KNOW THINE ENEMY
Reports were circulating that the Security Services were preparing for a summer of discontent amongst the people of the UK in 2009. Certainly the Establishment was rattled in 1997. My personal belief is that any such expression of restlessness will be as ruthlessly smothered as Gadaffi is smothering his own revolution in Libya in 2011. The Security Services, bent on propping up our increasingly corrupt neo con society, which is unravelling well after its sell by date, will collude with those who need to be overthrown. Any disgruntlement expressed this year will serve only to enable the Security Services to identify the leaders of a revolutionary movement and ensure that those leaders are permanently disabled.
Taking a stab in the dark I believe that we are a few years shy of a potential full throttled revolution. The full effects of the credit crunch have yet to bite the middle classes to the same extent as the credit crunch has already bitten the working classes. Both Labour and Conservative Governments have failed to rein in the bankers and the neo cons who are now patently corrupt. When light bulbs retailing at 65p and three inch steel screws retailing at £2.60 are bought by the Ministry of Defence at £22.51 and £103* respectively, (*See page 5 of The Sun Friday 4th March 2011) it stretches credibility to ascribe this to incompetence. Corruption is all too often explained as incompetence and such ‘incompetence’ on a national scale needs addressing.
During the years of boom those at the bottom of the pile failed to benefit during the years of plenty. Their wages were eroded, their security of tenure as tenants in the housing sector and workers in the world of employment were similarly eroded. A blind eye was turned toward illegal immigrants and the cheap labour they brought to employers in the UK.
Our anger is being misdirected by groups like the EDL, in the usual smoke and mirrors way, towards immigrants, rather than toward those who have deliberately turned a blind eye and encouraged illegal immigration.
Illegal immigrants are vulnerable. As we saw in the deaths of those Chinese immigrants at Morecambe Bay, the MP reported her worries to the immigration authorities, as did the police. The immigration authorities refused to act. Virtual slave labour is a far more profitable enterprise than paying the workforce a living wage. That is after all how Britain came to world dominance – through the slave trade. Damian Green MP was arrested (2008). His ‘crime’ was to seek to publicise the fact that up to 5,000 illegal immigrants had procured jobs in Whitehall and the House of Commons. This apparently was a ‘State Secret’ deserving of a police raid on the House of Commons and Mr Green’s homes and offices with the collusion of Speaker Martin and his minions.
If illegal immigrants are placed in sensitive positions of work they may well do as they are bid in order to ensure that they remain in this country. If that means that whilst they clean offices they are also asked to collude in snooping on our elected representatives and unbiddable civil servants, then they have little choice but to do so. Illegal immigrants should not be punished for this cynical and ruthless establishment exploitation of their vulnerability.
The ‘working class’ have been squeezed until the pips squeak and now they are being squeezed even harder. The working classes – those who earn under £12,000 a year – have long suffered penury and increased direct and indirect taxation so that they are hardly able to scratch a living without resorting to questionable practices. As unemployment rises the working classes are being galvanised into venting their resentment against immigrants, rather than against Government.
As Robert Tressel teased in his novel: The Ragged Trousered Philosophers, the ‘working class’ have no appetite for revolution. It is only when the credit crunch begins to bite the ‘middle classes’ that a revolutionary spirit takes hold and the Security Services, enslaved to those with a neo con agenda, predicted this ‘middle class’ unrest would be felt in the Summer of 2009. Following the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt Yemen and Libya are we wrong to suppose that such a revolution might not overtake us in the UK? Revolutions are infectious.
The erosion of union membership has meant that many workers feel they have to ‘put up and shut up’ – that they have no choice but to bow to changed working practices, temporary contracts and an increasingly unsympathetic managerial regime. The Government deems it entirely feasible that an unemployed person can live on an income of £65.00 per week. Everyone knows this income is wholly inadequate to pay utility bills, insurance and living expenses, let alone commute to sign on. The working classes have long realised that working illegally, whilst drawing Job Seekers Allowance is the only solution and think it an acceptable risk to face the chance of prosecution. They too work for less than the legal wage in an effort to supplement their diet with more than baked beans on toast.
Unemployed lawyers, accountants and other professionals know that their integrity and future professional standing make the option of working illegally a far riskier proposition. In short the middle classes care about a criminal record; or perhaps they care more about being caught. And it is the middle classes that Governments look to appease, quite rightly, since without them revolutions are rarely possible.
However there is a growing lack of morality amongst many within the so called ‘middle class’ echelon of society, who also know that they are immune from prosecution and can do as they please within the boundaries of secret societies whose members favour one another.
Members of these societies promote one another, cover one another’s backs and have a strict code of ‘Omerta’ – a mafia like code of silence.
If caught and facing criminal charges, like most Mafia clans, these people will take the rap and not squeal. The most high profile example of this code can be seen in the guilty plea of Bernard Madoff, who took the rap in order to ensure that the microscopic glare of the judicial system and the world did not uncover the full extent of that Ponzi scheme, which milked billions from ordinary investors. It is investors, pensioners deprived of their pensions and countless others in other Ponzi schemes, who will begin to realise how they have been ripped off.
As more and more educated people of an honest disposition find themselves deprived of economic means, a pension, a voice, retaining a decent standard of living, the freedom to express their views and gain justice they will lose faith in the long treasured but largely fictional freedoms of our society and a tide of revelation will reveal just how much we have been duped by successive governments of all political hues. Successive Governments have promoted the inhumane, amoral and unacceptable neo con face of capitalism. When that moment comes the British people should be aware of the tactics which our out of control Security Services are capable of using against innocents who trip over unpalatable truths.
This blog aims to make those intent on such a revolution aware of the infrastructure they are up against, to remove the blinkers of innocence and rid all would be revolutionaries of their trust in our judicial system. After understanding one’s own motivations the next essential key to victory over those neo con forces of corruption, which currently rule our society, is the axiom: ‘Know thine enemy.’
Past revolutions should teach us a great deal, but we would be wise to realise just how ruthless and devoid of moral rectitude are those who currently hold power.
The tactics used by the South African Defence Forces against those who rose in the struggle against apartheid had more than a smidgeon of help from our own Security Services. I have talked to someone who claims to have worked as an active soldier, under cover and with complete deniability, in Angola and another in what was then Rhodesia. They both claimed to have actively supported the all white regimes of both countries with the collusion of our Security Services in the UK. This provided a learning curve in population control, which still holds good today. However it is always wise to bear in mind that those who feed one these stories may be dealing in half-truths, although there is an element of corroboration in independent press reports.
It was widely reported that prostitutes in Johannesburg were infected with HIV in the early 1980’s. ANC activists were the primary targets and the prostitutes merely used as a tool of infection. This story has since been denied, but the rate of HIV infection was highest, in its earliest days, around the Johannesburg area. In Rhodesia highly toxic insecticides and herbicides were sprayed onto the veldt in the certainty that guerrilla fighters – who were largely barefoot – would suffer the side effects of such toxins as they made their way through the bush.
The greatest asset any out of control Security Service has is the refusal, by the general population, to believe that any arm of government could be so utterly evil, ruthless, wicked and malevolent.
Those who are prepared to collude with these forces do so in the firm belief that they are adhering to a patriotic duty to keep the status quo intact and unassailable and realise that without this small advantage they too would be subjected to penury and corruption. Particularly since they themselves are financial beneficiaries of that system. These are people whose grasp on morality is so tenuous that they believe ‘the ends always justify the means’ and have little in the way of intellectual power to understand the harm they are conspiring to perpetrate. These people are not capable of divining quite what ends they really serve; they remain in blissful ignorance of the ‘banality of the evil’ to which they have signed up.
History is littered with the acts of individuals who have counted on the honest judging others by their own moral principles. As J Edgar Hoover said:
‘The individual is handicapped by coming face-to-face with a conspiracy so monstrous – he simply cannot believe it exists.’
After any atrocity has been committed there will be those who will argue that it is now history and that the crimes need no longer be investigated. Often those who make this argument have something in their own past, which they wish to bury. To bury one’s head in the sand is to allow such atrocities to be committed again and again.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa only brought to light some crimes committed against some people, it did not address the very organised crime wave which propped up the apartheid regime over many decades and it failed to penetrate the code of ‘Omerta’ which still exists in South Africa to this day, and which many migrants from South Africa to the UK still hold to.
Most in South Africa, who did struggle against apartheid, did so through absolutely and utterly peaceful means. However the South African Defence Forces ensured that the peaceful actions of protestors were subverted; to be perceived as violent actions. It cannot be proven, but the entirely peaceful paper bucket bombs, which merely showered those in the vicinity with confetti, were subverted by out of control defence force stooges.
A man, known to have a weak heart, was lured into the vicinity of one such a paper bomb, which the South African security services had intelligence of. He was supposedly treated for shock at the time and died in the ambulance on the way to hospital. Whether his demise was entirely fortuitous or something more sinister is not known, but the lesson is there. Even the most innocuous actions can have dreadful consequences once out of control security services find a means to escalate that action and paint the perpetrators as malign murderers, rather than peaceful demonstrators.
The fact that the general population refuse to believe that such amoral tactics can be employed merely gives those prepared to use these tactics carte blanche to do as they please, secure in the knowledge that they can dub those who begin to suspect the truth as ‘conspiracy theorists.’
Planning and efforts to quell any such uprising in the UK are in train we, poor benighted saps who have no idea of just how our society is really organised, will inevitably find ourselves subjected to the machinations of our out of control Security Services.
Any responsible Member of Parliament who begins to stray into ‘verboten’ questions about our Security Services will initially be told that: ‘This is a matter of national security.’
If this fails to shut him or her up they will then be targeted to ensure that their own probity comes under scrutiny. Caught up in the nightmare of trying to prove their own innocence, or trying to downplay their guilt, they will quickly lose interest in exposing the excesses of our Security Services. If they persist they may be found guilty of fraudulent share dealing, whilst being assured by colleagues that ‘everyone does it; ’ dead with a quarter tablet of co-proxamol ‘overdose, ’ or with an orange in their mouth and a stocking over their head in an embarrassing death by misadventure from an uncharacteristic auto erotic experiment, which good taste dictates precludes further enquiries.
An unbiddable Minister for War may be lured into an affair with a young woman who has also been placed in the arms of a Russian diplomat. An unbiddable Home Secretary may find his son’s alleged drug use becomes the subject of newspaper hints so vast that the Home Secretary is forced to deal with the family dilemma, rather than pursue policy changes within the Home Office. Another Home Secretary may find her expenses under such close scrutiny that she is constantly frustrated in her Ministerial duties by having to fire fight accusations of expense claims which in the end undermine her position as Home Secretary so entirely that she is either rendered incapable of pursing policy change or driven from office entirely.
Wednesday 9 March 2011
3. INTELLIGENCE GATHERING
INTELLIGENCE GATHERING
INTELLIGENCE GATHERING on the ordinary people of this country is a ‘State Secret.’ Most of the Establishment will try to say that it is just a loony ‘conspiracy theory.’ The problem is almost every British Telecom engineer knows about it and when questioned will often say: ‘Yes I’ve heard about Echelon, but I have signed the Official Secrets Act.’ The Russians know about ECHELON, most Arab States are perfectly aware of what ECHELON is. Most diplomatic posts will employ highly sophisticated and well-encrypted communication systems to circumvent ECHELON.
So ECHELON is not much of a ‘State Secret,’ unless of course one would prefer the ordinary citizen to remain unaware of how easy it is to monitor their growing unrest and to target possible leaders, opposed to the neo con corruption of the State, before those individuals know they are on the way to becoming activists. It is clear that it is also being subverted to ‘stitch up’ those who wish to alter the status quo, sending email messages, posting material of a questionable nature or even ensuring that home computers are fraudulently said to have been used for the use of child pornography. Katherine Gunn who blew the whistle on intelligence gathering at GCHQ appeared on Radio 4’s On The Ropes and testified to her inability to find work and continuing problems. Whistle blowers are severely discouraged.
Those who seek power often know that they have to play the ball game in accordance with rules others have set, because by failing to do so all power will elude them. What they fail to grasp is that power attained on these terms leads not only their own enslavement, but to the enslavement of the people they represent.
‘Blair told his inner circle he was one of the few world leaders who understood the “new realities” of the global order, post 9/11. “The Prime Minister has an extremely acute sense of American power,” says one of his entourage. “Very few people understand just what that means. He does. He understood that the Americans can bring to bear a capability of a different order to anything the world has seen. There is no historical precedent. America’s reach is everywhere. …”’
page 152 - BLAIR’S WARS – by John Kampfner, published by The Free Press in paperback 2004. – ISBN 0-7432-4830-9
ECHELON is a product of our ‘special relationship’ with the USA. Under the American Constitution the American Government is in contravention of the US Constitution if it monitors citizens within the USA. So at Menwith Hill and GCHQ the Americans have devolved much of the administration to the British – although a large number of US servicemen and women are involved. The range of ECHELON is not limited to citizens of the USA. It is capable of downloading every email, telephone and fax transmission made almost anywhere in the world. There are a few exceptions I am told – island states like Kiribati are apparently incapable of being monitored by ECHELON.
No – there are no warehouses of tapes, technology has moved on. Intelligence gathering methods digitally records and automatically flags up key phrases. Intelligence gathering has voice recognition techniques, so that if a person becomes a threat ten years’ down the line all their communication traffic can be retrospectively monitored. Intelligence gathering and those that administer it are capable of corrupting emails.
Sending and receiving emails from an MI6 renegade, Richard Tomlinson, on the run in Switzerland, I was struck by how mad his emails appeared to be and when he wrote back saying how mad my own emails were I realised how easy it is to corrupt email traffic.
An ex Security Services, now academic don at Magdalene College, Cambridge still refuses to have an email address.
Mobile phone records trace one to a particular location. At the risk of being called a ‘conspiracy theorist’ one has to allow for the possibility that ‘Big Brother’ really is listening to everything one says and does and perhaps even changing what one says and does to try to ensure convicted criminality of the would be revolutionary. Most intercept recordings are never listened to, most phone calls and emails do not threaten national security.
However those who believe in freedom and would work to regaining that freedom may now be deemed a ‘national threat’ and all too easily monitored and their means of communication hijacked. Once monitored it is all too simple to ensure that they are rendered impotent.
Who are their contacts, to which groups do they belong? How easy would it be to undermine their efforts at raising public awareness of forces within the State who are out of control?
If organising a peaceful demonstration, with no criminal intent whatsoever, knowledge of the telephone calls and emails sent to and received by the organisers of such an event would allow infiltrators with a violent agenda, seeking to undermine the political effectiveness of that event, to provide excellent media footage of property being trashed, small children trampled and say police horses stabbed. Animal lovers, those who believe in the sanctity of life and those who respect property above all would all be revolted. What more effective means of undermining a peaceful demonstration could be employed?
However we now no longer have the freedom to organise spontaneous demonstrations. If a protest is organised proper permission has to be sought from the police. One can’t even leaflet the queues of tourists and observers who wish to observe the debates in Parliament without contravening our new laws. Those who control the neo con establishment, which has deprived us of our pensions, is rapidly reducing our currency to a worthless piece of paper and trashed the once highly respected banking system in this country, also control the mechanisms whereby the population can express discontent. The comedian, Mark Thomas, ably demonstrated these ludicrous legal inroads on our freedoms in a Radio 4 broadcast. Mark Thomas holds the record for the greatest number of demonstrations within the ‘designated area’ of London now carrying stringent controls on those who wish to demonstrate.
If one thinks a free press still exists think again. Every broadcaster is vetted by means of making those who gain the broadcasting contracts bid for their franchise and stick to their stated aims.
Journalists are themselves very easily duped into thinking they are essential to national security and playing with the big boys. Those who report on ‘Security’ are briefed by the MoD (Ministry of Defence), often off the record, but given a sufficiently plausible ‘inside line’ to make their reporting credible. Whilst those who are excluded from the charmed laager of the Security Services are often fed rubbish and their credibility all too easily undermined.
Piers Morgan, as editor of the Mirror, published pictures of supposed Iraqi’s being maltreated. He submitted the pictures to the Ministry of Defence (MoD) prior to publication and was met with a stony silence. Taking the silence to signify corroboration of the pictures he published them. Only then did the MoD weigh in to rubbish his story and thereby prevent any other, more credible, stories of human rights abuses being perpetrated by British and American troops at Abu Ghraib being published. Every other Fleet Street editor became chary of becoming the same butt of a Piers Morgan joke. A joke which still hangs over Piers Morgan to this day, despite the evidence that such abuses did occur.
So your phone calls can be retrieved, as can your emails, faxes etc. to ascertain whether or not you were in touch with anyone at all before your demonstration. On balance the Security Services have resisted the urge to make evidence gathered by intercepts admissible in a court of law. They fear that making intercept recordings admissible in Courts of Law might open a can of worms. Those who treasure our freedoms would then be able to turn the tables on the neo cons who have conspired to erode those freedoms and, under a freedom of information appeal, request those recordings be produced in any Court of Law.
The police, Special Branch, the Security Services, the ‘Stay-Behind’ secret groups can so very easily drum
see – NATO’s Secret Armies by Daniel Ganser. The Imperial War Museum has evidence of the history of the group who are still in existence today. They are largely made up of ex military and police, predominantly drawn from the red neck stock of ex MoD police and Royal Military Police as well as a smattering of ex Special Branch and SAS / SBS types. None of these groups have much respect for the rule of law and order and many within their ranks firmly believe in their right to subvert justice in order to obtain a sort of rough justice outside the rule of law. Stay-Behind groups have caches of guns, C4 and other weaponry hidden in woods and on ‘safe’ farmland. Initially set up as the final line of defence to thwart a Russian invasion, during the Cold War, they have now turned their neo con attentions to defeating those who seek to ensure we retain Human Rights, Civil Liberties and a modicum of freedom in our political and judicial processes. Since they are not even acknowledged to exist by the State they remain unaccountable to those in Parliament and to the people of this country. This group are generally called ‘STAY BEHIND’ in the UK, Sheepskin in Greece, Gladio in Italy. These ‘Stay-Behind’ groups appear to have proven links to Secret Societies, including the Masonic P2 (Propaganda Due) and Mafia links. Giulio Adnreotti, Italy’s Prime Minister revealed the existence of Gladio around the time of the first Gulf War on 3 August 1990.
Shortly after that admission in Italy, the ex-Greek Prime Minister, Papandreou, confirmed to a Greek newspaper (October 1990 Ta Nea) that he had discovered a secret NATO army operating in Greece whilst he was Prime Minister in the 1980’s. A German newspaper, TAZ , began to report that a similar organisation existed in Germany. A German television channel then reported that ex-Schutzstaffel (SS) personnel had been recruited to this NATO movement and questions were asked in the German Parliament. Over the course of the next few months’ revelations rolled out over Europe. The Belgians, having linked the existence of a ‘Stay-Behind’ group, who had wreaked mayhem and slaughter on the Belgian people, purportedly closed down the force a year after a Special Committee published its report into the scandal. The French publicly declared that such a force had been in existence but had also been disbanded after Stalin’s death in 1953. However Prime Minister, Andreotti, in Italy then revealed that the French had been represented at a meeting of this clandestine NATO Group on 23 October 1990 in Belgium. Sarkozy the current Prime Minister of France announced on 11 March 2009, that France would be rejoining the NATO Military Command Structure Alliance, of which the Stay-Behind projects figure prominently. A lack of public curiosity of Britain’s role in the debacle, both in the media and in Parliament led to an article in the Observer newspaper on 7th June 1992, going pretty much unremarked.
The British Security Services decline to comment and it seems MP’s were too busy taking cash for questions to pursue unsettling questions of national security and the circumstances in which national security had been compromised by unscrupulous and unaccountable clandestine neo con organisations.
In Holland it was admitted that such a secret organisation did exist, but the then Netherlands Prime Minister, Ruud Lubbers, added the caveat that their own ‘Stay Behind’ army was supervised by NATO. There followed admissions, or questionable denials in Luxemburg, Portugal, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Turkey. The European Parliament discussed the scandal affecting all twelve of its member States on 22nd November 1990. Out of control ‘stay-behind’ security personnel are now facing an enquiry in Turkey, following revelations that hundreds of Kurds remain ‘missing.’
A public enquiry into the actions of Gladio in Italy revealed that their Stay-Behind Group, Gladio, had indulged in ‘false flag’ acts of terrorism, booby-trapping one vehicle to kill a policeman and injuring another. The GLADIO mistake of using C4 – an explosive favoured by NATO, as opposed to alternative explosives favoured by Communist agitators, proved to be their undoing. Gladio has not repeated the mistake of using C4 again and now makes stringent efforts to reproduce explosives of the type favoured by the groups it aims to blame for false flag terrorist acts. The blame for this act of terrorism was incorrectly laid at the feet of the Communist movement in Italy, so allowing the authorities to round up over 300 Italian Communist sympathisers. This act of terrorism was eventually proven to be the result of the increasingly fascist Stay-Behind Group, GLADIO.
These ‘Stay-Behind secret armies operate under different code names, but all were generally referred to by the Italian name Gladio, in the press, in the absence of a willingness to expand on these admissions by member countries of their own secret armies’ cooperation in the affair. Eventually it would be revealed that the code names differed - Absalon in Denmark, P26 or Projekt 26 in Switzerland (a non NATO country), Rocambole (ROC) in Sweden, Sheepskin in Greece. However the British Security Services, the CIA and NATO universally refer to these groups as S/B or ‘Stay-Behind’ projects.
up stooges who cannot be traced back to covert Security Services, or privatised Security Companies, who remain largely unregulated and who willingly subvert peaceful demonstrations in order to excuse brutal clamp downs and provide the basis for further legislation to limit our freedoms. It is now evident that Andy Coulson was not so innocent in his claims of innocence when the News of the World bugged politicians. Coulson has committed the cardinal sin, his credibility as to his ignorance has been shot down. So Coulson has had to leave the inner sanctum and protection of the Conservative Party. Even the politicians are joining the ranks of the disaffected and it is Coulson who is in their sights rather than the privatised and deniable intercept industry which has grown exponentially.
Since those working toward a more transparent State are not given access to intercept information, in order to hunt down these right wing neo con subversives, it is difficult to prove the extent of the collusion by forces within the State intent on disrupting much needed reform. The stooges themselves will escape prosecution, but those who seek a peaceful demonstration will be deemed responsible for the violent actions of agent provocateurs in their midst. Agent provocateurs who are protected by the State.
INTELLIGENCE GATHERING on the ordinary people of this country is a ‘State Secret.’ Most of the Establishment will try to say that it is just a loony ‘conspiracy theory.’ The problem is almost every British Telecom engineer knows about it and when questioned will often say: ‘Yes I’ve heard about Echelon, but I have signed the Official Secrets Act.’ The Russians know about ECHELON, most Arab States are perfectly aware of what ECHELON is. Most diplomatic posts will employ highly sophisticated and well-encrypted communication systems to circumvent ECHELON.
So ECHELON is not much of a ‘State Secret,’ unless of course one would prefer the ordinary citizen to remain unaware of how easy it is to monitor their growing unrest and to target possible leaders, opposed to the neo con corruption of the State, before those individuals know they are on the way to becoming activists. It is clear that it is also being subverted to ‘stitch up’ those who wish to alter the status quo, sending email messages, posting material of a questionable nature or even ensuring that home computers are fraudulently said to have been used for the use of child pornography. Katherine Gunn who blew the whistle on intelligence gathering at GCHQ appeared on Radio 4’s On The Ropes and testified to her inability to find work and continuing problems. Whistle blowers are severely discouraged.
Those who seek power often know that they have to play the ball game in accordance with rules others have set, because by failing to do so all power will elude them. What they fail to grasp is that power attained on these terms leads not only their own enslavement, but to the enslavement of the people they represent.
‘Blair told his inner circle he was one of the few world leaders who understood the “new realities” of the global order, post 9/11. “The Prime Minister has an extremely acute sense of American power,” says one of his entourage. “Very few people understand just what that means. He does. He understood that the Americans can bring to bear a capability of a different order to anything the world has seen. There is no historical precedent. America’s reach is everywhere. …”’
page 152 - BLAIR’S WARS – by John Kampfner, published by The Free Press in paperback 2004. – ISBN 0-7432-4830-9
ECHELON is a product of our ‘special relationship’ with the USA. Under the American Constitution the American Government is in contravention of the US Constitution if it monitors citizens within the USA. So at Menwith Hill and GCHQ the Americans have devolved much of the administration to the British – although a large number of US servicemen and women are involved. The range of ECHELON is not limited to citizens of the USA. It is capable of downloading every email, telephone and fax transmission made almost anywhere in the world. There are a few exceptions I am told – island states like Kiribati are apparently incapable of being monitored by ECHELON.
No – there are no warehouses of tapes, technology has moved on. Intelligence gathering methods digitally records and automatically flags up key phrases. Intelligence gathering has voice recognition techniques, so that if a person becomes a threat ten years’ down the line all their communication traffic can be retrospectively monitored. Intelligence gathering and those that administer it are capable of corrupting emails.
Sending and receiving emails from an MI6 renegade, Richard Tomlinson, on the run in Switzerland, I was struck by how mad his emails appeared to be and when he wrote back saying how mad my own emails were I realised how easy it is to corrupt email traffic.
An ex Security Services, now academic don at Magdalene College, Cambridge still refuses to have an email address.
Mobile phone records trace one to a particular location. At the risk of being called a ‘conspiracy theorist’ one has to allow for the possibility that ‘Big Brother’ really is listening to everything one says and does and perhaps even changing what one says and does to try to ensure convicted criminality of the would be revolutionary. Most intercept recordings are never listened to, most phone calls and emails do not threaten national security.
However those who believe in freedom and would work to regaining that freedom may now be deemed a ‘national threat’ and all too easily monitored and their means of communication hijacked. Once monitored it is all too simple to ensure that they are rendered impotent.
Who are their contacts, to which groups do they belong? How easy would it be to undermine their efforts at raising public awareness of forces within the State who are out of control?
If organising a peaceful demonstration, with no criminal intent whatsoever, knowledge of the telephone calls and emails sent to and received by the organisers of such an event would allow infiltrators with a violent agenda, seeking to undermine the political effectiveness of that event, to provide excellent media footage of property being trashed, small children trampled and say police horses stabbed. Animal lovers, those who believe in the sanctity of life and those who respect property above all would all be revolted. What more effective means of undermining a peaceful demonstration could be employed?
However we now no longer have the freedom to organise spontaneous demonstrations. If a protest is organised proper permission has to be sought from the police. One can’t even leaflet the queues of tourists and observers who wish to observe the debates in Parliament without contravening our new laws. Those who control the neo con establishment, which has deprived us of our pensions, is rapidly reducing our currency to a worthless piece of paper and trashed the once highly respected banking system in this country, also control the mechanisms whereby the population can express discontent. The comedian, Mark Thomas, ably demonstrated these ludicrous legal inroads on our freedoms in a Radio 4 broadcast. Mark Thomas holds the record for the greatest number of demonstrations within the ‘designated area’ of London now carrying stringent controls on those who wish to demonstrate.
If one thinks a free press still exists think again. Every broadcaster is vetted by means of making those who gain the broadcasting contracts bid for their franchise and stick to their stated aims.
Journalists are themselves very easily duped into thinking they are essential to national security and playing with the big boys. Those who report on ‘Security’ are briefed by the MoD (Ministry of Defence), often off the record, but given a sufficiently plausible ‘inside line’ to make their reporting credible. Whilst those who are excluded from the charmed laager of the Security Services are often fed rubbish and their credibility all too easily undermined.
Piers Morgan, as editor of the Mirror, published pictures of supposed Iraqi’s being maltreated. He submitted the pictures to the Ministry of Defence (MoD) prior to publication and was met with a stony silence. Taking the silence to signify corroboration of the pictures he published them. Only then did the MoD weigh in to rubbish his story and thereby prevent any other, more credible, stories of human rights abuses being perpetrated by British and American troops at Abu Ghraib being published. Every other Fleet Street editor became chary of becoming the same butt of a Piers Morgan joke. A joke which still hangs over Piers Morgan to this day, despite the evidence that such abuses did occur.
So your phone calls can be retrieved, as can your emails, faxes etc. to ascertain whether or not you were in touch with anyone at all before your demonstration. On balance the Security Services have resisted the urge to make evidence gathered by intercepts admissible in a court of law. They fear that making intercept recordings admissible in Courts of Law might open a can of worms. Those who treasure our freedoms would then be able to turn the tables on the neo cons who have conspired to erode those freedoms and, under a freedom of information appeal, request those recordings be produced in any Court of Law.
The police, Special Branch, the Security Services, the ‘Stay-Behind’ secret groups can so very easily drum
see – NATO’s Secret Armies by Daniel Ganser. The Imperial War Museum has evidence of the history of the group who are still in existence today. They are largely made up of ex military and police, predominantly drawn from the red neck stock of ex MoD police and Royal Military Police as well as a smattering of ex Special Branch and SAS / SBS types. None of these groups have much respect for the rule of law and order and many within their ranks firmly believe in their right to subvert justice in order to obtain a sort of rough justice outside the rule of law. Stay-Behind groups have caches of guns, C4 and other weaponry hidden in woods and on ‘safe’ farmland. Initially set up as the final line of defence to thwart a Russian invasion, during the Cold War, they have now turned their neo con attentions to defeating those who seek to ensure we retain Human Rights, Civil Liberties and a modicum of freedom in our political and judicial processes. Since they are not even acknowledged to exist by the State they remain unaccountable to those in Parliament and to the people of this country. This group are generally called ‘STAY BEHIND’ in the UK, Sheepskin in Greece, Gladio in Italy. These ‘Stay-Behind’ groups appear to have proven links to Secret Societies, including the Masonic P2 (Propaganda Due) and Mafia links. Giulio Adnreotti, Italy’s Prime Minister revealed the existence of Gladio around the time of the first Gulf War on 3 August 1990.
Shortly after that admission in Italy, the ex-Greek Prime Minister, Papandreou, confirmed to a Greek newspaper (October 1990 Ta Nea) that he had discovered a secret NATO army operating in Greece whilst he was Prime Minister in the 1980’s. A German newspaper, TAZ , began to report that a similar organisation existed in Germany. A German television channel then reported that ex-Schutzstaffel (SS) personnel had been recruited to this NATO movement and questions were asked in the German Parliament. Over the course of the next few months’ revelations rolled out over Europe. The Belgians, having linked the existence of a ‘Stay-Behind’ group, who had wreaked mayhem and slaughter on the Belgian people, purportedly closed down the force a year after a Special Committee published its report into the scandal. The French publicly declared that such a force had been in existence but had also been disbanded after Stalin’s death in 1953. However Prime Minister, Andreotti, in Italy then revealed that the French had been represented at a meeting of this clandestine NATO Group on 23 October 1990 in Belgium. Sarkozy the current Prime Minister of France announced on 11 March 2009, that France would be rejoining the NATO Military Command Structure Alliance, of which the Stay-Behind projects figure prominently. A lack of public curiosity of Britain’s role in the debacle, both in the media and in Parliament led to an article in the Observer newspaper on 7th June 1992, going pretty much unremarked.
The British Security Services decline to comment and it seems MP’s were too busy taking cash for questions to pursue unsettling questions of national security and the circumstances in which national security had been compromised by unscrupulous and unaccountable clandestine neo con organisations.
In Holland it was admitted that such a secret organisation did exist, but the then Netherlands Prime Minister, Ruud Lubbers, added the caveat that their own ‘Stay Behind’ army was supervised by NATO. There followed admissions, or questionable denials in Luxemburg, Portugal, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Turkey. The European Parliament discussed the scandal affecting all twelve of its member States on 22nd November 1990. Out of control ‘stay-behind’ security personnel are now facing an enquiry in Turkey, following revelations that hundreds of Kurds remain ‘missing.’
A public enquiry into the actions of Gladio in Italy revealed that their Stay-Behind Group, Gladio, had indulged in ‘false flag’ acts of terrorism, booby-trapping one vehicle to kill a policeman and injuring another. The GLADIO mistake of using C4 – an explosive favoured by NATO, as opposed to alternative explosives favoured by Communist agitators, proved to be their undoing. Gladio has not repeated the mistake of using C4 again and now makes stringent efforts to reproduce explosives of the type favoured by the groups it aims to blame for false flag terrorist acts. The blame for this act of terrorism was incorrectly laid at the feet of the Communist movement in Italy, so allowing the authorities to round up over 300 Italian Communist sympathisers. This act of terrorism was eventually proven to be the result of the increasingly fascist Stay-Behind Group, GLADIO.
These ‘Stay-Behind secret armies operate under different code names, but all were generally referred to by the Italian name Gladio, in the press, in the absence of a willingness to expand on these admissions by member countries of their own secret armies’ cooperation in the affair. Eventually it would be revealed that the code names differed - Absalon in Denmark, P26 or Projekt 26 in Switzerland (a non NATO country), Rocambole (ROC) in Sweden, Sheepskin in Greece. However the British Security Services, the CIA and NATO universally refer to these groups as S/B or ‘Stay-Behind’ projects.
up stooges who cannot be traced back to covert Security Services, or privatised Security Companies, who remain largely unregulated and who willingly subvert peaceful demonstrations in order to excuse brutal clamp downs and provide the basis for further legislation to limit our freedoms. It is now evident that Andy Coulson was not so innocent in his claims of innocence when the News of the World bugged politicians. Coulson has committed the cardinal sin, his credibility as to his ignorance has been shot down. So Coulson has had to leave the inner sanctum and protection of the Conservative Party. Even the politicians are joining the ranks of the disaffected and it is Coulson who is in their sights rather than the privatised and deniable intercept industry which has grown exponentially.
Since those working toward a more transparent State are not given access to intercept information, in order to hunt down these right wing neo con subversives, it is difficult to prove the extent of the collusion by forces within the State intent on disrupting much needed reform. The stooges themselves will escape prosecution, but those who seek a peaceful demonstration will be deemed responsible for the violent actions of agent provocateurs in their midst. Agent provocateurs who are protected by the State.
4. THE AGENT PROVOCATEUR
AGENT PROVOCATEURS
Those who comment authoritatively in the media on the Security Services will use the argument that a very small number of individuals are employed by the State to oversee national security and it is mere fantasy to suppose that an extensive network exists.
The MoD is adept at wooing journalists prepared to sing from their hymn sheets. Those who do not are quickly frozen out or fed false stories to ensure that their professional ability will never be trusted again. So no journalist aiming to report unbiased information can ever become an expert in the Security Services.
Whilst it is true that paid individuals working for MI5, MI6 (SIS), Special Branch, GCHQ etc. are relatively few in number, the lure to be a part of the establishment appeals to many more who have no formal contract of employment with the security services. These individuals are only too willing to be stooges for our out of control security services and flatter themselves that they may suddenly have developed some sort of intellectual capacity by being invited to contribute towards the work of the ‘intelligence services.’ That these low-grade individuals are given a broad remit, in which to work unsupervised, allows our Security Services, with some justification, to claim ignorance and therefore deny culpability. Private Detective agencies specialising in intercept information also allow bugging to take place with impunity without seeking the Home Secretary’s imprimatur on any documents.
These would be James Bonds will forego any moral values to feel themselves a part of an elite with an inside line to ‘Military Intelligence.’ Clubbable individuals who may belong to the Committee of Twenty, the Bilderberg Group, Rotarians, Masons, Buffaloes, the British Lions, Royal Arch, Livery Companies, the Honourable Artillery Company or any other self selecting ‘elite’ are often approached to do some sort of service in the interests of ‘national security.’ Such individuals are often weak minded, ill-educated people who are drawn to these sorts of clubs due to their own lack of ability and justified lack of confidence. They need to congregate for personal advantage, as hyenas congregate in the wild in order to assault more noble beasts.
Individuals who were part of a visiting good will chess team to Russia, during the Cold War, were approached to plant bugs in the conference room, within the Russian Embassy, whilst there to discuss arrangements for their visit to the USSR. This may be morally justified during a time like the Cold War and it is hard to resist the temptation to err in the higher service of patriotism. Equally, the individual approached may have been right to refuse, since he felt himself outside the machinations of the Security Services and doubted their motives. It may have been that the Security Services themselves were intent on souring relations further and ensuring that ‘goodwill’ chess visits were curtailed. That old maxim ‘need to know basis only’ often covers a host of sins and questionable ‘smoke and mirrors’ schemes which would not see the light of day if those with any smidgeon of moral rectitude were allowed to know precisely what the agenda really was.
Natives of these islands are often approached to make life difficult for individuals who do not conform to the establishment norm, but are no threat to national security. And it is here that the harm done to dissenters within the British Isles is most evident.
The machinations around the miners’ strike and Grunwick, and the underhand neo con tactics which succeeded in virtually destroying workers’ unions outside the public sector had at their core a degree of collusion by the Security Services, who were prepared to turn on the people of this country to serve those who sought to profit most from the unacceptable neo con face of capitalism and to destroy the unions.
Organisations which attempt to uncover unpalatable truths about the British establishment are often infiltrated and taken over by agents provocateur in order to nullify the effect of their organisation. People within these organisations may have a peaceful and honourable agenda, but soon find themselves urged toward more violent extremes or self-destructive tactics.
The finances of the organisation may become muddied; internecine fighting within the organisation may break out. In essence an organisation which once had laudable aims can become a battleground for infighting, power hungry demagogues and it is all too easy to manipulate members of these organisations into this type of self-destructive behaviour with a little tweaking from agent provocateur within their midst.
In order to establish their bona fides the neo con agent provocateur will initially be perceived to have a great victory over those they covertly serve. Having established their bona fides they will then go on to destroy the organisation, oust honest and worthy activists until, eventually, one finds these organisations deprived of the talents of those who believe in the aims of the organisation and supplanted by agents provocateurs who promote one another in order to destroy the organisation completely.
James Todd of Victims of Masonic Ill Treatment (VOMIT) comes to mind. This man claimed to be campaigning against the excesses of Masonic influence, whilst actually working toward identifying and destroying individuals who could have been effectively campaigning to reveal those excesses. He showered journalists with spurious stories, whilst smothering stories of real interest. He sent members chasing after red herrings to deflect their energies from pursuing the goals they might have achieved. Whenever anyone got within striking distance of causing a real uproar, which might bring some focus on Masonic excesses, James Todd would create a storm in a teacup over an irrelevant issue or misdirect those with real complaints.
In the end too many organisations, supposedly campaigning against establishment malpractices, are completely overtaken by agent provocateurs, who end up leading these organisations, so making them completely ineffective.
Prior to 9/11 in 2001 an anti-capitalist rally was held in London, by a broad coalition of a number of groups. The organisers and demonstrators had absolutely no intention of causing harm or perpetrating violence. Consider the following reports on the same event which occurred in 2001. The official version of events denies eye witness reports from Trafalgar Square of agents provocateurs in their midst who tried to drum up violence whilst held by police for seven hours without access to public toilets or refreshments.
Such provocation from the external police force upon the demonstrators was augmented by those planted within the group being corralled; who then tried to instigate violence amongst the innocent who were corralled and provocatively held for seven hours by the police. It is a testament to those demonstrators that any outbreak of violence was minimal and short lived, when one considers the sort of provocation they faced from neo con establishment forces.
This is perhaps the most controversial and unproven assertion, that those who have suffered some mental ill health may be spurred, albeit by wholly honourable sentiments, to do the most harm in subverting the peaceful intentions of any demonstration or movement for change. These people are deserving of great kindness, however one should be aware of how easily they can be manipulated into destructive and chaotic activities.
Despite television cameras focusing on a group of about two dozen masked demonstrators, who trashed a MacDonald’s restaurant, it is worth noting that of the 42 people arrested, most of those arrests were for drunkenness, public order offences and allegedly carrying weapons. The demonstrators who trashed MacDonald’s (which very oddly was unguarded and left open to attack) largely seemed immune from prosecution and any agents provocateur efforts to step up the violence were shunned by the predominantly peaceful demonstrators. The official line – pasted immediately below – remains uncorrupted on the internet:
http://www.rte.ie/news/2000/0501/maydaylondon.html
Violence distorts message of London anti-capitalist rally
Monday, 1 May 2000 23:58
Seven people, including three police officers, were hospitalised in London after fighting broke out at a May Day anti-capitalist rally in front of the Houses of Parliament. Demonstrators split from a mainstream protest in Parliament Square and smashed their way into a McDonald's restaurant and hurled bricks and bottles at police. The restaurant was destroyed. There were further violent confrontations as protesters tried to storm St Martin's in the Field Church just off Trafalgar Square. Demonstrators hurled bottles, cans, traffic bollards and any rubbish they could find at police wearing riot gear. One officer said that there were an estimated 4,000 protesters in the square itself.
All police leave was cancelled and there remains a heavy security presence in the city. Scotland Yard feared that some demonstrators were intent on causing violence similar to that experienced last year in London and more recently in Washington. Condemning the violence the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, described the rioters as idiots and beneath contempt. He called for those responsible to be brought to justice. The British Home Secretary said that he had discussed preparations for the protests with the Metropolitan and City of London police. Jack Straw said that everybody had a right to demonstrate. However, he added that nobody had a right to demonstrate violently or to attack people or property. Scotland Yard said that 42 people were arrested for drunkenness, public order offences or carrying weapons.
It had all started peacefully this morning as thousands of demonstrators banging drums and blowing whistles converged on Parliament Square in Westminster. They said they were going to reclaim the streets by planting seeds and saplings. They were ringed by hundreds of police who feared a repeat of the riots, which took place in London last June and November. There was minor traffic congestion and police just looked on. The Reclaim the Streets group, which organised the guerrilla gardening event, denied that a repeat of last year's June 18 London riots was inevitable. A spokesman for the group, John Jordan, said that the event was a celebration of the anti-capitalism movement, rather than a protest.
But at about 2pm the mood changed. About two dozen protestors stormed into the Whitehall branch of McDonalds and within minutes they had smashed every window and had torn down the sign outside. Riot police who tried to break it up were pelted with bottles and cans. TV camera crews were also attacked. There was a sit-down demonstration in the road outside. It was the sort of violence that police had predicted. Protestors were later forced by police to remain in Trafalgar Square. It is believed that police gradually filtered people out through the square.
Some of the demonstrators were masked to conceal their identities from the dozens of CCTV cameras which police are monitoring from a central control room in nearby Scotland Yard. Police said that there are known trouble-makers who attempted to incite violent behaviour by posting messages on the internet. However, protestors in Parliament Square insisted that they were not there for violence. Their protest passed off with only minor incidents.
Eight people were arrested at a similar anti-capitalist rally in Manchester. 250 people had demonstrated peacefully in Piccadilly Gardens, but smaller groups then targeted fast food outlets and the city's tram system. A massive police operation was in place and protestors were contained and eventually led from the city centre.
http://www.ngy.1st.ne.jp/~ieg/icrm/icrm2000/icrm0005/0005n633.htm
… Anyone who attended the May Day anti-capitalist demonstrations in London would on watching the evening news or reading the papers the following morning have wondered if they were talking about the same event. The media has been full of lurid accounts of mass violence and terror throughout the streets of London. But was this actually the case and what was the real role of the Men in Blue?
For days the press had been building up the planned demonstrations as being a carnival of chaos in which blood would flow all over London. Excited reporters dreamt up stories of saboteurs infiltrating City offices (although being a Bank Holiday they would actually be shut!) and conspiratorial characters lurking in dark pub rooms planning the decimation of the City. The repeated statements from the organisers that the event would be non-violent were rejected as being a cover position. The police added to this hysteria with repeated announcements that all police leave was being cancelled to prepare for the riots to come. As we shall see the police were very much working towards their own agenda.
Come Monday morning, the streets of London were full of police vans as they waited for the hooded rioters to appear from out of darkened doorways. However nothing of the sort occurred. The traditional trade union demonstration left Clerkenwell Green at 1.00pm as planned. In Parliament Square several thousand demonstrators arrived, as announced, to carry out a mass planting as a sign of opposition to the forces of capital. Since gardening is not normally seen as a sign of rioting there was little for the media to report.
However, the police were having none of this. After the November demonstration against capitalism, timed to coincide with the Seattle events, the police had been smarting over criticism that they had let the event get out of control. Now they wanted their revenge. Citing the actions of a very small minority of those present who had attacked a branch of McDonalds and daubed paint on a couple of statues (both these targets had strangely been left unprotected by the police despite concerns being raised before hand), the police moved in and pushed demonstrators up towards Trafalgar Square. At the same time the official labour movement demonstration was summarily stopped in the Stand before it arrived for the planned rally in Trafalgar Square and told that they could go no further and should disband-so much for democratic rights. The police then set about slowly sealing off the whole of Trafalgar Square. Lines of police in full riot gear were joined by a large number of military police again in full body armour. Hundreds were left trapped inside the square, demonstrators, tourists, the lot. A smaller group positioned in Charing Cross road by the Portrait Gallery were pushed backwards, after refusing a call from the police to go into Trafalgar Square and be trapped with the others.
Despite repeated provocations from the police the mood remained remarkable calm and strangely quiet as evening approached. Contrary to the position being reported by the media it was clear to all present that the majority of those present were not out to cause trouble but just wanted to celebrate May Day and oppose capitalism. The promised conspiratorial hordes of "anarchists" turned out to be just a handful, nothing like the numbers predicted by the right wing press. Disgracefully the police kept those trapped in Trafalgar Square in there for hour after hour, no food or water or access to toilets. Included in this number were old people and small children, tourists and local workers. The police just didn't care, they wanted their revenge for last years 'defeat'. Corralled in for no reason other than to try and intimidate, the people were only very gradually let out a few at a time and only after being photographed by police cameras.
Such heavy handed methods, completely out of tune with the earlier carnival mood reported as such even by the police spokespersons, should serve as a warning to the Labour and trade union movement. These are the sort of methods that the police are prepared to use, and worse, to terrorise and intimidate legitimate demonstrations. We have already had a taste of this during the Miners strike, the polltax campaign and in Northern Ireland. It is naive in the extreme to believe that the law is impartial and that we are all equal under it. In the future, as opposition grows and grows against the attacks of the market, especially from the organised labour movement, the police will increasingly adopt such vicious methods to try and break the spirit of the class.
Trade unionists and Labour movement activists should also be warned that there is already a campaign afoot on the part of the media and others to use this event as an excuse to ban or 'limit' demonstrations. Ann Widdecombe has also called for the rounding up of all film of the demonstration, this to then be made available to the police. The warning is clear-demonstrations will be curtailed or banned and those which do take place will be heavily "supervised" with cameras everywhere. The movement cannot stand for this curtailing of our rights and must take a stand against this trend. If the labour movement opposes this new proposals then it can be defeated. They can harass and arrest a few stray individuals but against a force of hundreds of thousands of trade unionists, youth and others from the working class they would be powerless. This is the required response to the rantings of Blair, Straw, Widdecombe and the rest. The Labour movement fought for the right to protest and march to show opposition-now the struggle is on again.
Rob Sewell and Steve Jones
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2001/02/10/my-debate-with-squall/
…And so SQUALL would like to present a few unreported facts to remind ourselves that staying on our toes is a permanent requirement…….
Fact. Reclaim the Streets publicised a guerilla gardening action in Parliament Square. Their publicity stated that it was not a protest but a constructive action to highlight the necessity to reclaim public space. The horticultural nature of the event was consciously designed to attract those genuinely into ‘greening the streets’ rather than just getting pissed and exercising their lairyness.
Fact. The event in Parliament Square lasted for seven hours and there was no violence whatsoever, even when towards the conclusion of the day police tried to hold everyone in the Square against their will. The samba band played, seeds were planted, the road was turfed, banners were unfurled, a maypole was erected and activists filed reports and thoughts onto Indymedia UK’s new roadside-laptop website. The day passed off as a success. Whether or not activists agreed with defacing statues - some did some didn’t - the paint was cleaned off in a day and no lasting damage occurred. At the end of the day the crowd held together in one mass and marched through the police cordon united. The police did not wield their truncheons and there was no violence on either side at any point in the day. Some activists even hung around with bin bags and cleaned up the Square afterwards. How many people heard about this. Six weeks later Parliament Square was covered in plants as the Mayday sown seeds sprung into action.
Fact: A van full of compost, straw bails and seeds bound for Parliament Square was trailed from west London, intercepted by police and impounded for being unroadworthy. Two days later police allowed the driver to drive it away. It was evidently roadworthy. Five weeks later when the van was put in for a service, the garage mechanics found that every nut on the two back wheels was about to fall off. The garage informed the owner that he was fortunate to be alive.
Fact. For three weeks up to Mayday, British mainstream media incessantly publicised the event as a riot. “British army on standby” roared the Evening Standard. More people in the UK learned about the event through the mainstream media than they did through RTS leaflets. If certain people arrived in London looking for a riot, it wasn’t an RTS flyer which attracted them.
Fact. The media and those they managed to attract got their riot. Not much of one as riots go but just enough of a ruckus to weave the story around. A plethora of groups ranging from the Socialist Worker Party to the Rover workers to Turkish communists to pissed punks to unaligned anti-capitalists and bemused tourists were all corralled in Trafalgar Square and refused exit by truncheoned police lines.
Fact. For the first time in four years of anti-capitalist demonstrations, a McDonald’s Burger bar right in the middle of the demonstration was left undefended by policemen. Nearby riot police waited for twenty minutes before going in to disperse demonstrators who had by this time smashed the place up. A pre-event action outside McDonald’s on the Strand earlier that morning was swarming with police and intelligence officers. Why did they leave the Whitehall McDonald’s undefended?
Let those who got caught up in the scraps with police, those who sprayed the cenotaph, those who threw tarmac lumps in Kennington Park later that evening; let them defend their own actions. Some property-damagers like the ex-British army soldier who daubed fake blood on Winston Churchill’s statue had very good reasons for doing what they did and deserve applause for their courage of conviction. Both for their action and their willingness to be emphatic about the political reasons for their action when a “sorry m’lud” might have reduced the sentence. Some were just the pissed lunch outs you’ll always find somewhere. A tiny minority amid the thousands.
The barrage of critics laying blame for the Mayday skirmishes and the subsequently overblown media backlash at the feet of Reclaim the Streets are well wide of the mark. In their critical haste they are ignoring the creative work that went into facilitating a remarkably successful event in Parliament Square. An event that was imaginative, politically symbolic, well executed, well attended, forceful yet non-violent. Very few people seem to realise that this event even took place. And yet this was the RTS event, as advertised by RTS, in Parliament Square. A malevolent media so keen for dramatic copy and so capitalistically complicit, continues to foster and ferment the outrage, relishing and inflaming the very riots they pretend to abhor.
The more insidious part of this agenda is the cold calculation. For the abhorrence that such hysterical coverage ferments in the minds and loyalties of a general public is capitalism’s attempt to destroy the reputation of its detractors. If the capitalist world can persuade the general public that its opponents are not thoughtful people with a point, but violently crazed troublemakers, then they can keep their tightened grip round the throat of the world, unchallenged
To split the spikies from the fluffies, the NGO’s from the direct action groups, middle England from street folk, one section of society from another so that disunited, we affect nothing. The straggled survivors from a thousand massacred social causes are uniting to provide a significant challenge to the manicured PR of unfettered capitalism; a threat unparalleled in recent years. Beware the wedge now being driven strategically into the joins.
Those reports in full – note that the typeface has now been corrupted on some non-establishment reports on the internet:
http://www.ngy.1st.ne.jp/~ieg/icrm/icrm2000/icrm0005/0005n633.htm
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London May Day protests Hypocrisy of the capitalist press and politicians
Ÿ‘Ûî•ñ ICRM, International Information Concerning Revolutionary Movements
ICRM No.633 May 1, 2000 London-U.K.
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London May Day protests Hypocrisy of the capitalist press and politicians
http://www.marxist.com/Europe/london_may_day00.html
The violent flair up in London on May Day which resulted in damage to a McDonald's restaurant and other property has caused outrage in the capitalist press and amongst bourgeois politicians of every stripe.
Leading the chorus of condemnation was none other than Tony Blair, the leader of the nation, who denounced the actions of the protesters as "mindless thuggery". The following day, he urged the friends and families of those involved to "name names" and grass on their loved ones. In Parliament, Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, defended the "non-confrontational" actions of the Metropolitan police, which drew loud cheers from the Tories. "The vandals desecrated the Cenotaph and defaced the statue of Sir Winston Churchill..." he thundered, oblivious to the fact that Churchill was an avowed enemy of the Labour movement. This was followed by howls of protest from William Hague and Anne Widdecombe. These Saviours of Democracy asked in the House of Commons for "exemplary sentences" to be handed out and suggested May Day demonstrations be banned in future.
It is no accident that the right to protest, the right to demonstrate, as well as the right to free speech, was won by the British working class in the teeth of opposition from the ruling class and their political representatives in the Tory Party. How they would love to turn the clocks back!
For us, the uprooting of turf, the daubing of paint, and the smashing of a few shop fronts is a futile gesture which cannot damage or undermine global capitalism. This requires the conscious movement of the working class in the struggle for a socialist society. Despite the childish nature of the actions of some of the protesters, which are utterly counter-productive, they have served to bring down the wrath of God on their heads from the Establishment. Both New Labour and the Tories are falling over themselves to castigate the anti-capitalist protesters. All are united in an unholy alliance of condemnation. Private property must remain sacred!
What strikes you about all this sanctimonious bellowing is its utter hypocrisy. These good law-abiding Christian Ladies and Gentlemen who rule our lives are quick to condemn small-time violence from protesters against global capitalism. But when it comes to mass violence inflicted on the "lesser breeds" in other countries who threaten the material interests of imperialism, all we get is crocodile tears from these same hypocrites. These Christian people, who no doubt go to church every Sunday in their fashionable clothes, welcomed the bombing of Iraq and the murder of 100,000 men, women and children. The imperialist power's merciless and inhuman economic blockade has resulted in the deaths of tens of over one million children, creating terrible shortages, especially of medicine and medical supplies.
Those who raise their arms in horror at the daubing of paint on the Cenotaph, stupid as it was, were the most ardent war-mongers when it came to the bombing of innocent people in former Yugoslavia. This, after all, was simply "collateral damage" and nothing more. NATO, with the full backing of the British government, targeted refineries, water plants, television studios, residential areas and factories. Blair was the most bellicose of all NATO leaders in his campaign to "degrade", i.e.. to bomb the hell out of Yugoslavia. And all this imperialist aggression was dressed up as "ethical foreign policy".
As Leon Trotsky pointed out 75 years ago: "The British bourgeoisie has been brought up on ruthlessness. The conditions of island existence, the moral philosophy of Calvinism, colonial practices, and national arrogance have led them along that road."
Their morality is the morality of the market place. Tony Blair apes all the features of the ruling class in his condemnation of the lower orders. The working class must learn restraint, subordination, and even gratitude, while the capitalist class engages in their exploitation. Working people must reject this stinking hypocrisy, so beloved by the Labour and trade union hierarchy, and fight to end the rule of the monopolies, which will mean a society free from violence, hunger and exploitation. In the words of Frederick Engels, it will constitute a leap by humanity from the "realm of necessity" to the "realm of freedom".
The role of the police
Anyone who attended the May Day anti-capitalist demonstrations in London would on watching the evening news or reading the papers the following morning have wondered if they were talking about the same event. The media has been full of lurid accounts of mass violence and terror throughout the streets of London. But was this actually the case and what was the real role of the Men in Blue?
For days the press had been building up the planned demonstrations as being a carnival of chaos in which blood would flow all over London. Excited reporters dreamt up stories of saboteurs infiltrating City offices (although being a Bank Holiday they would actually be shut!) and conspiratorial characters lurking in dark pub rooms planning the decimation of the City. The repeated statements from the organisers that the event would be non-violent were rejected as being a cover position. The police added to this hysteria with repeated announcements that all police leave was being cancelled to prepare for the riots to come. As we shall see the police were very much working towards their own agenda.
Come Monday morning, the streets of London were full of police vans as they waited for the hooded rioters to appear from out of darkened doorways. However nothing of the sort occurred. The traditional trade union demonstration left Clerkenwell Green at 1.00pm as planned. In Parliament Square several thousand demonstrators arrived, as announced, to carry out a mass planting as a sign of opposition to the forces of capital. Since gardening is not normally seen as a sign of rioting there was little for the media to report.
However, the police were having none of this. After the November demonstration against capitalism, timed to coincide with the Seattle events, the police had been smarting over criticism that they had let the event get out of control. Now they wanted their revenge. Citing the actions of a very small minority of those present who had attacked a branch of McDonalds and daubed paint on a couple of statues (both these targets had strangely been left unprotected by the police despite concerns being raised before hand), the police moved in and pushed demonstrators up towards Trafalgar Square. At the same time the official labour movement demonstration was summarily stopped in the Stand before it arrived for the planned rally in Trafalgar Square and told that they could go no further and should disband-so much for democratic rights . The police then set about slowly sealing off the whole of Trafalgar Square. Lines of police in full riot gear were joined by a large number of military police again in full body armour. Hundreds were left trapped inside the square, demonstrators, tourists, the lot. A smaller group positioned in Charing Cross road by the Portrait Gallery were pushed backwards, after refusing a call from the police to go into Trafalgar Square and be trapped with the others.
Despite repeated provocations from the police the mood remained remarkable calm and strangely quiet as evening approached. Contrary to the position being reported by the media it was clear to all present that the majority of those present were not out to cause trouble but just wanted to celebrate May Day and oppose capitalism. The promised conspiratorial hordes of "anarchists" turned out to be just a handful, nothing like the numbers predicted by the right wing press. Disgracefully the police kept those trapped in Trafalgar Square in there for hour after hour, no food or water or access to toilets. Included in this number were old people and small children, tourists and local workers. The police just didn't care, they wanted their revenge for last years 'defeat'. Corralled in for no reason other than to try and intimidate, the people were only very gradually let out a few at a time and only after being photographed by police cameras.
Such heavy handed methods, completely out of tune with the earlier carnival mood reported as such even by the police spokespersons, should serve as a warning to the Labour and trade union movement. These are the sort of methods that the police are prepared to use, and worse, to terrorise and intimidate legitimate demonstrations. We have already had a taste of this during the Miners strike, the polltax campaign and in Northern Ireland. It is naive in the extreme to believe that the law is impartial and that we are all equal under it. In the future, as opposition grows and grows against the attacks of the market, especially from the organised labour movement, the police will increasingly adopt such vicious methods to try and break the spirit of the class.
Trade unionists and Labour movement activists should also be warned that there is already a campaign afoot on the part of the media and others to use this event as an excuse to ban or 'limit' demonstrations. Ann Widdecombe has also called for the rounding up of all film of the demonstration, this to then be made available to the police. The warning is clear-demonstrations will be curtailed or banned and those which do take place will be heavily "supervised" with cameras everywhere. The movement cannot stand for this curtailing of our rights and must take a stand against this trend. If the labour movement opposes this new proposals then it can be defeated. They can harass and arrest a few stray individuals but against a force of hundreds of thousands of trade unionists, youth and others from the working class they would be powerless. This is the required response to the rantings of Blair, Straw, Widdecombe and the rest. The Labour movement fought for the right to protest and march to show opposition-now the struggle is on again.
Rob Sewell and Steve Jones
Was this the same event?
http://www.rte.ie/news/2000/0501/maydaylondon.html
Violence distorts message of London anti-capitalist rally
Monday, 1 May 2000 23:58
Seven people, including three police officers, were hospitalised in London after fighting broke out at a May Day anti-capitalist rally in front of the Houses of Parliament. Demonstrators split from a mainstream protest in Parliament Square and smashed their way into a McDonald's restaurant and hurled bricks and bottles at police. The restaurant was destroyed. There were further violent confrontations as protesters tried to storm St Martin's in the Field Church just off Trafalgar Square. Demonstrators hurled bottles, cans, traffic bollards and any rubbish they could find at police wearing riot gear. One officer said that there were an estimated 4,000 protesters in the square itself.
All police leave was cancelled and there remains a heavy security presence in the city. Scotland Yard feared that some demonstrators were intent on causing violence similar to that experienced last year in London and more recently in Washington. Condemning the violence the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, described the rioters as idiots and beneath contempt. He called for those responsible to be brought to justice. The British Home Secretary said that he had discussed preparations for the protests with the Metropolitan and City of London police. Jack Straw said that everybody had a right to demonstrate. However, he added that nobody had a right to demonstrate violently or to attack people or property. Scotland Yard said that 42 people were arrested for drunkenness, public order offences or carrying weapons.
It had all started peacefully this morning as thousands of demonstrators banging drums and blowing whistles converged on Parliament Square in Westminster. They said they were going to reclaim the streets by planting seeds and saplings. They were ringed by hundreds of police who feared a repeat of the riots, which took place in London last June and November. There was minor traffic congestion and police just looked on. The Reclaim the Streets group, which organised the guerrilla gardening event, denied that a repeat of last year's June 18 London riots was inevitable. A spokesman for the group, John Jordan, said that the event was a celebration of the anti-capitalism movement, rather than a protest.
But at about 2pm the mood changed. About two dozen protestors stormed into the Whitehall branch of McDonalds and within minutes they had smashed every window and had torn down the sign outside. Riot police who tried to break it up were pelted with bottles and cans. TV camera crews were also attacked. There was a sit-down demonstration in the road outside. It was the sort of violence that police had predicted. Protestors were later forced by police to remain in Trafalgar Square. It is believed that police gradually filtered people out through the square.
Some of the demonstrators were masked to conceal their identities from the dozens of CCTV cameras which police are monitoring from a central control room in nearby Scotland Yard. Police said that there are known trouble-makers who attempted to incite violent behaviour by posting messages on the internet. However, protestors in Parliament Square insisted that they were not there for violence. Their protest passed off with only minor incidents.
Eight people were arrested at a similar anti-capitalist rally in Manchester. 250 people had demonstrated peacefully in Piccadilly Gardens, but smaller groups then targeted fast food outlets and the city's tram system. A massive police operation was in place and protestors were contained and eventually led from the city centre.
Note the underhand tactics used against demonstrators, thoughtlessly putting drivers and other road users lives at risk by tampering with impounded vehicles.
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2001/02/10/my-debate-with-squall/
My Debate with Squall
Posted February 10, 2001
My Debate with Squall
Squall Editorial, June 2000
In this land of hasty critics, it isn’t difficult to inflame levels of self-criticism so destructive that the team - our team - is bound to lose, whatever. The mercenaries who populate British media know the formula well. It may be numbingly predictable but relentless criticism sells; the nastier the better. It sways our decision to pluck a newspaper from the stands and persuades us to loiter before the TV news.
It has often been repeated that British heroes are only promoted with applause in order to provide fodder for future lambast and British journalists largely deserve their scurrilous reputation for fueling the process. One minute yer friend, the next yer enemy, regardless of circumstances; fickle in search of a novel angle and permanently purchasable for thirty pieces of silver.
The barrage of criticism heaped upon Reclaim the Streets from all sides subsequent to the guerilla gardening action on Mayday provides an ample case in point; staggering both in its complicity with mainstream political strategy and for the inanity of its pointless self-destruction.
We’re used to the likes of the Daily Mail and the Sunday Times proffering the ‘Anarchist yobs takeover’ and ‘RTS stockpile weapons’ style of coverage. But this time the usual suspects were joined by an onslaught of critical barrage from pseudo-friends of the movement like Oxbridge journo, George Monbiot. Content to have established a career based on his connections to the UK direct action scene, it is a bitter truth that Monbiot might accept thirty pieces of Guardian silver for an exaggerated kiss and tell onslaught against RTS.
For those who missed George Monbiot’s bilious attack, a wade through the spluttered outrage can be spared with a summary of his main points. Liberally peppered with the language and metaphor of utter condemnation, he stated that RTS’s ranks are swollen with violent and uncaring thugs, and that, having lost the plot completely, RTS are “a part of the problem not the solution”. Furthermore, and perhaps most hypocritically, he stated that planting seeds outside the Houses of Parliament was a “futile” action against capitalism.
Four years ago, Monbiot was content to wallow in the acres of column inches which revolved around “The Oxford don and his rag-bag army” when as one of a hundred or so activists on The Land is Ours’ first action at Wisley, he planted vegetables and trees on a small stretch of long disused WW2 airfield in Surrey. Monbiot launched his career in British journalism off the back of his association with that action, with the Daily Telegraph running a whole page on the “ideological leader” Monbiot and his French aristocratic ancestry. There were many of his co-activists on that direct action who felt the agenda being pilfered even at that stage.
Four years later there’s an undeniable hypocrisy in Monbiot’s preparedness to describe the Guerilla Gardening action on Mayday as a futile gesture. Andy yet occurring as it did outside the Houses of Parliament it was evidently a far more full frontal and significant action than planting up a wooded Surrey copse miles from anywhere and already full of wildlife. If Monbiot was alone with his extravagant and well paid criticism, we wouldn’t waste our column inches talking about his. But his criticisms sat complicity alongside a raft of hysterical exaggerations and dire warnings which appeared on BBC and ITV news that evening and in most national newspapers the next day.
Stoked further by the Labour Party’s desire to associate Ken Livingstone with those who sprayed the cenotaph, coverage of the event became a laughable circus of hyperbole; an exaggerated monstrosity of self-inflated condemnation portraying all anti-capitalists as mindless thugs who would spit on the grave of the war dead. In the latent belief that there is no smoke without fire, people believed it. The media steer babbled on relentlessly until people were found whistling its tune without thinking twice about the source of the subliminal melody. Even those with previous direct action associations began parroting the position that RTS had lost the plot.
And so SQUALL would like to present a few unreported facts to remind ourselves that staying on our toes is a permanent requirement…….
Fact. Reclaim the Streets publicised a guerilla gardening action in Parliament Square. Their publicity stated that it was not a protest but a constructive action to highlight the necessity to reclaim public space. The horticultural nature of the event was consciously designed to attract those genuinely into ‘greening the streets’ rather than just getting pissed and exercising their lairyness.
Fact. The event in Parliament Square lasted for seven hours and there was no violence whatsoever, even when towards the conclusion of the day police tried to hold everyone in the Square against their will. The samba band played, seeds were planted, the road was turfed, banners were unfurled, a maypole was erected and activists filed reports and thoughts onto Indymedia UK’s new roadside-laptop website. The day passed off as a success. Whether or not activists agreed with defacing statues - some did some didn’t - the paint was cleaned off in a day and no lasting damage occurred. At the end of the day the crowd held together in one mass and marched through the police cordon united. The police did not wield their truncheons and there was no violence on either side at any point in the day. Some activists even hung around with bin bags and cleaned up the Square afterwards. How many people heard about this. Six weeks later Parliament Square was covered in plants as the Mayday sown seeds sprung into action.
Fact: A van full of compost, straw bails and seeds bound for Parliament Square was trailed from west London, intercepted by police and impounded for being unroadworthy. Two days later police allowed the driver to drive it away. It was evidently roadworthy. Five weeks later when the van was put in for a service, the garage mechanics found that every nut on the two back wheels was about to fall off. The garage informed the owner that he was fortunate to be alive.
Fact. For three weeks up to Mayday, British mainstream media incessantly publicised the event as a riot. “British army on standby” roared the Evening Standard. More people in the UK learned about the event through the mainstream media than they did through RTS leaflets. If certain people arrived in London looking for a riot, it wasn’t an RTS flyer which attracted them.
Fact. The media and those they managed to attract got their riot. Not much of one as riots go but just enough of a ruckus to weave the story around. A plethora of groups ranging from the Socialist Worker Party to the Rover workers to Turkish communists to pissed punks to unaligned anti-capitalists and bemused tourists were all corralled in Trafalgar Square and refused exit by truncheoned police lines.
Fact. For the first time in four years of anti-capitalist demonstrations, a McDonald’s Burger bar right in the middle of the demonstration was left undefended by policemen. Nearby riot police waited for twenty minutes before going in to disperse demonstrators who had by this time smashed the place up. A pre-event action outside McDonald’s on the Strand earlier that morning was swarming with police and intelligence officers. Why did they leave the Whitehall McDonald’s undefended?.
Let those who got caught up in the scraps with police, those who sprayed the cenotaph, those who threw tarmac lumps in Kennington Park later that evening; let them defend their own actions. Some property-damagers like the ex-British army soldier who daubed fake blood on Winston Churchill’s statue had very good reasons for doing what they did and deserve applause for their courage of conviction. Both for their action and their willingness to be emphatic about the political reasons for their action when a “sorry m’lud” might have reduced the sentence. Some were just the pissed lunch outs you’ll always find somewhere. A tiny minority amid the thousands.
The barrage of critics laying blame for the Mayday skirmishes and the subsequently overblown media backlash at the feet of Reclaim the Streets are well wide of the mark. In their critical haste they are ignoring the creative work that went into facilitating a remarkably successful event in Parliament Square. An event that was imaginative, politically symbolic, well executed, well attended, forceful yet non-violent. Very few people seem to realise that this event even took place. And yet this was the RTS event, as advertised by RTS, in Parliament Square. A malevolent media so keen for dramatic copy and so capitalistically complicit, continues to foster and ferment the outrage, relishing and inflaming the very riots they pretend to abhor.
The more insidious part of this agenda is the cold calculation. For the abhorrence that such hysterical coverage ferments in the minds and loyalties of a general public is capitalism’s attempt to destroy the reputation of its detractors. If the capitalist world can persuade the general public that its opponents are not thoughtful people with a point, but violently crazed troublemakers, then they can keep their tightened grip round the throat of the world, unchallenged
To split the spikies from the fluffies, the NGO’s from the direct action groups, middle England from street folk, one section of society from another so that disunited, we affect nothing. The straggled survivors from a thousand massacred social causes are uniting to provide a significant challenge to the manicured PR of unfettered capitalism; a threat unparalleled in recent years. Beware the wedge now being driven strategically into the joins.
Socialist Outlook : SO/15 - Summer 2008
Eventually the truth might emerge as it did following demonstrations against protestors who demonstrated against the Vietnam war in 1968:
http://www.isg-fi.org.uk/spip.php?article637
Vietnam Solidarity Campaign veteran on secret reports
Exposed: British police spies worked to isolate anti-war movement
On the Secret Internal Police Reports about the 1968 mobilizations
Ernie Tate
Recently, Solomon Hughes of the British daily, the Guardian, has been in touch with me regarding the recently released London police reports about the preparations for the October 27th, 1968, mobilizations against the Vietnam War, which my partner, Jess MacKenzie and I were involved in.
The story broke on BBC television yesterday evening. It certainly shows the scope of the protests and the vicious role of the police, with sections of the press playing along, in trying to isolate those of us who were organizing opposition to the war.
FolIowing is my letter to Hughes and I’ve pasted in one of the recently released police reports. He says the file is about three inches thick. If you clear away the hysteria, the report shows just how wrong the cops got it all, which as Paul Mason of the BBC suggests, is why they kept their reports hidden for forty years. Aside from that, I’ve used this opportunity to give some information on some of the difficulties we faced in organizing the demos at that time. It’s an important period in the history of the socialist left in the U.K.
Friday, May 30, 2008
Ernie Tate’s letter to The Guardian’s Solomon Hughes
Toronto,
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Hello Solomon:
Again, thanks very much for the internal police reports. After forty years, they make interesting reading and sort of capture the flavour of those tumultuous times. What is not expressed in the reports, however, is the anger which was wide-spread then about the American actions in Vietnam as a result of what people were seeing on television every evening and reading in their newspapers, and the absolute obsequious role of the Wilson Labour Government in the face of this. Its policy of “neutrality” and its talk about Britain “using its good offices to act as an intermediary” between the U.S. and the Vietnamese “to bring an end to the conflict”, in many peoples eyes lacked any moral basis.
The VSC’s criticism of this policy, asking how the British would have reacted if other countries had applied such a policy to Britain when it, during the Second World War, was under assault from fascist Germany, was one of the most powerful arguments we made and it found a deep response throughout Britain and helps to explain why a relatively small organization, such as the VSC with hardly any resources, quickly increased its influence over a short time to where it was able to have a dramatic influence on the streets. Whether we were able to have any influence on Government policy, I don’t know, but it certainly must have caused some concern because it showed just how quickly an “unofficial” opposition could develop outside the influence of the Labour Party.
Regarding October 1968, from the police reports you sent and my experience there, it seems to me the police were feeding many stories to the press in an attempt scare people away — with much of the press co-operating – and which back-fired somewhat, because I’m sure it only helped promote our actions and helped us reach a much larger audience than if we were relying only on our limited resources. The police reports certainly captured the hyper-anxiety of those running the security forces and maybe even the state, probably more induced by what was happening in the rest of Europe, especially in France, than in Britain itself.
Some of the police statements are simply factually wrong and surprisingly ill informed, and I’m sure, they were meant to re-enforce their own political prejudices. Or maybe they were smoking some strong stuff. Every little tit-bit of information, the gossip, the stupid speculations by un-named people, who could even be other plain clothes cops, the talk about cutting GPO lines setting vehicles on fire, etc., is just silly, and meant to put the wind up their superiors, I’m sure.
Take the issue of violence, for example. In the report, “Vietnam Solidarity campaign ‘Autumn Offensive’”, Sept. 10, 68, p3, it states: “The more cautious representatives of the International Socialism and International Marxist groups paid lip service to the vision of a peaceful demonstration.” This is written by someone who must have been asleep and had not been following what was going on, and it suggests that whoever they had planted inside, if it came from there, was somewhat inept, and collecting money under false pretences.
Let me explain. It’s just not logical what the report says about this. The International Marxist Group, of which I was one of the leaders, was very clear about what our objectives were: very simply, we wanted the Labour Government to break from the Americans on Vietnam. This would be the best way, we thought, to put pressure on the U.S. to withdraw their troops and the best tactic for accomplishing this was having tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people on the streets of London protesting. This is what we meant by solidarity with the Vietnamese and why we, along with the Bertrand Russell Foundation, set up the VSC. Some of VSC posters even carried the slogan calling for victory for the NLF.
To achieve this, we had to make it possible for ordinary people to come out onto the streets and protest peacefully. A deliberate policy of seeking out confrontation and fighting the police stood in the way of this. At a special VSC conference in early 1968, after a very brief stay, most of the Maoist groups – especially Albert Machanda – broke from the VSC, strange as it may seem, because we had refused to adopt their proposal to endorse the programme of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front. It was their way of trying to tie us into the politics of the NLF, and the Maoiism of the Communist Party of China.
It was in the Ad Hoc Committee where we had the strongest debates about violence and confrontation, especially around the question of a possible route for the October, 1968, action. It seems whoever was writing the reports, was totally unaware of this. The Ad Hoc Committee, initiated by the VSC in the spring of1968, was a broad coalition of anti-war and political groups who, although they did not necessarily agree with the VSC’s “solidarity” line, united around the common task of organizing the October,1998 demo. (The police report gets this all confused.) The VSC proposed an assembly point on the Embankment and then proceeding to Hyde Park for a mass rally; the Maoists and other ultra-lefts, instead, proposed going to Grosvenor Square and the American Embassy as we had done the previous March, for a confrontation with the police.
After a long debate, the majority supported our point of view. About the same time, we also had a debate about the route with the International Socialists, who were not in the VSC (the police report is also incorrect about this) but who were in the Ad Hoc Committee. I.S. had proposed organizing a mass rally at the Bank of England and encircling it in some kind of symbolic gesture “against finance capital”! This was also rejected because it would have given maximum opportunity for the ultra left and anarchists to create chaos and violence and we would have had great difficulty controlling it. Basically, we thought it irresponsible to invite people out for a peaceful protest then force them, without them having any say about the tactic, into a confrontation with the police with perhaps tragic circumstances. (I don’t think the I.S. was ultra-left at that time, but simply misguided. I think the I.S. (now the SWP) – who were a lot smaller then – learned a lot from this experience, because it seems to me, they have been quite successful over the past few years, in organizing through the Stop the War Coalition some very successful demos against the war in Iraq.)
On the actual day of the October 27th, 1968, demonstration (which incidentally, I think was much larger than the 100,000 we had initially projected), we took action to ensure that the ultra-left would not try and divert everyone to the American Embassy. We placed recognized leaders – myself included — immediately behind the ultra-left contingent. Tariq Ali played an invaluable role here. When they made their move at Trafalgar Square to head towards the American Embassy, we simply turned around and stopped the demonstration and let the Maoists and their friends head off and Tariq took up a megaphone to explain what was happening to those behind us. The ultra-left and anarchists hesitated a little while and began yelling insults at us, but we told the people around us to wait until they left. I estimate they took around 5000 people to fight the police in Grosvenor Square and had quite a few people arrested, including people who did not know what they were getting into.
In the previous years, in 1966 they had been brutal in their treatment of people on our demonstrations which were quite small – around a couple of hundred — but the best we could do as the war escalated. The police were known to carry lead-filled leather black-jacks which they would use to thump the backs of protestors who resisted being pushed around. People told me it was like a kidney punch which caused temporary, but very painful paralysis. Unlike CND, or the Committee of 100 which carried out sit-downs, and were largely influenced by pacifism, we in the VSC recommended that people not be violent but be militant and resist the police attacks. As the report confirms, the police were totally surprised by the new mood of militancy they met on the streets.
We were also angry at their covert disruption operations to prevent us functioning and carrying out our normal activities. For example, several time over the summer of 1968, they tried to prevent the National Council of the Ad-Hoc Committee from meeting by phoning and pretending to be an official of the Committee to cancel our hall rental. Several times we had to meet out on the Yorkshire moors to conduct our business. In addition, when our people travelled to the continent they were victimized, Ralph Schoenman being a case in point, if he had to check in his luggage for the flight, at the other end the bags would not show up and only appear after a couple of hours, long after every one else on the flight had gotten theirs. Of course, the authorities were illegally opening our bags to see what was there.
But we weren’t silent about the role of the police in trying to intimidate us. If you check the media reports from that time, you’ll see that in September we began a concerted media campaign to limit police presence on our demonstrations. Our argument was that the police were at the demonstrations on the assumption that violence was going to take place and that it was they who provoked violence. I remember some intellectuals, some of the folks around New Left Review, Robin Blackburn specifically, publically making the point that the police presence gave the impression that there was something illegal in the act of protesting and that protest was a normal civic duty and part of the democratic process.
Tariq Ali, who helped orchestrate this campaign and who had more media access than anyone we knew, in the weeks leading up to the demo, gave several important T.V. interviews under this theme, where he very cogently argued our case explaining that we had our own monitors for the demo and that the police should stay away. Ralph Milliband also felt very strong about this issue, appearing several times in the media demanding that the police stay away. John Palmer, who worked for the Guardian was also very supportive of what we were trying to do, as was Paul Foot.
And indeed, on the day of the demonstration, there were hardly any police visible; they and their horses, kept to the back streets out of sight. And as you mention, on that day things were rather peaceful as far as we were concerned and very clearly, the police had over-reacted. The West End was like a ghost city. All the welding of the manhole covers on the route of the march was just absurd, as was all the heavy plywood on bank buildings and windows. Another demand we raised, but I don’t know how successful we were, was to give individual policemen the right to refuse duty to police a demonstration, as a matter conscience.
The foregoing is my reaction to the material you sent me. Of course the times were much more radical then than now and people, generally, especially the youth, felt they could influence events, and maybe change things for the better. In such a radicalization, everyone comes onto the streets, often with their own weird ideas and concepts. This was true in London that year and is also reflected in the police report. In this sense it is an important historical document which reminds us of the times and how the authorities responded to one of the most significant protests in those years. I’m glad you made the effort to dig it up and give it the light of day. I hope what I’ve put down here helps you sort your way through it.
Yours truly,
Ernest Tate
The Secret Police Report
Secret [marked “SECRET” top and bottom of all three pages] Metropolitan Police Special Branch
Subject: Vietnam Solidarity campaign “Autumn Offensive”
Reference to papers 346/68/15 (2)
10th day of September 1968
The climate of opinion among extreme left-wing elements in this country in relation to public political protest has undergone a radical change over the last few years. The emphasis has shifted first from orderly, peaceful, cooperative meetings and processions to passive resistance and “sit downs” and now to active confrontation with the authorities to attempt to force social changes and alterations of government policy. Indeed, the more vociferous spokesmen of the left are calling fro the complete overthrow of parliamentary democracy and the substitution of various brands of “socialism” and “workers control”. They claim that this can only be achieved by “action on the streets”, and although few of them will admit it publicly, or in the press, that they desire a state of anarchy, it is nevertheless tacitly accepted that such a conditions is a necessary preamble to engineering a breakdown of out present system of government and achieving a revolutionary change in the society in which we live.
Between 1956 and 1963 the Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament acted as a catalyst for the discontent of the British left, and this organisation was used as a platform and a stalking horse by almost all the dissident groups. The virtual cessation of nuclear bomb-testing removed the strongest plank from the C.N.D platform, and the committee of 100 took up the banner of protest. This latter organisation became more extreme with the passage of time, and when it foundered earlier this year was almost wholly anarchistic in character.
The Vietnam War was the next issue taken up by British political extremists. Protest was sporadic at first, but in Jun 1966 a new organisation called the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign was formed under the leadership of Ralph SCHOENMAN, the notorious American agitator, and financed by Bertrand RUSSELL. The Trotskyist influence was strong from the beginning; although anarchists and pacifists were attracted by the anti-war and anti-establishment flavour of the group they have never possessed power within it and it remains the preserve of revolutionary factions. A parallel organisation, the British Committee for Peace in Vietnam, founded in 1965, is communist-controlled and moderate in tone. 1967 saw the rise of a number of Maoist groups, notably the Friends of China led by Albert MANCHANDA, and the Maoists are active in the British Vietnam Solidarity Front and openly advocate the use of violence. The “Stop It” committee of expatriate Americans is also involved in the protest activity over the Vietnam War; the members are split on the violence issue.
The leaders of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign belong chiefly to two Trotskyist factions – the International Socialism and International Marxist groups. Pat JORDAN, a veteran Trotskyist, is the power behind the scenes; Ed GUITON, Mike MARTIN and Ernie TATE are leading officials. Others closely involved in V.S.C. activity are XXXXXX of the Revolutionary Socialists Student Federation and XXXXXXX of the Radical Students Alliance. Tariq ALI is popularly supposed to be a leading light in the V.S.C. and the student protest movement: this is not the case. His power and influence are in inverse ratio to his acknowledged flair for personal publicity and his natural gifts as a mob orator.
It is a matter of common knowledge that disorderly demonstrations took place in Grosvenor Square outside the American Embassy in October 1967 and March 1968 under V.S.C. auspices, and that there were numerous arrests and much damage to property. The pattern at both these demonstrations were remarkably similar. A meeting, followed by a march to the American Embassy, followed by disorder in the square and adjacent streets. In the second demonstration a number of aliens and students from provincial universities took part. Another anti-American demonstration in July 1968, nominally under communist auspices, was heavily infiltrated by V.S.C supporters and again there was disorder and many arrests. At this time an announcement was made that there would be a week of activity in October 1968 under the general title of the “autumn offensive” culminating in a mass demonstration on the weekend of the 26th/27th October 1968.
In the past few months a number of revolutionary leaders have produced study papers on this demonstration, the theme is common. It is said that the anti-Vietnam war protest movement is merely part of the continuing struggle to bring about world-wide revolution and that this demonstration can only be regarded as a skirmish before the larger battle. The figure of 100,000 demonstrators began to be bandied about; there was general agreement that this number of militant demonstrators would bring about a total breakdown of law and order. To this end a number of moribund V.S.C. branches were resurrected and local activity stimulated. The existing London branches are:
Earls Court
Hampstead, Kilburn, Notting Hill Gate, Fulham, Lambeth, Walthamstow, Hornsey, Highgate and Holloway, Hackney
Additionally the following ad-hoc committees have been formed to co-ordinate local activity:
North London ad-hoc committee
North West London ad-hoc committee
North West London Action Group
Wes Middlesex Vietnam ad-hoc committee
Libertarian ad-hoc committee
The national headquarters of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign are at 120 commercial road, E.1 . The organisation occupies offices on the second-floor, and the following persons are employed full time on the premises
XXXXX
XXXXX
XXXXX
During the early planning stages of this demonstration it was apparent that the question of the use of calculated violence as a political weapon was causing division in the ranks of the V.S.C members. The Maoists felt that violence was inevitable and said so. The more cautious representatives of the International Socialism and International Marxist groups paid lip service to the vision of a peaceful demonstration. In the event the Maoists did not gain any places on the National Council or the national ad-hoc committee, and are outpaced as apostles of violence by the more volatile anarchists. All the indications are that the Maoists and anarchists will disregard any sort of instructions – from Police or march leaders – and take an independent line on the day
XXXX REDACTED PARAGRAPH XXXX
The following buildings have been suggested as alternative “targets” at one time or another
XXXX REDACTED LIST OF TARGETS XXX
XXX REDACTED FINAL PRAGRAPH XXX
Ernie Tate joined the Canadian section of the Fourth International in the 1950s and in the mid-1960s was assigned by the International to help build the movement in Britain.
If one considers that at the time of these rallies against the Vietnam war the military, with Stirling, Crozier and others at their head, began flirting with Mountbatten and leaders of industry to discuss the idea of overthrowing a properly elected Labour Government, under Harold Wilson, one realises just how out of control the establishment then was. The fact that no enquiry has been held to investigate that mooted coup should indicate that these maverick elements of the establishment remain protected today.
Currently the only legal means of expressing discontent is to do so individually, with no trace of any organisation whatsoever. If you design a leaflet to distribute at say a Remembrance Day Service and then peacefully hand out your leaflet, expressing discontent at the erosion of civil liberties by successive Governments in the name of ‘national security,’ pointing out that Servicemen died for our freedoms, which successive Governments are now denying us. And you do not block the pathway, nor ask anyone else to hand out your leaflets. If you do not collude with like-minded friends then you should not be arrested. However once you recruit one friend you become an illegal demonstration.
One individual who did carry out such an individual demonstration in the Midlands reported:
“Only able to cover one entrance to the Parish Church for the Remembrance Day Service, I suddenly noticed that all the big wigs were routed through another entrance.
Had a demonstration of two or three people been organised I would have had to have sought permission, giving advance warning and run the risk of subversive elements turning a peaceful demonstration into a farcical and possibly violent event.
Having stood in the street at the entrance to the parish church carrying out this one-person demonstration I suddenly realised how unused the police are to expressions of free speech. A policeman could be seen and heard on his radio questioning his right to arrest me. The policeman was asked: ‘Is the demonstrator alone ‘ – back came the answer – ‘Yes.’ Is the demonstrator preventing those trying to gain access to the Parish Church from doing so.’ The answer was ‘No.’ ‘Is the demonstrator disturbing the peace in any way.’ ‘No.’ What is the demonstrator doing?’ ‘Chatting to bystanders, smiling and handing out leaflets.’ ‘No – you can’t arrest a single demonstrator.’
Though no doubt the police would have trawled the law books in future years to find some excuse to do so, had I repeated that demonstration.”
By removing the element of surprise from demonstrators the establishment has, particularly under this Labour Government, ensured that they are able to compromise or subvert all future demonstrations with the use of provocative police action and planted agents provocateurs.
Those who comment authoritatively in the media on the Security Services will use the argument that a very small number of individuals are employed by the State to oversee national security and it is mere fantasy to suppose that an extensive network exists.
The MoD is adept at wooing journalists prepared to sing from their hymn sheets. Those who do not are quickly frozen out or fed false stories to ensure that their professional ability will never be trusted again. So no journalist aiming to report unbiased information can ever become an expert in the Security Services.
Whilst it is true that paid individuals working for MI5, MI6 (SIS), Special Branch, GCHQ etc. are relatively few in number, the lure to be a part of the establishment appeals to many more who have no formal contract of employment with the security services. These individuals are only too willing to be stooges for our out of control security services and flatter themselves that they may suddenly have developed some sort of intellectual capacity by being invited to contribute towards the work of the ‘intelligence services.’ That these low-grade individuals are given a broad remit, in which to work unsupervised, allows our Security Services, with some justification, to claim ignorance and therefore deny culpability. Private Detective agencies specialising in intercept information also allow bugging to take place with impunity without seeking the Home Secretary’s imprimatur on any documents.
These would be James Bonds will forego any moral values to feel themselves a part of an elite with an inside line to ‘Military Intelligence.’ Clubbable individuals who may belong to the Committee of Twenty, the Bilderberg Group, Rotarians, Masons, Buffaloes, the British Lions, Royal Arch, Livery Companies, the Honourable Artillery Company or any other self selecting ‘elite’ are often approached to do some sort of service in the interests of ‘national security.’ Such individuals are often weak minded, ill-educated people who are drawn to these sorts of clubs due to their own lack of ability and justified lack of confidence. They need to congregate for personal advantage, as hyenas congregate in the wild in order to assault more noble beasts.
Individuals who were part of a visiting good will chess team to Russia, during the Cold War, were approached to plant bugs in the conference room, within the Russian Embassy, whilst there to discuss arrangements for their visit to the USSR. This may be morally justified during a time like the Cold War and it is hard to resist the temptation to err in the higher service of patriotism. Equally, the individual approached may have been right to refuse, since he felt himself outside the machinations of the Security Services and doubted their motives. It may have been that the Security Services themselves were intent on souring relations further and ensuring that ‘goodwill’ chess visits were curtailed. That old maxim ‘need to know basis only’ often covers a host of sins and questionable ‘smoke and mirrors’ schemes which would not see the light of day if those with any smidgeon of moral rectitude were allowed to know precisely what the agenda really was.
Natives of these islands are often approached to make life difficult for individuals who do not conform to the establishment norm, but are no threat to national security. And it is here that the harm done to dissenters within the British Isles is most evident.
The machinations around the miners’ strike and Grunwick, and the underhand neo con tactics which succeeded in virtually destroying workers’ unions outside the public sector had at their core a degree of collusion by the Security Services, who were prepared to turn on the people of this country to serve those who sought to profit most from the unacceptable neo con face of capitalism and to destroy the unions.
Organisations which attempt to uncover unpalatable truths about the British establishment are often infiltrated and taken over by agents provocateur in order to nullify the effect of their organisation. People within these organisations may have a peaceful and honourable agenda, but soon find themselves urged toward more violent extremes or self-destructive tactics.
The finances of the organisation may become muddied; internecine fighting within the organisation may break out. In essence an organisation which once had laudable aims can become a battleground for infighting, power hungry demagogues and it is all too easy to manipulate members of these organisations into this type of self-destructive behaviour with a little tweaking from agent provocateur within their midst.
In order to establish their bona fides the neo con agent provocateur will initially be perceived to have a great victory over those they covertly serve. Having established their bona fides they will then go on to destroy the organisation, oust honest and worthy activists until, eventually, one finds these organisations deprived of the talents of those who believe in the aims of the organisation and supplanted by agents provocateurs who promote one another in order to destroy the organisation completely.
James Todd of Victims of Masonic Ill Treatment (VOMIT) comes to mind. This man claimed to be campaigning against the excesses of Masonic influence, whilst actually working toward identifying and destroying individuals who could have been effectively campaigning to reveal those excesses. He showered journalists with spurious stories, whilst smothering stories of real interest. He sent members chasing after red herrings to deflect their energies from pursuing the goals they might have achieved. Whenever anyone got within striking distance of causing a real uproar, which might bring some focus on Masonic excesses, James Todd would create a storm in a teacup over an irrelevant issue or misdirect those with real complaints.
In the end too many organisations, supposedly campaigning against establishment malpractices, are completely overtaken by agent provocateurs, who end up leading these organisations, so making them completely ineffective.
Prior to 9/11 in 2001 an anti-capitalist rally was held in London, by a broad coalition of a number of groups. The organisers and demonstrators had absolutely no intention of causing harm or perpetrating violence. Consider the following reports on the same event which occurred in 2001. The official version of events denies eye witness reports from Trafalgar Square of agents provocateurs in their midst who tried to drum up violence whilst held by police for seven hours without access to public toilets or refreshments.
Such provocation from the external police force upon the demonstrators was augmented by those planted within the group being corralled; who then tried to instigate violence amongst the innocent who were corralled and provocatively held for seven hours by the police. It is a testament to those demonstrators that any outbreak of violence was minimal and short lived, when one considers the sort of provocation they faced from neo con establishment forces.
This is perhaps the most controversial and unproven assertion, that those who have suffered some mental ill health may be spurred, albeit by wholly honourable sentiments, to do the most harm in subverting the peaceful intentions of any demonstration or movement for change. These people are deserving of great kindness, however one should be aware of how easily they can be manipulated into destructive and chaotic activities.
Despite television cameras focusing on a group of about two dozen masked demonstrators, who trashed a MacDonald’s restaurant, it is worth noting that of the 42 people arrested, most of those arrests were for drunkenness, public order offences and allegedly carrying weapons. The demonstrators who trashed MacDonald’s (which very oddly was unguarded and left open to attack) largely seemed immune from prosecution and any agents provocateur efforts to step up the violence were shunned by the predominantly peaceful demonstrators. The official line – pasted immediately below – remains uncorrupted on the internet:
http://www.rte.ie/news/2000/0501/maydaylondon.html
Violence distorts message of London anti-capitalist rally
Monday, 1 May 2000 23:58
Seven people, including three police officers, were hospitalised in London after fighting broke out at a May Day anti-capitalist rally in front of the Houses of Parliament. Demonstrators split from a mainstream protest in Parliament Square and smashed their way into a McDonald's restaurant and hurled bricks and bottles at police. The restaurant was destroyed. There were further violent confrontations as protesters tried to storm St Martin's in the Field Church just off Trafalgar Square. Demonstrators hurled bottles, cans, traffic bollards and any rubbish they could find at police wearing riot gear. One officer said that there were an estimated 4,000 protesters in the square itself.
All police leave was cancelled and there remains a heavy security presence in the city. Scotland Yard feared that some demonstrators were intent on causing violence similar to that experienced last year in London and more recently in Washington. Condemning the violence the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, described the rioters as idiots and beneath contempt. He called for those responsible to be brought to justice. The British Home Secretary said that he had discussed preparations for the protests with the Metropolitan and City of London police. Jack Straw said that everybody had a right to demonstrate. However, he added that nobody had a right to demonstrate violently or to attack people or property. Scotland Yard said that 42 people were arrested for drunkenness, public order offences or carrying weapons.
It had all started peacefully this morning as thousands of demonstrators banging drums and blowing whistles converged on Parliament Square in Westminster. They said they were going to reclaim the streets by planting seeds and saplings. They were ringed by hundreds of police who feared a repeat of the riots, which took place in London last June and November. There was minor traffic congestion and police just looked on. The Reclaim the Streets group, which organised the guerrilla gardening event, denied that a repeat of last year's June 18 London riots was inevitable. A spokesman for the group, John Jordan, said that the event was a celebration of the anti-capitalism movement, rather than a protest.
But at about 2pm the mood changed. About two dozen protestors stormed into the Whitehall branch of McDonalds and within minutes they had smashed every window and had torn down the sign outside. Riot police who tried to break it up were pelted with bottles and cans. TV camera crews were also attacked. There was a sit-down demonstration in the road outside. It was the sort of violence that police had predicted. Protestors were later forced by police to remain in Trafalgar Square. It is believed that police gradually filtered people out through the square.
Some of the demonstrators were masked to conceal their identities from the dozens of CCTV cameras which police are monitoring from a central control room in nearby Scotland Yard. Police said that there are known trouble-makers who attempted to incite violent behaviour by posting messages on the internet. However, protestors in Parliament Square insisted that they were not there for violence. Their protest passed off with only minor incidents.
Eight people were arrested at a similar anti-capitalist rally in Manchester. 250 people had demonstrated peacefully in Piccadilly Gardens, but smaller groups then targeted fast food outlets and the city's tram system. A massive police operation was in place and protestors were contained and eventually led from the city centre.
http://www.ngy.1st.ne.jp/~ieg/icrm/icrm2000/icrm0005/0005n633.htm
… Anyone who attended the May Day anti-capitalist demonstrations in London would on watching the evening news or reading the papers the following morning have wondered if they were talking about the same event. The media has been full of lurid accounts of mass violence and terror throughout the streets of London. But was this actually the case and what was the real role of the Men in Blue?
For days the press had been building up the planned demonstrations as being a carnival of chaos in which blood would flow all over London. Excited reporters dreamt up stories of saboteurs infiltrating City offices (although being a Bank Holiday they would actually be shut!) and conspiratorial characters lurking in dark pub rooms planning the decimation of the City. The repeated statements from the organisers that the event would be non-violent were rejected as being a cover position. The police added to this hysteria with repeated announcements that all police leave was being cancelled to prepare for the riots to come. As we shall see the police were very much working towards their own agenda.
Come Monday morning, the streets of London were full of police vans as they waited for the hooded rioters to appear from out of darkened doorways. However nothing of the sort occurred. The traditional trade union demonstration left Clerkenwell Green at 1.00pm as planned. In Parliament Square several thousand demonstrators arrived, as announced, to carry out a mass planting as a sign of opposition to the forces of capital. Since gardening is not normally seen as a sign of rioting there was little for the media to report.
However, the police were having none of this. After the November demonstration against capitalism, timed to coincide with the Seattle events, the police had been smarting over criticism that they had let the event get out of control. Now they wanted their revenge. Citing the actions of a very small minority of those present who had attacked a branch of McDonalds and daubed paint on a couple of statues (both these targets had strangely been left unprotected by the police despite concerns being raised before hand), the police moved in and pushed demonstrators up towards Trafalgar Square. At the same time the official labour movement demonstration was summarily stopped in the Stand before it arrived for the planned rally in Trafalgar Square and told that they could go no further and should disband-so much for democratic rights. The police then set about slowly sealing off the whole of Trafalgar Square. Lines of police in full riot gear were joined by a large number of military police again in full body armour. Hundreds were left trapped inside the square, demonstrators, tourists, the lot. A smaller group positioned in Charing Cross road by the Portrait Gallery were pushed backwards, after refusing a call from the police to go into Trafalgar Square and be trapped with the others.
Despite repeated provocations from the police the mood remained remarkable calm and strangely quiet as evening approached. Contrary to the position being reported by the media it was clear to all present that the majority of those present were not out to cause trouble but just wanted to celebrate May Day and oppose capitalism. The promised conspiratorial hordes of "anarchists" turned out to be just a handful, nothing like the numbers predicted by the right wing press. Disgracefully the police kept those trapped in Trafalgar Square in there for hour after hour, no food or water or access to toilets. Included in this number were old people and small children, tourists and local workers. The police just didn't care, they wanted their revenge for last years 'defeat'. Corralled in for no reason other than to try and intimidate, the people were only very gradually let out a few at a time and only after being photographed by police cameras.
Such heavy handed methods, completely out of tune with the earlier carnival mood reported as such even by the police spokespersons, should serve as a warning to the Labour and trade union movement. These are the sort of methods that the police are prepared to use, and worse, to terrorise and intimidate legitimate demonstrations. We have already had a taste of this during the Miners strike, the polltax campaign and in Northern Ireland. It is naive in the extreme to believe that the law is impartial and that we are all equal under it. In the future, as opposition grows and grows against the attacks of the market, especially from the organised labour movement, the police will increasingly adopt such vicious methods to try and break the spirit of the class.
Trade unionists and Labour movement activists should also be warned that there is already a campaign afoot on the part of the media and others to use this event as an excuse to ban or 'limit' demonstrations. Ann Widdecombe has also called for the rounding up of all film of the demonstration, this to then be made available to the police. The warning is clear-demonstrations will be curtailed or banned and those which do take place will be heavily "supervised" with cameras everywhere. The movement cannot stand for this curtailing of our rights and must take a stand against this trend. If the labour movement opposes this new proposals then it can be defeated. They can harass and arrest a few stray individuals but against a force of hundreds of thousands of trade unionists, youth and others from the working class they would be powerless. This is the required response to the rantings of Blair, Straw, Widdecombe and the rest. The Labour movement fought for the right to protest and march to show opposition-now the struggle is on again.
Rob Sewell and Steve Jones
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2001/02/10/my-debate-with-squall/
…And so SQUALL would like to present a few unreported facts to remind ourselves that staying on our toes is a permanent requirement…….
Fact. Reclaim the Streets publicised a guerilla gardening action in Parliament Square. Their publicity stated that it was not a protest but a constructive action to highlight the necessity to reclaim public space. The horticultural nature of the event was consciously designed to attract those genuinely into ‘greening the streets’ rather than just getting pissed and exercising their lairyness.
Fact. The event in Parliament Square lasted for seven hours and there was no violence whatsoever, even when towards the conclusion of the day police tried to hold everyone in the Square against their will. The samba band played, seeds were planted, the road was turfed, banners were unfurled, a maypole was erected and activists filed reports and thoughts onto Indymedia UK’s new roadside-laptop website. The day passed off as a success. Whether or not activists agreed with defacing statues - some did some didn’t - the paint was cleaned off in a day and no lasting damage occurred. At the end of the day the crowd held together in one mass and marched through the police cordon united. The police did not wield their truncheons and there was no violence on either side at any point in the day. Some activists even hung around with bin bags and cleaned up the Square afterwards. How many people heard about this. Six weeks later Parliament Square was covered in plants as the Mayday sown seeds sprung into action.
Fact: A van full of compost, straw bails and seeds bound for Parliament Square was trailed from west London, intercepted by police and impounded for being unroadworthy. Two days later police allowed the driver to drive it away. It was evidently roadworthy. Five weeks later when the van was put in for a service, the garage mechanics found that every nut on the two back wheels was about to fall off. The garage informed the owner that he was fortunate to be alive.
Fact. For three weeks up to Mayday, British mainstream media incessantly publicised the event as a riot. “British army on standby” roared the Evening Standard. More people in the UK learned about the event through the mainstream media than they did through RTS leaflets. If certain people arrived in London looking for a riot, it wasn’t an RTS flyer which attracted them.
Fact. The media and those they managed to attract got their riot. Not much of one as riots go but just enough of a ruckus to weave the story around. A plethora of groups ranging from the Socialist Worker Party to the Rover workers to Turkish communists to pissed punks to unaligned anti-capitalists and bemused tourists were all corralled in Trafalgar Square and refused exit by truncheoned police lines.
Fact. For the first time in four years of anti-capitalist demonstrations, a McDonald’s Burger bar right in the middle of the demonstration was left undefended by policemen. Nearby riot police waited for twenty minutes before going in to disperse demonstrators who had by this time smashed the place up. A pre-event action outside McDonald’s on the Strand earlier that morning was swarming with police and intelligence officers. Why did they leave the Whitehall McDonald’s undefended?
Let those who got caught up in the scraps with police, those who sprayed the cenotaph, those who threw tarmac lumps in Kennington Park later that evening; let them defend their own actions. Some property-damagers like the ex-British army soldier who daubed fake blood on Winston Churchill’s statue had very good reasons for doing what they did and deserve applause for their courage of conviction. Both for their action and their willingness to be emphatic about the political reasons for their action when a “sorry m’lud” might have reduced the sentence. Some were just the pissed lunch outs you’ll always find somewhere. A tiny minority amid the thousands.
The barrage of critics laying blame for the Mayday skirmishes and the subsequently overblown media backlash at the feet of Reclaim the Streets are well wide of the mark. In their critical haste they are ignoring the creative work that went into facilitating a remarkably successful event in Parliament Square. An event that was imaginative, politically symbolic, well executed, well attended, forceful yet non-violent. Very few people seem to realise that this event even took place. And yet this was the RTS event, as advertised by RTS, in Parliament Square. A malevolent media so keen for dramatic copy and so capitalistically complicit, continues to foster and ferment the outrage, relishing and inflaming the very riots they pretend to abhor.
The more insidious part of this agenda is the cold calculation. For the abhorrence that such hysterical coverage ferments in the minds and loyalties of a general public is capitalism’s attempt to destroy the reputation of its detractors. If the capitalist world can persuade the general public that its opponents are not thoughtful people with a point, but violently crazed troublemakers, then they can keep their tightened grip round the throat of the world, unchallenged
To split the spikies from the fluffies, the NGO’s from the direct action groups, middle England from street folk, one section of society from another so that disunited, we affect nothing. The straggled survivors from a thousand massacred social causes are uniting to provide a significant challenge to the manicured PR of unfettered capitalism; a threat unparalleled in recent years. Beware the wedge now being driven strategically into the joins.
Those reports in full – note that the typeface has now been corrupted on some non-establishment reports on the internet:
http://www.ngy.1st.ne.jp/~ieg/icrm/icrm2000/icrm0005/0005n633.htm
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London May Day protests Hypocrisy of the capitalist press and politicians
Ÿ‘Ûî•ñ ICRM, International Information Concerning Revolutionary Movements
ICRM No.633 May 1, 2000 London-U.K.
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London May Day protests Hypocrisy of the capitalist press and politicians
http://www.marxist.com/Europe/london_may_day00.html
The violent flair up in London on May Day which resulted in damage to a McDonald's restaurant and other property has caused outrage in the capitalist press and amongst bourgeois politicians of every stripe.
Leading the chorus of condemnation was none other than Tony Blair, the leader of the nation, who denounced the actions of the protesters as "mindless thuggery". The following day, he urged the friends and families of those involved to "name names" and grass on their loved ones. In Parliament, Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, defended the "non-confrontational" actions of the Metropolitan police, which drew loud cheers from the Tories. "The vandals desecrated the Cenotaph and defaced the statue of Sir Winston Churchill..." he thundered, oblivious to the fact that Churchill was an avowed enemy of the Labour movement. This was followed by howls of protest from William Hague and Anne Widdecombe. These Saviours of Democracy asked in the House of Commons for "exemplary sentences" to be handed out and suggested May Day demonstrations be banned in future.
It is no accident that the right to protest, the right to demonstrate, as well as the right to free speech, was won by the British working class in the teeth of opposition from the ruling class and their political representatives in the Tory Party. How they would love to turn the clocks back!
For us, the uprooting of turf, the daubing of paint, and the smashing of a few shop fronts is a futile gesture which cannot damage or undermine global capitalism. This requires the conscious movement of the working class in the struggle for a socialist society. Despite the childish nature of the actions of some of the protesters, which are utterly counter-productive, they have served to bring down the wrath of God on their heads from the Establishment. Both New Labour and the Tories are falling over themselves to castigate the anti-capitalist protesters. All are united in an unholy alliance of condemnation. Private property must remain sacred!
What strikes you about all this sanctimonious bellowing is its utter hypocrisy. These good law-abiding Christian Ladies and Gentlemen who rule our lives are quick to condemn small-time violence from protesters against global capitalism. But when it comes to mass violence inflicted on the "lesser breeds" in other countries who threaten the material interests of imperialism, all we get is crocodile tears from these same hypocrites. These Christian people, who no doubt go to church every Sunday in their fashionable clothes, welcomed the bombing of Iraq and the murder of 100,000 men, women and children. The imperialist power's merciless and inhuman economic blockade has resulted in the deaths of tens of over one million children, creating terrible shortages, especially of medicine and medical supplies.
Those who raise their arms in horror at the daubing of paint on the Cenotaph, stupid as it was, were the most ardent war-mongers when it came to the bombing of innocent people in former Yugoslavia. This, after all, was simply "collateral damage" and nothing more. NATO, with the full backing of the British government, targeted refineries, water plants, television studios, residential areas and factories. Blair was the most bellicose of all NATO leaders in his campaign to "degrade", i.e.. to bomb the hell out of Yugoslavia. And all this imperialist aggression was dressed up as "ethical foreign policy".
As Leon Trotsky pointed out 75 years ago: "The British bourgeoisie has been brought up on ruthlessness. The conditions of island existence, the moral philosophy of Calvinism, colonial practices, and national arrogance have led them along that road."
Their morality is the morality of the market place. Tony Blair apes all the features of the ruling class in his condemnation of the lower orders. The working class must learn restraint, subordination, and even gratitude, while the capitalist class engages in their exploitation. Working people must reject this stinking hypocrisy, so beloved by the Labour and trade union hierarchy, and fight to end the rule of the monopolies, which will mean a society free from violence, hunger and exploitation. In the words of Frederick Engels, it will constitute a leap by humanity from the "realm of necessity" to the "realm of freedom".
The role of the police
Anyone who attended the May Day anti-capitalist demonstrations in London would on watching the evening news or reading the papers the following morning have wondered if they were talking about the same event. The media has been full of lurid accounts of mass violence and terror throughout the streets of London. But was this actually the case and what was the real role of the Men in Blue?
For days the press had been building up the planned demonstrations as being a carnival of chaos in which blood would flow all over London. Excited reporters dreamt up stories of saboteurs infiltrating City offices (although being a Bank Holiday they would actually be shut!) and conspiratorial characters lurking in dark pub rooms planning the decimation of the City. The repeated statements from the organisers that the event would be non-violent were rejected as being a cover position. The police added to this hysteria with repeated announcements that all police leave was being cancelled to prepare for the riots to come. As we shall see the police were very much working towards their own agenda.
Come Monday morning, the streets of London were full of police vans as they waited for the hooded rioters to appear from out of darkened doorways. However nothing of the sort occurred. The traditional trade union demonstration left Clerkenwell Green at 1.00pm as planned. In Parliament Square several thousand demonstrators arrived, as announced, to carry out a mass planting as a sign of opposition to the forces of capital. Since gardening is not normally seen as a sign of rioting there was little for the media to report.
However, the police were having none of this. After the November demonstration against capitalism, timed to coincide with the Seattle events, the police had been smarting over criticism that they had let the event get out of control. Now they wanted their revenge. Citing the actions of a very small minority of those present who had attacked a branch of McDonalds and daubed paint on a couple of statues (both these targets had strangely been left unprotected by the police despite concerns being raised before hand), the police moved in and pushed demonstrators up towards Trafalgar Square. At the same time the official labour movement demonstration was summarily stopped in the Stand before it arrived for the planned rally in Trafalgar Square and told that they could go no further and should disband-so much for democratic rights . The police then set about slowly sealing off the whole of Trafalgar Square. Lines of police in full riot gear were joined by a large number of military police again in full body armour. Hundreds were left trapped inside the square, demonstrators, tourists, the lot. A smaller group positioned in Charing Cross road by the Portrait Gallery were pushed backwards, after refusing a call from the police to go into Trafalgar Square and be trapped with the others.
Despite repeated provocations from the police the mood remained remarkable calm and strangely quiet as evening approached. Contrary to the position being reported by the media it was clear to all present that the majority of those present were not out to cause trouble but just wanted to celebrate May Day and oppose capitalism. The promised conspiratorial hordes of "anarchists" turned out to be just a handful, nothing like the numbers predicted by the right wing press. Disgracefully the police kept those trapped in Trafalgar Square in there for hour after hour, no food or water or access to toilets. Included in this number were old people and small children, tourists and local workers. The police just didn't care, they wanted their revenge for last years 'defeat'. Corralled in for no reason other than to try and intimidate, the people were only very gradually let out a few at a time and only after being photographed by police cameras.
Such heavy handed methods, completely out of tune with the earlier carnival mood reported as such even by the police spokespersons, should serve as a warning to the Labour and trade union movement. These are the sort of methods that the police are prepared to use, and worse, to terrorise and intimidate legitimate demonstrations. We have already had a taste of this during the Miners strike, the polltax campaign and in Northern Ireland. It is naive in the extreme to believe that the law is impartial and that we are all equal under it. In the future, as opposition grows and grows against the attacks of the market, especially from the organised labour movement, the police will increasingly adopt such vicious methods to try and break the spirit of the class.
Trade unionists and Labour movement activists should also be warned that there is already a campaign afoot on the part of the media and others to use this event as an excuse to ban or 'limit' demonstrations. Ann Widdecombe has also called for the rounding up of all film of the demonstration, this to then be made available to the police. The warning is clear-demonstrations will be curtailed or banned and those which do take place will be heavily "supervised" with cameras everywhere. The movement cannot stand for this curtailing of our rights and must take a stand against this trend. If the labour movement opposes this new proposals then it can be defeated. They can harass and arrest a few stray individuals but against a force of hundreds of thousands of trade unionists, youth and others from the working class they would be powerless. This is the required response to the rantings of Blair, Straw, Widdecombe and the rest. The Labour movement fought for the right to protest and march to show opposition-now the struggle is on again.
Rob Sewell and Steve Jones
Was this the same event?
http://www.rte.ie/news/2000/0501/maydaylondon.html
Violence distorts message of London anti-capitalist rally
Monday, 1 May 2000 23:58
Seven people, including three police officers, were hospitalised in London after fighting broke out at a May Day anti-capitalist rally in front of the Houses of Parliament. Demonstrators split from a mainstream protest in Parliament Square and smashed their way into a McDonald's restaurant and hurled bricks and bottles at police. The restaurant was destroyed. There were further violent confrontations as protesters tried to storm St Martin's in the Field Church just off Trafalgar Square. Demonstrators hurled bottles, cans, traffic bollards and any rubbish they could find at police wearing riot gear. One officer said that there were an estimated 4,000 protesters in the square itself.
All police leave was cancelled and there remains a heavy security presence in the city. Scotland Yard feared that some demonstrators were intent on causing violence similar to that experienced last year in London and more recently in Washington. Condemning the violence the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, described the rioters as idiots and beneath contempt. He called for those responsible to be brought to justice. The British Home Secretary said that he had discussed preparations for the protests with the Metropolitan and City of London police. Jack Straw said that everybody had a right to demonstrate. However, he added that nobody had a right to demonstrate violently or to attack people or property. Scotland Yard said that 42 people were arrested for drunkenness, public order offences or carrying weapons.
It had all started peacefully this morning as thousands of demonstrators banging drums and blowing whistles converged on Parliament Square in Westminster. They said they were going to reclaim the streets by planting seeds and saplings. They were ringed by hundreds of police who feared a repeat of the riots, which took place in London last June and November. There was minor traffic congestion and police just looked on. The Reclaim the Streets group, which organised the guerrilla gardening event, denied that a repeat of last year's June 18 London riots was inevitable. A spokesman for the group, John Jordan, said that the event was a celebration of the anti-capitalism movement, rather than a protest.
But at about 2pm the mood changed. About two dozen protestors stormed into the Whitehall branch of McDonalds and within minutes they had smashed every window and had torn down the sign outside. Riot police who tried to break it up were pelted with bottles and cans. TV camera crews were also attacked. There was a sit-down demonstration in the road outside. It was the sort of violence that police had predicted. Protestors were later forced by police to remain in Trafalgar Square. It is believed that police gradually filtered people out through the square.
Some of the demonstrators were masked to conceal their identities from the dozens of CCTV cameras which police are monitoring from a central control room in nearby Scotland Yard. Police said that there are known trouble-makers who attempted to incite violent behaviour by posting messages on the internet. However, protestors in Parliament Square insisted that they were not there for violence. Their protest passed off with only minor incidents.
Eight people were arrested at a similar anti-capitalist rally in Manchester. 250 people had demonstrated peacefully in Piccadilly Gardens, but smaller groups then targeted fast food outlets and the city's tram system. A massive police operation was in place and protestors were contained and eventually led from the city centre.
Note the underhand tactics used against demonstrators, thoughtlessly putting drivers and other road users lives at risk by tampering with impounded vehicles.
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2001/02/10/my-debate-with-squall/
My Debate with Squall
Posted February 10, 2001
My Debate with Squall
Squall Editorial, June 2000
In this land of hasty critics, it isn’t difficult to inflame levels of self-criticism so destructive that the team - our team - is bound to lose, whatever. The mercenaries who populate British media know the formula well. It may be numbingly predictable but relentless criticism sells; the nastier the better. It sways our decision to pluck a newspaper from the stands and persuades us to loiter before the TV news.
It has often been repeated that British heroes are only promoted with applause in order to provide fodder for future lambast and British journalists largely deserve their scurrilous reputation for fueling the process. One minute yer friend, the next yer enemy, regardless of circumstances; fickle in search of a novel angle and permanently purchasable for thirty pieces of silver.
The barrage of criticism heaped upon Reclaim the Streets from all sides subsequent to the guerilla gardening action on Mayday provides an ample case in point; staggering both in its complicity with mainstream political strategy and for the inanity of its pointless self-destruction.
We’re used to the likes of the Daily Mail and the Sunday Times proffering the ‘Anarchist yobs takeover’ and ‘RTS stockpile weapons’ style of coverage. But this time the usual suspects were joined by an onslaught of critical barrage from pseudo-friends of the movement like Oxbridge journo, George Monbiot. Content to have established a career based on his connections to the UK direct action scene, it is a bitter truth that Monbiot might accept thirty pieces of Guardian silver for an exaggerated kiss and tell onslaught against RTS.
For those who missed George Monbiot’s bilious attack, a wade through the spluttered outrage can be spared with a summary of his main points. Liberally peppered with the language and metaphor of utter condemnation, he stated that RTS’s ranks are swollen with violent and uncaring thugs, and that, having lost the plot completely, RTS are “a part of the problem not the solution”. Furthermore, and perhaps most hypocritically, he stated that planting seeds outside the Houses of Parliament was a “futile” action against capitalism.
Four years ago, Monbiot was content to wallow in the acres of column inches which revolved around “The Oxford don and his rag-bag army” when as one of a hundred or so activists on The Land is Ours’ first action at Wisley, he planted vegetables and trees on a small stretch of long disused WW2 airfield in Surrey. Monbiot launched his career in British journalism off the back of his association with that action, with the Daily Telegraph running a whole page on the “ideological leader” Monbiot and his French aristocratic ancestry. There were many of his co-activists on that direct action who felt the agenda being pilfered even at that stage.
Four years later there’s an undeniable hypocrisy in Monbiot’s preparedness to describe the Guerilla Gardening action on Mayday as a futile gesture. Andy yet occurring as it did outside the Houses of Parliament it was evidently a far more full frontal and significant action than planting up a wooded Surrey copse miles from anywhere and already full of wildlife. If Monbiot was alone with his extravagant and well paid criticism, we wouldn’t waste our column inches talking about his. But his criticisms sat complicity alongside a raft of hysterical exaggerations and dire warnings which appeared on BBC and ITV news that evening and in most national newspapers the next day.
Stoked further by the Labour Party’s desire to associate Ken Livingstone with those who sprayed the cenotaph, coverage of the event became a laughable circus of hyperbole; an exaggerated monstrosity of self-inflated condemnation portraying all anti-capitalists as mindless thugs who would spit on the grave of the war dead. In the latent belief that there is no smoke without fire, people believed it. The media steer babbled on relentlessly until people were found whistling its tune without thinking twice about the source of the subliminal melody. Even those with previous direct action associations began parroting the position that RTS had lost the plot.
And so SQUALL would like to present a few unreported facts to remind ourselves that staying on our toes is a permanent requirement…….
Fact. Reclaim the Streets publicised a guerilla gardening action in Parliament Square. Their publicity stated that it was not a protest but a constructive action to highlight the necessity to reclaim public space. The horticultural nature of the event was consciously designed to attract those genuinely into ‘greening the streets’ rather than just getting pissed and exercising their lairyness.
Fact. The event in Parliament Square lasted for seven hours and there was no violence whatsoever, even when towards the conclusion of the day police tried to hold everyone in the Square against their will. The samba band played, seeds were planted, the road was turfed, banners were unfurled, a maypole was erected and activists filed reports and thoughts onto Indymedia UK’s new roadside-laptop website. The day passed off as a success. Whether or not activists agreed with defacing statues - some did some didn’t - the paint was cleaned off in a day and no lasting damage occurred. At the end of the day the crowd held together in one mass and marched through the police cordon united. The police did not wield their truncheons and there was no violence on either side at any point in the day. Some activists even hung around with bin bags and cleaned up the Square afterwards. How many people heard about this. Six weeks later Parliament Square was covered in plants as the Mayday sown seeds sprung into action.
Fact: A van full of compost, straw bails and seeds bound for Parliament Square was trailed from west London, intercepted by police and impounded for being unroadworthy. Two days later police allowed the driver to drive it away. It was evidently roadworthy. Five weeks later when the van was put in for a service, the garage mechanics found that every nut on the two back wheels was about to fall off. The garage informed the owner that he was fortunate to be alive.
Fact. For three weeks up to Mayday, British mainstream media incessantly publicised the event as a riot. “British army on standby” roared the Evening Standard. More people in the UK learned about the event through the mainstream media than they did through RTS leaflets. If certain people arrived in London looking for a riot, it wasn’t an RTS flyer which attracted them.
Fact. The media and those they managed to attract got their riot. Not much of one as riots go but just enough of a ruckus to weave the story around. A plethora of groups ranging from the Socialist Worker Party to the Rover workers to Turkish communists to pissed punks to unaligned anti-capitalists and bemused tourists were all corralled in Trafalgar Square and refused exit by truncheoned police lines.
Fact. For the first time in four years of anti-capitalist demonstrations, a McDonald’s Burger bar right in the middle of the demonstration was left undefended by policemen. Nearby riot police waited for twenty minutes before going in to disperse demonstrators who had by this time smashed the place up. A pre-event action outside McDonald’s on the Strand earlier that morning was swarming with police and intelligence officers. Why did they leave the Whitehall McDonald’s undefended?.
Let those who got caught up in the scraps with police, those who sprayed the cenotaph, those who threw tarmac lumps in Kennington Park later that evening; let them defend their own actions. Some property-damagers like the ex-British army soldier who daubed fake blood on Winston Churchill’s statue had very good reasons for doing what they did and deserve applause for their courage of conviction. Both for their action and their willingness to be emphatic about the political reasons for their action when a “sorry m’lud” might have reduced the sentence. Some were just the pissed lunch outs you’ll always find somewhere. A tiny minority amid the thousands.
The barrage of critics laying blame for the Mayday skirmishes and the subsequently overblown media backlash at the feet of Reclaim the Streets are well wide of the mark. In their critical haste they are ignoring the creative work that went into facilitating a remarkably successful event in Parliament Square. An event that was imaginative, politically symbolic, well executed, well attended, forceful yet non-violent. Very few people seem to realise that this event even took place. And yet this was the RTS event, as advertised by RTS, in Parliament Square. A malevolent media so keen for dramatic copy and so capitalistically complicit, continues to foster and ferment the outrage, relishing and inflaming the very riots they pretend to abhor.
The more insidious part of this agenda is the cold calculation. For the abhorrence that such hysterical coverage ferments in the minds and loyalties of a general public is capitalism’s attempt to destroy the reputation of its detractors. If the capitalist world can persuade the general public that its opponents are not thoughtful people with a point, but violently crazed troublemakers, then they can keep their tightened grip round the throat of the world, unchallenged
To split the spikies from the fluffies, the NGO’s from the direct action groups, middle England from street folk, one section of society from another so that disunited, we affect nothing. The straggled survivors from a thousand massacred social causes are uniting to provide a significant challenge to the manicured PR of unfettered capitalism; a threat unparalleled in recent years. Beware the wedge now being driven strategically into the joins.
Socialist Outlook : SO/15 - Summer 2008
Eventually the truth might emerge as it did following demonstrations against protestors who demonstrated against the Vietnam war in 1968:
http://www.isg-fi.org.uk/spip.php?article637
Vietnam Solidarity Campaign veteran on secret reports
Exposed: British police spies worked to isolate anti-war movement
On the Secret Internal Police Reports about the 1968 mobilizations
Ernie Tate
Recently, Solomon Hughes of the British daily, the Guardian, has been in touch with me regarding the recently released London police reports about the preparations for the October 27th, 1968, mobilizations against the Vietnam War, which my partner, Jess MacKenzie and I were involved in.
The story broke on BBC television yesterday evening. It certainly shows the scope of the protests and the vicious role of the police, with sections of the press playing along, in trying to isolate those of us who were organizing opposition to the war.
FolIowing is my letter to Hughes and I’ve pasted in one of the recently released police reports. He says the file is about three inches thick. If you clear away the hysteria, the report shows just how wrong the cops got it all, which as Paul Mason of the BBC suggests, is why they kept their reports hidden for forty years. Aside from that, I’ve used this opportunity to give some information on some of the difficulties we faced in organizing the demos at that time. It’s an important period in the history of the socialist left in the U.K.
Friday, May 30, 2008
Ernie Tate’s letter to The Guardian’s Solomon Hughes
Toronto,
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Hello Solomon:
Again, thanks very much for the internal police reports. After forty years, they make interesting reading and sort of capture the flavour of those tumultuous times. What is not expressed in the reports, however, is the anger which was wide-spread then about the American actions in Vietnam as a result of what people were seeing on television every evening and reading in their newspapers, and the absolute obsequious role of the Wilson Labour Government in the face of this. Its policy of “neutrality” and its talk about Britain “using its good offices to act as an intermediary” between the U.S. and the Vietnamese “to bring an end to the conflict”, in many peoples eyes lacked any moral basis.
The VSC’s criticism of this policy, asking how the British would have reacted if other countries had applied such a policy to Britain when it, during the Second World War, was under assault from fascist Germany, was one of the most powerful arguments we made and it found a deep response throughout Britain and helps to explain why a relatively small organization, such as the VSC with hardly any resources, quickly increased its influence over a short time to where it was able to have a dramatic influence on the streets. Whether we were able to have any influence on Government policy, I don’t know, but it certainly must have caused some concern because it showed just how quickly an “unofficial” opposition could develop outside the influence of the Labour Party.
Regarding October 1968, from the police reports you sent and my experience there, it seems to me the police were feeding many stories to the press in an attempt scare people away — with much of the press co-operating – and which back-fired somewhat, because I’m sure it only helped promote our actions and helped us reach a much larger audience than if we were relying only on our limited resources. The police reports certainly captured the hyper-anxiety of those running the security forces and maybe even the state, probably more induced by what was happening in the rest of Europe, especially in France, than in Britain itself.
Some of the police statements are simply factually wrong and surprisingly ill informed, and I’m sure, they were meant to re-enforce their own political prejudices. Or maybe they were smoking some strong stuff. Every little tit-bit of information, the gossip, the stupid speculations by un-named people, who could even be other plain clothes cops, the talk about cutting GPO lines setting vehicles on fire, etc., is just silly, and meant to put the wind up their superiors, I’m sure.
Take the issue of violence, for example. In the report, “Vietnam Solidarity campaign ‘Autumn Offensive’”, Sept. 10, 68, p3, it states: “The more cautious representatives of the International Socialism and International Marxist groups paid lip service to the vision of a peaceful demonstration.” This is written by someone who must have been asleep and had not been following what was going on, and it suggests that whoever they had planted inside, if it came from there, was somewhat inept, and collecting money under false pretences.
Let me explain. It’s just not logical what the report says about this. The International Marxist Group, of which I was one of the leaders, was very clear about what our objectives were: very simply, we wanted the Labour Government to break from the Americans on Vietnam. This would be the best way, we thought, to put pressure on the U.S. to withdraw their troops and the best tactic for accomplishing this was having tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people on the streets of London protesting. This is what we meant by solidarity with the Vietnamese and why we, along with the Bertrand Russell Foundation, set up the VSC. Some of VSC posters even carried the slogan calling for victory for the NLF.
To achieve this, we had to make it possible for ordinary people to come out onto the streets and protest peacefully. A deliberate policy of seeking out confrontation and fighting the police stood in the way of this. At a special VSC conference in early 1968, after a very brief stay, most of the Maoist groups – especially Albert Machanda – broke from the VSC, strange as it may seem, because we had refused to adopt their proposal to endorse the programme of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front. It was their way of trying to tie us into the politics of the NLF, and the Maoiism of the Communist Party of China.
It was in the Ad Hoc Committee where we had the strongest debates about violence and confrontation, especially around the question of a possible route for the October, 1968, action. It seems whoever was writing the reports, was totally unaware of this. The Ad Hoc Committee, initiated by the VSC in the spring of1968, was a broad coalition of anti-war and political groups who, although they did not necessarily agree with the VSC’s “solidarity” line, united around the common task of organizing the October,1998 demo. (The police report gets this all confused.) The VSC proposed an assembly point on the Embankment and then proceeding to Hyde Park for a mass rally; the Maoists and other ultra-lefts, instead, proposed going to Grosvenor Square and the American Embassy as we had done the previous March, for a confrontation with the police.
After a long debate, the majority supported our point of view. About the same time, we also had a debate about the route with the International Socialists, who were not in the VSC (the police report is also incorrect about this) but who were in the Ad Hoc Committee. I.S. had proposed organizing a mass rally at the Bank of England and encircling it in some kind of symbolic gesture “against finance capital”! This was also rejected because it would have given maximum opportunity for the ultra left and anarchists to create chaos and violence and we would have had great difficulty controlling it. Basically, we thought it irresponsible to invite people out for a peaceful protest then force them, without them having any say about the tactic, into a confrontation with the police with perhaps tragic circumstances. (I don’t think the I.S. was ultra-left at that time, but simply misguided. I think the I.S. (now the SWP) – who were a lot smaller then – learned a lot from this experience, because it seems to me, they have been quite successful over the past few years, in organizing through the Stop the War Coalition some very successful demos against the war in Iraq.)
On the actual day of the October 27th, 1968, demonstration (which incidentally, I think was much larger than the 100,000 we had initially projected), we took action to ensure that the ultra-left would not try and divert everyone to the American Embassy. We placed recognized leaders – myself included — immediately behind the ultra-left contingent. Tariq Ali played an invaluable role here. When they made their move at Trafalgar Square to head towards the American Embassy, we simply turned around and stopped the demonstration and let the Maoists and their friends head off and Tariq took up a megaphone to explain what was happening to those behind us. The ultra-left and anarchists hesitated a little while and began yelling insults at us, but we told the people around us to wait until they left. I estimate they took around 5000 people to fight the police in Grosvenor Square and had quite a few people arrested, including people who did not know what they were getting into.
In the previous years, in 1966 they had been brutal in their treatment of people on our demonstrations which were quite small – around a couple of hundred — but the best we could do as the war escalated. The police were known to carry lead-filled leather black-jacks which they would use to thump the backs of protestors who resisted being pushed around. People told me it was like a kidney punch which caused temporary, but very painful paralysis. Unlike CND, or the Committee of 100 which carried out sit-downs, and were largely influenced by pacifism, we in the VSC recommended that people not be violent but be militant and resist the police attacks. As the report confirms, the police were totally surprised by the new mood of militancy they met on the streets.
We were also angry at their covert disruption operations to prevent us functioning and carrying out our normal activities. For example, several time over the summer of 1968, they tried to prevent the National Council of the Ad-Hoc Committee from meeting by phoning and pretending to be an official of the Committee to cancel our hall rental. Several times we had to meet out on the Yorkshire moors to conduct our business. In addition, when our people travelled to the continent they were victimized, Ralph Schoenman being a case in point, if he had to check in his luggage for the flight, at the other end the bags would not show up and only appear after a couple of hours, long after every one else on the flight had gotten theirs. Of course, the authorities were illegally opening our bags to see what was there.
But we weren’t silent about the role of the police in trying to intimidate us. If you check the media reports from that time, you’ll see that in September we began a concerted media campaign to limit police presence on our demonstrations. Our argument was that the police were at the demonstrations on the assumption that violence was going to take place and that it was they who provoked violence. I remember some intellectuals, some of the folks around New Left Review, Robin Blackburn specifically, publically making the point that the police presence gave the impression that there was something illegal in the act of protesting and that protest was a normal civic duty and part of the democratic process.
Tariq Ali, who helped orchestrate this campaign and who had more media access than anyone we knew, in the weeks leading up to the demo, gave several important T.V. interviews under this theme, where he very cogently argued our case explaining that we had our own monitors for the demo and that the police should stay away. Ralph Milliband also felt very strong about this issue, appearing several times in the media demanding that the police stay away. John Palmer, who worked for the Guardian was also very supportive of what we were trying to do, as was Paul Foot.
And indeed, on the day of the demonstration, there were hardly any police visible; they and their horses, kept to the back streets out of sight. And as you mention, on that day things were rather peaceful as far as we were concerned and very clearly, the police had over-reacted. The West End was like a ghost city. All the welding of the manhole covers on the route of the march was just absurd, as was all the heavy plywood on bank buildings and windows. Another demand we raised, but I don’t know how successful we were, was to give individual policemen the right to refuse duty to police a demonstration, as a matter conscience.
The foregoing is my reaction to the material you sent me. Of course the times were much more radical then than now and people, generally, especially the youth, felt they could influence events, and maybe change things for the better. In such a radicalization, everyone comes onto the streets, often with their own weird ideas and concepts. This was true in London that year and is also reflected in the police report. In this sense it is an important historical document which reminds us of the times and how the authorities responded to one of the most significant protests in those years. I’m glad you made the effort to dig it up and give it the light of day. I hope what I’ve put down here helps you sort your way through it.
Yours truly,
Ernest Tate
The Secret Police Report
Secret [marked “SECRET” top and bottom of all three pages] Metropolitan Police Special Branch
Subject: Vietnam Solidarity campaign “Autumn Offensive”
Reference to papers 346/68/15 (2)
10th day of September 1968
The climate of opinion among extreme left-wing elements in this country in relation to public political protest has undergone a radical change over the last few years. The emphasis has shifted first from orderly, peaceful, cooperative meetings and processions to passive resistance and “sit downs” and now to active confrontation with the authorities to attempt to force social changes and alterations of government policy. Indeed, the more vociferous spokesmen of the left are calling fro the complete overthrow of parliamentary democracy and the substitution of various brands of “socialism” and “workers control”. They claim that this can only be achieved by “action on the streets”, and although few of them will admit it publicly, or in the press, that they desire a state of anarchy, it is nevertheless tacitly accepted that such a conditions is a necessary preamble to engineering a breakdown of out present system of government and achieving a revolutionary change in the society in which we live.
Between 1956 and 1963 the Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament acted as a catalyst for the discontent of the British left, and this organisation was used as a platform and a stalking horse by almost all the dissident groups. The virtual cessation of nuclear bomb-testing removed the strongest plank from the C.N.D platform, and the committee of 100 took up the banner of protest. This latter organisation became more extreme with the passage of time, and when it foundered earlier this year was almost wholly anarchistic in character.
The Vietnam War was the next issue taken up by British political extremists. Protest was sporadic at first, but in Jun 1966 a new organisation called the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign was formed under the leadership of Ralph SCHOENMAN, the notorious American agitator, and financed by Bertrand RUSSELL. The Trotskyist influence was strong from the beginning; although anarchists and pacifists were attracted by the anti-war and anti-establishment flavour of the group they have never possessed power within it and it remains the preserve of revolutionary factions. A parallel organisation, the British Committee for Peace in Vietnam, founded in 1965, is communist-controlled and moderate in tone. 1967 saw the rise of a number of Maoist groups, notably the Friends of China led by Albert MANCHANDA, and the Maoists are active in the British Vietnam Solidarity Front and openly advocate the use of violence. The “Stop It” committee of expatriate Americans is also involved in the protest activity over the Vietnam War; the members are split on the violence issue.
The leaders of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign belong chiefly to two Trotskyist factions – the International Socialism and International Marxist groups. Pat JORDAN, a veteran Trotskyist, is the power behind the scenes; Ed GUITON, Mike MARTIN and Ernie TATE are leading officials. Others closely involved in V.S.C. activity are XXXXXX of the Revolutionary Socialists Student Federation and XXXXXXX of the Radical Students Alliance. Tariq ALI is popularly supposed to be a leading light in the V.S.C. and the student protest movement: this is not the case. His power and influence are in inverse ratio to his acknowledged flair for personal publicity and his natural gifts as a mob orator.
It is a matter of common knowledge that disorderly demonstrations took place in Grosvenor Square outside the American Embassy in October 1967 and March 1968 under V.S.C. auspices, and that there were numerous arrests and much damage to property. The pattern at both these demonstrations were remarkably similar. A meeting, followed by a march to the American Embassy, followed by disorder in the square and adjacent streets. In the second demonstration a number of aliens and students from provincial universities took part. Another anti-American demonstration in July 1968, nominally under communist auspices, was heavily infiltrated by V.S.C supporters and again there was disorder and many arrests. At this time an announcement was made that there would be a week of activity in October 1968 under the general title of the “autumn offensive” culminating in a mass demonstration on the weekend of the 26th/27th October 1968.
In the past few months a number of revolutionary leaders have produced study papers on this demonstration, the theme is common. It is said that the anti-Vietnam war protest movement is merely part of the continuing struggle to bring about world-wide revolution and that this demonstration can only be regarded as a skirmish before the larger battle. The figure of 100,000 demonstrators began to be bandied about; there was general agreement that this number of militant demonstrators would bring about a total breakdown of law and order. To this end a number of moribund V.S.C. branches were resurrected and local activity stimulated. The existing London branches are:
Earls Court
Hampstead, Kilburn, Notting Hill Gate, Fulham, Lambeth, Walthamstow, Hornsey, Highgate and Holloway, Hackney
Additionally the following ad-hoc committees have been formed to co-ordinate local activity:
North London ad-hoc committee
North West London ad-hoc committee
North West London Action Group
Wes Middlesex Vietnam ad-hoc committee
Libertarian ad-hoc committee
The national headquarters of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign are at 120 commercial road, E.1 . The organisation occupies offices on the second-floor, and the following persons are employed full time on the premises
XXXXX
XXXXX
XXXXX
During the early planning stages of this demonstration it was apparent that the question of the use of calculated violence as a political weapon was causing division in the ranks of the V.S.C members. The Maoists felt that violence was inevitable and said so. The more cautious representatives of the International Socialism and International Marxist groups paid lip service to the vision of a peaceful demonstration. In the event the Maoists did not gain any places on the National Council or the national ad-hoc committee, and are outpaced as apostles of violence by the more volatile anarchists. All the indications are that the Maoists and anarchists will disregard any sort of instructions – from Police or march leaders – and take an independent line on the day
XXXX REDACTED PARAGRAPH XXXX
The following buildings have been suggested as alternative “targets” at one time or another
XXXX REDACTED LIST OF TARGETS XXX
XXX REDACTED FINAL PRAGRAPH XXX
Ernie Tate joined the Canadian section of the Fourth International in the 1950s and in the mid-1960s was assigned by the International to help build the movement in Britain.
If one considers that at the time of these rallies against the Vietnam war the military, with Stirling, Crozier and others at their head, began flirting with Mountbatten and leaders of industry to discuss the idea of overthrowing a properly elected Labour Government, under Harold Wilson, one realises just how out of control the establishment then was. The fact that no enquiry has been held to investigate that mooted coup should indicate that these maverick elements of the establishment remain protected today.
Currently the only legal means of expressing discontent is to do so individually, with no trace of any organisation whatsoever. If you design a leaflet to distribute at say a Remembrance Day Service and then peacefully hand out your leaflet, expressing discontent at the erosion of civil liberties by successive Governments in the name of ‘national security,’ pointing out that Servicemen died for our freedoms, which successive Governments are now denying us. And you do not block the pathway, nor ask anyone else to hand out your leaflets. If you do not collude with like-minded friends then you should not be arrested. However once you recruit one friend you become an illegal demonstration.
One individual who did carry out such an individual demonstration in the Midlands reported:
“Only able to cover one entrance to the Parish Church for the Remembrance Day Service, I suddenly noticed that all the big wigs were routed through another entrance.
Had a demonstration of two or three people been organised I would have had to have sought permission, giving advance warning and run the risk of subversive elements turning a peaceful demonstration into a farcical and possibly violent event.
Having stood in the street at the entrance to the parish church carrying out this one-person demonstration I suddenly realised how unused the police are to expressions of free speech. A policeman could be seen and heard on his radio questioning his right to arrest me. The policeman was asked: ‘Is the demonstrator alone ‘ – back came the answer – ‘Yes.’ Is the demonstrator preventing those trying to gain access to the Parish Church from doing so.’ The answer was ‘No.’ ‘Is the demonstrator disturbing the peace in any way.’ ‘No.’ What is the demonstrator doing?’ ‘Chatting to bystanders, smiling and handing out leaflets.’ ‘No – you can’t arrest a single demonstrator.’
Though no doubt the police would have trawled the law books in future years to find some excuse to do so, had I repeated that demonstration.”
By removing the element of surprise from demonstrators the establishment has, particularly under this Labour Government, ensured that they are able to compromise or subvert all future demonstrations with the use of provocative police action and planted agents provocateurs.
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