Climate Camp Cometh!

While the UK media is desperately trying to figure out how two awfully middle class students managed to smuggling climbing gear and 30 foot Free Tibet banner into Beijing 2 days before the start of the Olympic I think it's a pertinent time to look at what lessons the UK can teach China about the freedom to protest.

Although you've probably never heard about it this week has played host to one of the centre pieces of the UK protest calender; The Camp For Climate Action. While this protest involves nothing illegal or is in anyway violent it is the most effective form of protest available because rather then simply raising a banner and calling on the government to change it gathers people together and teaches them how to bring about change themselves. It does this by bringing people together on a legally held campsite and then holds workshops on how to get the best from solar power, how carbon capture could be the safe future of fossil fuels and how to convert you diesel engine to run on environmentally sustainable bio-fuels.

For some reason the UK authorities see this free sharing of knowledge to be a form of "Domestic Extremism" that is as dangerous as the activities of Al Qeda or the IRA. As a response they have deployed, as part of a £5million deployment, officers from 5 police forces alongside MI5 officers and Tactical Advisers from the British Army. Together this security force have deployed an number of tactics against the camp including;

Laying Siege the Camp; Working in shifts teams of hundreds of police officers have totally encircled the campsite and are using stop and search powers to detain people wishing to enter the site. This is causing delays of up to several hours for and can only be considered an attempt to create an Us V Them attitude between the camp and the local community in order to prevent local people entering the camp and learning about it's true purpose.

The same tactic was used by the police during the anti-Iraq war protests. After a lengthy legal battle the issue came before the High Court who ruled that stop and search powers could not be used by way of intimidation or obstruction to prevent people from engaging in legal activities. Any police officers who attempts to do so would be acting unlawfully and abusing their power.

Seizure of Private Property; On one of the first days of the Climate Camp the site was raided by the police in order to execute a Police And Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) search warrant to look for items that could be used to commit criminal damage. The long list of property seized included wood for the sites toilet, plastic piping for the sites water supply, a truck borne solar powered electricity generator, a stripy jumper, a board game and some children's crayons, which were seized from a child. It is unclear that in the seizure of this property the police followed the rules of PACE and issued receipts for ever item. This would allow the properties lawful owner to recover the item from the police once the police fail to use it as evidence in a criminal prosecution.

Damage too and Theft of Campers Vehicles; Over the past few days a number of campers vehicles have been broken into and removed from the site by the police along with a significant number of bicycles. The police are attempting to justify this action by claiming the vehicles have been "dumped". This is odd because when I was working as a traffic warden we actually spent quite a lot of our time removing derelict vehicles for the police because dumped vehicles are a civil matter and the police have no legal right to touch them even when they are parked on the public highway, let alone on private property.

Smear Campaigns; On Tuesday the police issued a press released announcing that they had recovered a cache of weapons from a location near to the camp site. This cache included a number of kitchen knives and a solitary, replica ninja star which the police claimed was to be used by animal rights activists to attack a police horse. While I would like to give the police the benefit of the doubt and not believe that they assembled the cache of weapons themselves it is unlikely that the climate campers did so because when gathering kitchen knives for use in a criminal conspiracy it is traditional to remove them from the wooden knife block found in kitchens.

General Psychological Operations and Intimidation; This includes the traditional late night over flights by a police helicopter which has on occasion made full use of it's nightsun spotlight and has apparently taken to playing Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries over it's public address system. There also been an number of probing raids in the early hours of the morning which cause the campers to get out of bed thinking they're under attack even thought he police rarely raid camp sites in the dark due to the risk of tripping over guy ropes and falling in potholes. The only tactical reason the police have for deploying these sort of harassment methods is to wear down the campers resolve to the point where they will not be able to engage int he daytime workshops.

On the back of a preformance like that I can only assume that the UK's only objection to China's human rights record is they think it's becoming a bit too liberal. In the actual sport of the Olympic games the UK has been forced to send home one of their boxers because despite whatever the Team GB selectors thought it turns out their star athlete just wasn't up to the competitive standard.

In financial news the Bank of England has announced that despite their best efforts they have been unable to cut interest rates. This comes as very bad news for the UK government who were rather hoping that if they could cause interest rates to drop they would be able to service their unsustainable level of borrowing without having to pay the market rate or cutting funding to any of their vanity projects.