Spare me the sight of Tories demanding more law and order
When politicians defend police violence towards protesters, they make it all the harder for the officers who do a good job
o Dave Hill
o guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 21 December 2010 14.59 GMT
The spectacle of seething Tories demanding lots more law and order is as enlightening now as ever. The year's final mayor's question time at London's City Hall took me back to the day I had to leave a Thatcher-era party conference because the hang 'em-flog 'em speeches were inflicting too much pain. It wasn't what people were saying that brought on nausea and a powerful urge to flee, but the sheer, crushing tedium of it. Watching paint dry or stools float would have been more diverting. More importantly, I'd been subjected to enough proof of a peculiarly Conservative inability to address such issues intelligently. On Wednesday some of Boris Johnson's fellow party members provided a reminder of how very dim Tories can still be.
The subject was violent incidents at recent student demos in the capital. The chap who raised it was Brian Coleman, who is not only a London Assembly member but also a Barnet councillor and chair of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority (LFEPA). In these roles he has won fame for, respectively, claiming £8,000 in taxi expenses, being censured for sending an abusive email to a blogger-resident and, most recently, publicly describing leaders of the Fire Brigades Union with which LFEPA is in dispute as "thoroughly unpleasant" and "thick". Such is his flair for moderation and subtlety.
Coleman asked Johnson, rhetorically, if he thought it necessary for people who go on demos to wear masks. Shouldn't the rules be tightened to prevent this? Surely, he continued, the bad stuff that went on would be repeated endlessly unless police took what he called "firm and dramatic action" on behalf of "Mr and Mrs Average Londoner".
What did he have in mind? Coleman's response to footage of Nicola Fisher being whacked on the leg by Sergeant Delroy Smellie of the Territorial Support Group at a vigil for Ian Tomlinson last year was to say that people who take part in protests should expect that sort of thing. Perhaps he'd like to see the principle inform the conduct of every Met officer (after all, the sergeant was acquitted). He could then, perhaps, sit back and enjoy the televised spectacle of random citizens being soundly beaten in the name of the law, telling himself all the while that London was being made a better place.
Of course, some argue that such a state of affairs already exists. The Green party's Jenny Jones would certainly not go that far, but in inviting Johnson to "admit the possibility of violence against peaceful protesters from the police", she was reminding everyone that not every cop behaves properly in these situations. This very moderate intervention brought forth a spitting rebuke from another Tory AM, Gareth Bacon, followed by a third, Steve O'Connell, asserting that it is perfectly possible for large demonstrations to proceed through London peacefully if they want to. He was referring to the Countryside Alliance.
What is it about Old Bill that makes some Tories go weak in the brain? Can they do nothing to control their pavlovian urge to defend the police in just about every circumstance, sacrificing in the process any reputation they may have had for measured judgements?
One big reason for tensions between police and perfectly peaceable demonstrators is that too many of those paid (by us) to enforce the rules fail to abide by their own. Coleman's comments about masks would have been more persuasive had he acknowledged that some police officers have themselves taken to concealing their faces at demos (you'll spot one the background in this clip from the G20). Bacon is a fan of kettling, yet a committee chaired by his colleague Victoria Borwick rightly found that the tactic can easily cause more trouble than it solves. The Countryside Alliance march of 2004 was, in fact, marred by violence and drew complaints that officers had obscured or removed their ID numbers – a breach of regulations, as an IPCC report made clear. Six years later they're still at it.
Johnson, to his credit, gave no ground when defending the right to peaceful protest and made clear he did not want the police to be more aggressive and tooled-up. His right-hand man, Kit Malthouse, who chairs the Metropolitan Police Authority, has rightly given a dead straight answer of "no" to talk of water cannons. Yet though Johnson called for law-abiding protestors to inform on those around them who go looking for a fight, he didn't make the same demand of the police. As recent events in Ealing have shown, these are not easy times to be a police officer – especially a good one. Politicians who refuse to say that bad policing makes the job of the good ones harder would be more helpful to the rest of us if they said nothing at all.
Spare me the sight of Tories demanding more law and order | Dave Hill | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
Spare me the sight of Tories demanding more law and order
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