And let me tell you it's all been pure drama! The latest round of squabbling has stemmed from the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) dominated Stop The War Coalition(STWC) march of Saturday 15th March.
First off one group published photographs of people on the march with their faces unobscured. This prompted a group called Fitwatch (http://www.fitwatch.blogspot.com) to complain because this group is dedicated to resisting the activities of the Police's Forward Intelligence Teams (FIT) and they believe that the publishing of photographs featuring protesters faces only serves to aid the police.
This prompted another group to object because they felt that because that protesters are captured on CCTV, photographed by FIT teams, monitored by helicopters and followed by undercover officers there should be no problem with photographers publishing peoples faces as the police already have plenty of their own pictures.
Then another group brought up the spectre of Redwatch, a rather nasty far right website that is dedicated to collecting images of protesters so the brave Nazi's can extract revenge on those who disagree with their unpleasant viewpoint.
And so the argument continued.
Personally I think it is very bad form to publish photographs of people on demonstrations without their permission because aside from the problems of Redwatch and the police many of them might have found themselves phoning in sick to attend and their bosses may not be so impressed to see their ugly mugs on the Internet in much the same way that universities fail to share the joy of students who've posted pics of their drunken exploits on MySpace.
Also it is worth noting that the British Police's attempts to police protests depends very heavily on something known as the Panopticon Principle.
I think this principle is the result of the work of an 18 century sociologist (I could check but that would constitute research and a clear breach of the bloggers code) who discovered that if the people whose behaviour he was observing knew that they were being observed they would alter their behaviour accordingly and in doing so totally fuck up his results.
This research was then developed into the Panoptican Prison which is a circle of bar less cells built around a central observation coloum. Despite the fact that the cells were open and the prisoners were not locked in order was maintained in these prisons because the inmates dared not behave because they believed that they were under constant observation and any misdemeanour would not go unnoticed or unpunished.
The principle is applied to public order policing because although the police have helicopters and CCTV cameras public disorder is by definition disorderly so they cannot see everything because CCTV cameras can only point in one direction at a time and helicopters fly too high to be able to identify individuals. So what the police do it deploy very high profile FIT teams in hi-vis jackets carrying very large and very flash looking camera rigs in the hope that it will convince people that they'd better behave because they're constantly being recorded and monitored by an Omnipotent force.
All this of course does raise the question of whether or not rather then resisting the police the Fitwatch group are actually playing into the polices hands by allowing their behaviour to be altered by the presence of the police observers?
The other big argument of the moment is the march itself. The so called autonomous groups are arguing that STWC marches have becoming ineffective, tightly controlled A to B marches only permitted in places and at times when they will have no impact. For this reason the autonomous mob feel that these marches should be attended by autonomous blocks which allow people to show that while they disagree with the STWC leadership they are still not happy with the wars.
The STWC have responded by saying that the main reason their marches have become stale is because of the massive restrictions imposed on them by the police and the state and autonomous blocks only make the problem worse by giving the police an excuse to strangle the coalition into oblivion.
Personally I have to say that I agree with the STWC because by organising such large scale demonstrations the STWC are putting themselves very much on the line and under those circumstances only the mildest survive.
That's not to say that I am against autonomous blocks on principle because on certain occasions, such as the F15 march, it would be very useful to have a large block declaring that while it was opposed to the war in Iraq it happened to also think that the SWP were a bunch of useless communists, George Galloway is a bit of a tit and perhaps Tariq Aziz wasn't the greatest man to ever live. However on a wet Saturday afternoon there seems little point in the exercise other then to piss people off and create divisions but that's just my opinion.
Anyway it should only be a couple of days before the DVD's arrive to feed my wire addiction and I can stop banging my head against the table in frustrated boredom.
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Re whether fitwatch are playing into the hands of the police by altering their behaviour.
It seems that your argument has answered that in itself. The use of Fit teams has already altered everyone's behaviour on demos and this is what we are resisting. If we were carrying on protesting regardless of interference by FIT then it would be reasonable to ignore them.
Furthermore, we've ignored them for years and seen more and more repression and less and less people attending protests. People are being harassed off the streets (and it should be emphasised that their tactics go well beyond just taking photos of people).
Since we've started taking the intiative with Fitwatch, we've had more postive feedback and more people wanting to join us on the streets than we have for any other initative we've been involved in for years (admittedly this isn't a great number, but we're talking the relative state of the protest movement at the moment).
Also, just a small point but STWC are putting nothing on the line in organising their marches. They both refused and try to derail plans for direct action throughout the war, and achieved nothing.
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