Emergency dispatch: Your future as an unperson

The arrests you think are ‘good’ based on no-evidence besides vibes could one day come to your door too.

This was written on a phone. Typos are a political act, grammar errors doubly so.

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There was a quiet agreement about which ones were the ‘bad’ arrests: The Republic 8 because the republican protestors (relentlessly called “anti-monarchy activists” by broadcasters) had asked nicely to protest and been ambushed by the Met; the monarchist who was lifted due to her proximity to a group of Just Stop Oil activists (who also didn’t cause any ‘disruption’) because she was a sweet, sweet sycophant. But others were implicitly deemed to have had it coming: the unpeople.

The unpeople were the 14 Animal Rising activists who, having just started non-violence training at the Just Stop Oil offices in Hackney, were arrested by police who stormed in claiming they were engaged in a conspiracy that none of them knew anything about. The presence of leaflets and screen printing resources — including paint — in an office used by activists was deemed proof enough that a group of civic-minded and deeply passionate women were planning to throw paint and scare the horses (that they are animal rights activists who love animals above all didn’t matter a jot). The women — most of whom had never been arrested before — were held for 14 hours then  released without charge because the “conspiracy” the Met claimed to have broken up was less real than the worst Alex-Jones-on-Infowars fictions.

I’m still waiting for the Met to show us the paint and other items they claim were vital to a conspiracy it invented whole cloth in its fevered imagination.

On Friday, a group of Just Stop Oil protestors — 13 marching in  a larger protest through Westminster — were arrested for walking. The Met put a Section 12 in place — which requires anyone in an area to comply with a specific instruction — then made it illegal to walk in the road and not on the pavement. Most of the JSO activists — having decided that they did not want to be arrested that day — returns to the pavement but 13 who were willing to take a stand remained on the road and were arrested by police for whom heavy-handed is a mantra.

I — along with other worried parties — hung around Hammersmith Police Station from 1pm on Friday until 4am Saturday waiting for the JSO members held there (6 out of the 13) to be set free. They could and should have been released in a few hours under the Police and Criminal Evidence (PACE) guidelines but the Met’s pace slows to a crawl when JSO, XR, Animal Rising, and other direct action groups are involved. The long detention times are a punishment without the inconvenience of having to go to magistrates or the Crown Court.

JSO, XR, Animal Rising and other direct action groups are treated more harshly because the Met sees them as unpeople; it assumes too that the press won’t care (it usually doesn’t) and, in fact, will be accomplice to implying or outright shouting that “these people” deserve it and have fewer rights than “good” ‘law-abiding’ LBC listeners and Daily Mail readers. And so it is that unlawful arrests, undertaken with violence and justified with non-existent evidence of “conspiracy” are treated in Met press releases and media regurgitation of them as ‘good’ arrests.

One day, the people who cheer the crackdowns and head crackings doled out to JSO, XR, Animal Rising, and others might find that they have become unpeople, reduced in status from citizens to ‘agitators’ and ‘enemies of the people’ by laws and police powers that allow the Home Office’s whims to trump everything. But for now they’re delighted to hoot and holler when the unpeople are punished for the crime of having opinions that the editors of right-wing newspapers disdain. You might be a ‘good’ person in the eyes of the Daily Mail today but it takes one angry reporter or malignant Mail news desk psycho to decide that you are an enemy; and if the Sauron Eye of the Murdoch, Rothermere and Barclay press swings to stare at you, every part of your life can be suddenly considered suspect. It is easier to become an unperson than you realise; karma is a bitch and pisses everywhere without regard for your nice carpets and carefully maintained credit rating.

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