions in red block capitals: Person claims £120 in benefits.

Single column side story: Millionaire state employee fraudulently evades £1,000,000 tax.

Small third story: Millionaire trousers a further £70,000,000 - his annual dodging of £600,000 tax unmentioned.

Brought to you by a billionaire proprietor who has dodged billions of pounds in tax over decades.

Fracking - We Are Winning

Barton Moss near Manchester has been the front line of the anti-fracking campaign in the UK. Police have shown a predictable level of impartiality.

They arrived one rainy day saying that a flare had been fired at a police helicopter two days earlier, cordoned off the tents and undertook searches that involved pulling out everyone's clothes and bedding and leaving it in the rain. Had there actually been any such flare fired the police would not have left it two days to come and investigate.

Older protesters are taken away from the site by the police using a favourite pretext for action with no legal basis, 'for your own safety'.

They have arrested people on a range of trumped up charges. Perhaps the most extraordinary is the incident of a non-protesting Lawful Observer, Dr Steven Peers, who was shooed away from filming an arrest and then arrested for drink-driving even though he was a sober pedestrian. Top tip; don't fit up a person whose role is to film things until you've checked their camera is switched off.



Prosecutors dropped the case as soon as it got to court and he is now suing the police for wrongful arrest and false imprisonment.

Most of the arrests have been whilst walking in front of the delivery trucks. Enclosed in a moving kettle of officers who tread on their heels and kick their ankles, people walk slowly down the access road ahead of the convoy as it arrives in the morning and leaves in the evening. Around fifty people, myself included, have been arrested. Like many of those nicked, I wasn't doing anything that the others weren't, but they tend to pick off the new arrivals or the veterans of other protest camps.

The access road isn't a normal road. It's a private road and a public footpath. The police dug up and nicked the public footpath sign in December, but this does nothing to the legal status of the place.

They were told repeatedly, every day, including just before arresting me, that it was a public footpath and Obstruction of The Highway doesn't apply and such arrests were unlawful.

Yesterday a judge at Manchester Magistrates Court confirmed this. So today people sat in front of the trucks and stopped them for eight hours until the convoy turned around and went away.

The police will now have to fall back on their slurs of protesters turning up for a ruck with the police and what a great job the police are doing of resisting such rabid provocation. That imaginative press release is  believed to be tipped for the Man Booker shortlist, though it will face stiff competition from my strikingly creative arresting officer's statement.

I have never seen a UK environmental campaign that looks so likely to win as the one against fracking. It has the vulnerable fledgling industry element that made the GM campaign successful. Then there is the robust mix of locals, direct activists and NGOs all doing what they do best and working in concert that made the roads campaigns so successful. It has the climate imperative underneath and the sense that drastic looking measures are the only ones that square up to the problem, elements that made the climate camps capture the imagination and move the grounds of debate.

Cuadrilla, the company that had the fracking operation in Balcombe last year, announced a fortnight ago that they were pulling out of all their Lancashire sites. A couple of days later climate denying fuckweasel Environment Secretary Owen Paterson admitted that the protesters are winning the argument, though he didn't say it was due to having better values, science and facts. He attributed it to us having 'exciting clothes'. Last week BP ruled out any fracking in the UK, plainly saying it was because of the protests it would attract. Each new poll shows public opposition to fracking increasing.

We are winning.

Hillsborough: The Treble Injustice

When the Hillsborough Independent Panel report came out the Prime Minister admitted the families had suffered 'a double injustice'; the disaster itself, and the smears and cover up from police.

Today in parliament Steve Rotheram MP says there was a triple injustice - families were also spied upon by undercover police. Families report phone taps and break-ins without robbery. He plainly asked the Home Secretary Theresa May to confirm the spying didn't happen. She dodged it.

Theresa May also said it was 'extremely unfortunate' that police forces didn't give all Hillsborough material to the Independent Panel as they had promised to do. The "Independent" Police Complaints Commission has already recovered 2,500 South Yorkshire police pocket notebooks not available to previous investigations. Thirteen officers have refused to be interviewed by the IPCC and two have not replied.

We know that the secret police sought to protect society from threats. They did not distinguish between a  threat to life and limb, a threat to public order, a threat to corporate profit or a threat police credibility. They put officers into numerous black justice campaigns to deny justice, not just that of Stephen Lawrence's family.

Those campaigns sought to do was expose the police for what they actually were; institutionally corrupt and concerned with protecting their reputation more than admitting wrongdoing, providing answers to those who deserved them and allowing justice. Spying on the Hillsborough families fits squarely into that remit. Today, nearly 25 years on, that injustice continues. 
 
This is yet another strand that need to be included in the one all-encompassing, trusted and truly independent inquiry into the undercover policing scandal.

Testing the Waters

Remember folks, the lack of adequate flood defence and relief is because all the money goes on foreign aid, not because flood funding was slashed to fund tax cuts for the super rich.

We are the fourth biggest economy on earth because of our own hard work and natural superiority, and not because we spend several centuries looting the wealth of countries that we now throw the odd crumb of aid to on condition they let our corporate interests cherry pick their economy.

Whilst we are the fourth biggest economy, we are far from being the fourth-richest nation measured by average incomes. One that is rather better off on a per capita basis is Norway, which in the 1980s decided to keep 51% state ownership of its valuable (and finite) North Sea Oil resources, instead of chucking all that to the private sector. It has since been able to afford to protect its infrastructure from the very high levels of rainfall it endures. And also a load of that social democratic stuff too. you can go to university for free in Norway, even if you're from Eritrea.

Meanwhile, in the UK, we're told the coffers are empty, but since the 2008 banking crisis, banks have paid more than twice as much in bonuses as they have in corporation tax.

As the Met Office links the floods with climate change, long term flood prevention should have a focus on climate change abatement measures. Instead, the government has slashed such funding even when it saved far more money than it cost.

And so we end up wringing our hands and upholstery, demanding that the government answer the real question -  “how many BMWs have to get wet before the government stops trying to impress stupid African babies?”

Where's The Justice?

Another 29 convictions quashed because undercover cop Mark Kennedy's evidence was withheld from the court by police and prosecutors. It happened in an earlier case too.

In April 2009, 114 people were pre-emptively arrested whilst planning to shut down Ratcliffe on soar coal fired power station. Between their planned protest at Ratcliffe on soar power station and the subsequent trial they found out that one of them, Mark Stone, was in fact police officer Mark Kennedy.

Twenty of the Ratcliffe protesters had already been convicted, but the defendants in the separate trial of six more said he must have made some sort of report. As the prosecution have a duty to disclose any evidence that may help the defence, they asked to see it. Rather than do this, the state withdrew the charges (specifically saying it was new evidence and nothing to do with the cop, honest guv) and the trial dramatically collapsed. Two resulting official reports, when sifted in tandem, show that the police and prosecutors had colluded to hide Kennedy's involvement from both trials.

The twenty earlier convictions were quashed. This led the Drax 29 - who'd been driven by Kennedy on their mission to stop a train of coal en route to Drax power station in 2008 - to appeal as well. Earlier today the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas, overturned the convictions saying there was "a complete and total failure" to disclose evidence that would have been fundamental to the activists' defence. He said reasons for the failure remained unclear. Seems pretty clear from where I'm sitting. As with the Ratcliffe trail, they withheld evidence that would exonerate the defendants in order to secure convictions.

In October a conviction was ready to be overturned because, again, one of those arrested but not prosecuted was a police officer, this time Jim Boyling. But, bizarrely, the state has refused to say why it will let the appeal win. Next week several media outlets are going to court trying to force disclosure in the public interest.

...AND JUSTICE FOR THOUSANDS

We can be confident Kennedy and Boyling are not the only ones. But most undercover officers haven't been revealed. There will be dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of miscarriages of justice but the people wrongly convicted won't appeal because they don't know one of their comrades was a cop.

With the Ratcliffe 20, plus the additional Ratcliffe 6, that's 55 wrongful prosecutions and convictions from Kennedy alone. Taken as an average for these officers, that's around 8000 since the secret police started targeting activists this way in 1968. Even if it's just one per officer per year, there are around 600 miscarriages of justice being left to stand.

The Director of Public Prosecutions said they will investigate any cases brought to them, but they won't go searching. Thing is, we can't bring cases if we don't know who the cops were. It's a bit like me getting burgled, but the cops ask me to find a fingerprint and put a name to it before they investigate. It's *they* who hold the only records that can identify culprits and, given we all know these crimes happened, their refusal to investigate amounts to a cover-up.

NO TRUST, NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE

If the smaller, less intrusive, less serious phone hacking scandal warrants a public inquiry, what possible excuse is there to deny one for the secret police scandal? This is one of the biggest nobblings of the judicial system ever. Where's the justice?

At the Leveson inquiry into phone hacking, the police were happy to let a few lowlings go down in flames but when it started to implicate a very senior officer the Met held on to their evidence until it was too late to use, and even then handed it in with a gagging order so it couldn't even be referred to in Leveson's conclusions.

If they'll do that to a public inquiry, what chance is there with Operation Herne, the investigation into the secret police scandal headed by a chief constable where most of the personnel are Met staff including serving police officers with an eye on their future career?

They are already obstructing justice in this as much as they can. When women ex-partners of undercover cops had a hearing a couple of months ago trying to get their human rights claim heard in open court, the police were refusing to even admit Mark Kennedy was a police officer. (The court decided that the human rights claim will be heard in a secret tribunal where only the police and judge are present and the women's lawyers don't get to see what evidence the police present or omit.)

DONE, AND SEEN TO BE DONE 

This isn't just about fitting up hundreds of political activists and ruining lives with wrongful criminal records. It's also about spying on Stephen Lawrence's family and other black justice campaigns to undermine them. It's about the dozens of women who were psychologically and sexually abused by undercover officers, some left with children to raise alone. It's about the bereaved families whose dead childrens' identities were stolen by officers, putting the family at risk of retribution from criminals who thought they had twigged who the mole in their operation was. It's about the blacklisting of thousands of trade unionists on an illegal database with information supplied by police officers.

Beyond all that, it's about whatever was done by the other 90% of these officers who we don't yet know about.

Self-investigations will say 'mistakes were made, nothing systemic or malicious, lessons learned, move along, nothing to see'. There needs to be an open public inquiry conducted in a manner that is trusted by all sides. It needs to deliver justice commensurate with the wrongdoing that it investigates. The Hillsborough Independent Panel showed that such a thing is possible. Anything less is either a failure to understand the enormity of what was done, or else a deliberate obstruction to conceal the truth and stifle justice, yet again.

We Are More Possible Than You Can Powerfully Imagine

The problem with working for social change is that you never know if you're wasting your time. Only hindsight, and almost always a considerable quantity of it, can give you clues.

Every successful campaign - indeed, most historical events - gets tainted by our perspective that includes the time between then and now. It makes it look as if what happened was fated and inevitable. Conversely, things that failed appear as if they were always doomed and those involved were daft to have even tried.

When you read what the contemporaneous mainstream voices invested in the status quo said about, say, the Suffragettes or the civil rights movement, you get a very different view. Likewise,when we get to peer into the minds and deeds of the winners we find that they didn't see themselves with certainty either.

Cabinet papers from the 1984 Miners' Strike released today show the government was readying itself to declare a State of Emergency and, against stated government policy, use troops to move coal. Even with that on the table they weren't entirely confident.

Minutes of the secret cabinet committee, Misc 101, reveal Thatcher and her closest ministers were unsure of what to do: "It was not clear how far a declaration of a state of emergency would be interpreted as a sign of determination by the government or a sign of weakness, nor to what extent to which it would increase docker support for the miners' strike."

In 1952 the government built itself a bolthole in case of nuclear attack. These days it's a weird tourist attraction, which has given rise to hilarious roadsigns.

A guide book to bizarre days out, Bollocks To Alton Towers, explains.

The Secret Nuclear Bunker at Kelvedon Hatch easily qualifies as The World's Most Terrifying Bungalow. It's a place made all the more extraordinary for its very ordinary setting, on a country lane between Chipping Ongar, once the furthest outpost of the Central Line, and Brentwood, infamously crowned The Most Boring Town In Britain.

At first sight an unremarkable 1950s farm cottage, this bungalow is in fact the tip of a government iceberg - a huge three-storey bunker with 10ft thick concrete walls reaching 100ft underground. The local villagers knew nothing of its purpose, being the sort of people who could, back in 1952, remain unfazed by 40,000 tons of cement trundling up the road to Parrish Farm. Even the contractors weren't told what they were building.

When it was sold in 1992 the new owners

found the floors polished to within an inch of their lives and grass clipped to nail-scissor perfection. The four bored guards who had been stationed there had made the place nice and tidy and nicer and tidier...

In four decades of active service, at a cost of £3m a year, Kelvedon Bunker was never at red alert status. It was, only once, cranked up to amber. Not, as you might think, during the Cuban Missile Crisis (which apparently happened too quickly), or the occupation of the Palestinian territories, or the invasion of Afghanistan. Kelvedon was readied for action during the 1984-85 miners' strike, when the government was concerned that the country might be on the brink of civil war.

They really though they might have misjudged it, that the unionised workforce might band together to stem the tide of neoliberal regression that now laps around our necks in 2013. It was in no way a done deal.

So this is why we keep fighting for the change we know is needed. Not because we think we are fated to win, but because there are things worth fighting for. Because even if we fail, we may have laid the foundations of inspiration and experience that others will build upon and succeed. But, most of all, because we cannot foretell the future nor know all that is going on today. As a banner at the Newbury bypass campaign said, we are more possible than you can powerfully imagine.

The Shocking Shock Doctrine

The difference between Labour and Tory governments is that you can keep up with the pace of neoliberal evil Labour inflict. The Tories blast such a blizzard that you miss a lot of it. The kind of stuff that cropped up every few weeks and made you eclaim that you can't believe Labour would try it now just zips past you in a sort of white noise of regression, a cacophony of coins clinking on their way into the overstuffed pockets of the already obscenely wealthy.

This morning alone I've found out:


- Having made a pre-election promise of no cuts to Sure Start centres then axed 500, government websites are having the list of closed ones removed.

- Having promised that the bedroom tax wouldn't affect families with carers, it's been shown to hit 60,000 of them. As predicted.

- Senior Tory Liam Fox says the ringfencing of the NHS budget should be stopped. He uses the phrase "can't be fixed by throwing money at it"; try that on any spending, it sounds convincing even when it's untrue. "You can't sort out a debt problem by throwing money at it". Dr Fox trained as a doctor at public expense before giving up medicine to be a Tory MP.

- They plan to let landowners remove public rights of way centuries old. Bonus points to the Telegraph for characterising walkers as "trampling through gardens" and rights of way that go "straight through houses". Not vast estates of dozens, hundreds or even thousands of acres of open land, then.

And I keep finding I'm the only person in the room who's spotted their 2015 manifesto pledge to repeal the Human Rights Act, with Cameron giving serious consideration being given to complete withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights, something that was reiterated by the Justice Secretary only last week.

We've just entered the last full year of this government. At this rate, that's more than enough time to push us back to the 1830s.

Too Late For Turing But Not For Those Who Follow

After some years of campaigning, a posthumous Royal Pardon has been issued to Alan Turing. He was a genius mathematician whose work broke the Nazi Enigma codes and shortened the second world war. He laid the ground for all of modern computing. Without him, you wouldn't have the computer you're reading this on.

He was also gay and after conviction for consensual adult sex he was forced to have brutal hormone treatment. He also lost his security clearance to work on the government projects that were frankly the only things big enough to use his astonishing abilities. He died after eating an apple laced with cyanide, aged just 41.

It is peculiar to give him a pardon, which is usually issued when there is evidence that the person was wrongfully convicted. Turing most certainly did commit his crimes. It is also odd that the government is starting to play a zero-sum game, that if you do cool enough work for the state it'll let you off some sex offences in return.

But something really is different here, not about Turing but about the criminalisation of homosexuality. Turing is not the first to be absolved. One of the very few great things the Con-Dem government has done is allow men convicted of consensual adult gay sex to have their convictions wiped. Thousands of men have had their lives stymied by being branded sex offender for doing things that are now their protected legal right, and since October last year they can get the records erased.

The Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 requires the convicted man to apply, rather than proactively trawling the files for convictions to nullify, but even so it's astonishing. I cannot think of another law that, once repealed, gave retrospective pardon to its victims. The rule of law and the principle of obedience are usually regarded as paramount.

So giving Turing a pardon is anomalous, and the trade-off aspect is morally questionable. What happened to him was no more despicable or outrageous than what happened to tens of thousands of other men. Persecution is not tolerable if it only happens to us non-geniuses. But the pardon is actually in keeping with a wider legal framework that reflects a society's growing horror at what was done so recently.

Turing is dead; for those personally affected it is merely symbolic. But it cements the changes that have happened, builds an obstacle to backsliding, and adds conscious momentum to the continuing process of liberation, and for that it is to be welcomed.

Undercover Police: No Sex After All

A new police code of ethics will ban undercover officers from having sex with members of the public they are spying on. This completely contradicts a long series of pronouncements from a horde of the most senior police officers and politicians who said it was not only allowed but necessary.

On 13 June 2012 policing minister Nick Herbert told Parliament

What matters is that there is a general structure and system of proper oversight and control, rather than specific directions on behaviour that may or may not be permitted.

Moreover, to ban such actions would provide a ready-made test for the targeted criminal group to find out whether an undercover officer was deployed among them. Specifically forbidding the action would put the issue in the public domain and such groups would know that it could be tested.

On 27 September 2012 Jenny Jones, member of the Greater London Assembly, was at a Police and Crime Committee meeting questioning the Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Craig Mackay.

JJ: Would a serving police officer be given authorisation to start a sexual relationship with an activist while using a false identity?

DC: Not ordinarily, no.

JJ: What do you mean “not ordinarily”?

DC: Well you can’t write a rule for every particular scenario.

Radio 4's File On Four programme of 2 October 2012 featured the first interviews by several of the women affected. It also had the Met's Deputy Assistant Commissioner Patricia Gallan saying

I think it is one of those things that we cannot legislate for every single circumstance. If a circumstance happens where that happens with an officer, I would expect them to immediately report that to a supervisor. Each case needs to be looked at on its merits

The following month the big chief himself, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Bernard Hogan-Howe, told the Home Affairs Select Committee

The fact that it may sometimes happen, I think, could almost be inevitable. Not that I would encourage it, obviously, but when you are deploying an officer to live a lifestyle and they are going to get close to a target or a group of targets, it is not impossible to imagine that human relationships develop in that way.

Last week ago Hogan-Howe clarified his stance when questioned by the tenacious Jenny Jones AM.

what we need is transparency when it happens. The individual involved lets us know and we deal with it as a problem, but do not condemn.

When drugs officers are caught stealing and selling what they confiscate, or officers are proven to be violent or sexually abuse citizens, is it also dealt with it as a problem but not with condemnation? If you want it stopped, make it a sacking offence. Otherwise, it continues.

Just two weeks ago women who had long-term relationships were in court, appealing against the decision to send their human rights case to a Bullshit Stalinist Tribunal. Lawyers for the police said

It might in some circumstances be necessary and proportionate to authorise an undercover operative to engage in sexual contact in order, for example, to maintain cover

But this week Alex Marshall from the College of Policing told MP David Winnick

'the authorising officer should make it clear that sexual activity is not allowed while working undercover'.
Winnick: ‘Totally banned?’
Marshall ‘Yes.’ 

After years of flip-flopping, it now seems that it is OK to have a ready-made test, you can write a rule for every particular scenario, you can legislate for every circumstance, you don't look at each case on its merits, it's not almost inevitable and it is not necessary or proportionate to authorise an undercover operative to engage in sexual contact.

NO CHANGE THERE, THEN

It would be nice to think this was some sort of moral advance. In reality, it appears that senior police have decided to say that sexual activity is legal but not authorised. That is to say, if it were illegal the police as a body would be liable; if it is merely not authorised then it is the fault of the individual officer. Thus, the bigwigs who've permitted and encouraged it get away and the lowlings get all the blame.

More, it seems that they'll be arguing this was always the case, thus evading responsibility for what they oversaw. Liam Thomas was an undercover officer until 2004 and says

The official Met line was 'don't do it', but unofficially it was condoned. I remember one senior detective saying to me, 'Have you embedded yourself in the community yet?' It was tongue in cheek, but I left with the impression that had I shagged around for intelligence, it would have been OK.

Jim Boyling infiltrated environmental activists, marrying one woman he targeted and having children with her. She recalls that

Jim complained one day that his superiors said there was to be no more sexual relations with activists anymore – the implicit suggestion was that they were fully aware of this before and that it hadn't been restricted in the past. He was scoffing at it saying that it was impossible not to expect people to have sexual relations. He said people going in had 'needs' and I felt really insulted.

Two later officers - Rod Richardson and Lynn Watson - did not have long term relationships but instead told activists about their partners who lived elsewhere. On occasions these 'partners'- clearly other officers - would come to social events. This all means that the top brass knew full well about officers having relationships and had effective ways to avoid it.

And yet - most damningly after Watson and Richardson - they sent in Mark Kennedy without a pretend far-off partner. Like Bob Lambert thirty years before him, Kennedy targeted his first long-term girlfriend within weeks of starting his spying. At the very least his superiors chose to put him in a position where this was more likely, and it is plausible that they encouraged and even directed his relationships.

The fact that in the 30 years of known cases only one uncovered officer had no sexual contact with the public, and the overwhelming majority had long-term relationships, shows this was endemic and seemingly strategic.

Undercover officers openly had relationships; this meant they sometimes did so in front of other officers. The fact that John Dines' infiltration of London Greenpeace overlapped with Bob Lambert's in the late 1980s means Lambert's relationships will have been known about. Lynn Watson and Marco Jacobs were, at different times, deployed alongside Mark Kennedy. Watson in particular was at social events where Kennedy was very much in a couple.

Either these officers (and the others like them who haven't been unmasked) failed to report their colleagues' misconduct; or else their superiors failed to act on it; or else it simply wasn't regarded as wrong until the public found out.

Police Spies Out of Lives, which speaks for eight women who had long term relationships with officers and are suing the police, saidof this week's announcement

It’s a welcome step but we must be cautious. We’re still not getting the consistency and action that the public is owed. We are talking about deep abuse of people’s lives, the violation of their human rights, that we know has taken place over the last 25 years. The abuses indicate a profound level of institutional sexism, and also institutional prejudice against members of the public who engage campaigning for social and environmental justice.

There are still many questions which need answers: When does the new training start? What’s happening in the meantime? What about past transgressions? Are any officers facing disciplinary action – or are their superiors taking Hogan-Howe’s stance? Is there any protection for whistle-blowers? Will the police change their legal tactics – or are they going to continue to make their victims have to fight for justice?

Let Them Eat Jam

The BBC stays nigh-on silent about the privatisation of the NHS. But here's a BBC news story complete with audio about a LibDem MP (the hilariously named Tessa Munt) saying that a cut in jam sugar content from 60% to 50% could mean "the end of the British breakfast as we know it". All the news that's fit to, er, take up space with trivia.

The sugar thing, incidentally, seems to be less of a health measure and more to do with standardising for the global market. Still, surely reducing sugar consumption is the kind of thing that's a good idea for the health of the public at large. Maybe so, but then Munt isn't interested in the public's welfare.

She only got into the house of Commons in 2010. Despite such short tenure she's voted:

- to replace Trident (£50bn on unused weaponry whilst benefits are slashed)
- to increase VAT (a tax that hits the poorest hardest)
- to keep detention without charge at 28 days rather than reduce it to 14 days (LibDems, the party of civil liberties)
- against giving communities greater control of shops development to keep payday loan and betting shops out
- against investigating zero-hours contracts with a view to eliminating their abuse

But still, as long as you focus your media strategy on giving blankets to dogs and talking about jam, hopefully nobody will notice that other stuff.