Dan Kieran Read online

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  Introduction

  Voltaire once quipped, ‘I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.’ The use of a quotation from a Frenchman to define what it means to be British may offend some, but then that neatly sums up the contradictory nature of the British people. Sadly, today no-one can claim that Voltaire’s words speak for this country any more. On 1 August 2005, to the widespread shrugging of shoulders across the land, it became illegal to hold a spontaneous political demonstration outside the House of Commons. The nation’s apathy towards losing the right to free speech at the seat of its government, something supposedly as intrinsic to this ‘green and pleasant land’ as warm beer and Freddie FlintofT, posed the question what, if anything, does Britain actually stand for today?

  Twenty miles from London, along the Thames, you will find a field opposite an island in the river. The field contains a monument erected by the American Bar Association. In the field next to it there is a memorial garden to John F. Kennedy to commemorate his role in the Civil Rights movement. Why on earth, you may imagine, are there American monuments in fields by the Thames? There are no other monuments. There is nothing to commemorate anything British. Perhaps an important figure in American history was born there? Nope. The site is far more important to the American people than that. On that unmarked island, in 1215, something was written down that over five hundred years later became the Fifth Amendment of the American Bill of Rights. ‘No freeman shall be taken, imprisoned ... or in any other way destroyed ... except by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land. To no-one will we sell, to none will we deny or delay, right or justice.’ For Americans, this became, ‘No person shall... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.’ The original document was, of course, the Magna Carta.

  Nearly eight hundred years ago King John was held to account by a group of rebel barons who demanded a charter of liberties to protect England from his unfair and erratic behaviour. That was when the principle of a power higher than the sovereign was established. That higher power was the rule of law. The Magna Carta has since been described as the most potent symbol of freedom under law in western civilization. It is something, you would imagine, that even our embarrassed nation would manage to be proud of. At the very least you’d think we might have one of those blue plaques down there somewhere. ‘Liberty under law started here’ perhaps, nailed to a nearby tree. It would be nice to have something to commemorate the birth of British freedom, but there is nothing.

  Today, Britain, and the western world, hosts another dominant power that behaves pretty much as it likes and there seems little chance that it will be forced to adhere to a higher law. This dominant power is not even bound by any laws of basic morality. In fact, according to the American Bar Association1 and the late Milton Friedman, one of the most influential economists of all time, it is actually illegal for a corporation to act altruistically or for the good of their community, country or, heaven forbid, the world.2 A CEO who puts the interests of the community ahead of the company’s shareholders could actually be sent to prison. You see King John had nothing on the modern-day corporation.

  If we all lived in a corporation rather than a country, then at least we would reap the benefits of this immoral logic. But unlike corporations, most societies consider basic morality to be something of value. The government, meanwhile, is doing all it can to help corporations turn us into consumers of Britain rather than citizens of it. So I thought I’d better go out and find the Britain of our dreams, sometimes known as Albion, so we can all go and live there instead.

  The original idea for this book was nothing like the one you now hold in your hands. It was supposed to be a guide to some of the most absurd ancient legislation still on the statute book. I’d had this great idea to go round the country on a crime spree, breaking as many silly old laws as I could find, for your amusement. There are hundreds of these ridiculous laws still in force in Britain. For example, to this day it is illegal to flag down a London taxi if you have the plague. In Chester you can’t shoot a Welshman with a bow and arrow before midnight, but you can after midnight. It’s also against the law to beat a carpet in the Metropolitan Police District. Neither can you carry a sack of soot along a path in a place called Congleton, and it is still unlawful to get within a few hundred yards of the Queen without wearing socks. The list goes on and on. However, in the process of researching these laws I couldn’t help noticing another glut of legislation that seemed even more ludicrous. Great, you may think, but no. You see, there was one problem. Most of our silly laws have trickled onto the statute book over centuries, but this particular set had all come from our current government. And when you meet a man who got arrested after eating a cake with ‘Freedom of Speech’ written on it in icing, and someone else who has a criminal record for holding a banner made of fridge packing in Parliament Square that had ‘Freedom of Speech’ written on it in biro, the idea of breaking the Adulteration of Tea Act of 1776 starts to seem a little frivolous. Of course, once I started lifting up this legal concrete slab in the garden of England all sorts of other creepy crawlics emerged that cast doubt on the health of the nation. So this book became, quite by coincidence, a very different thing entirely.

  Of course, on paper Britain is doing rather well for itself. We have enjoyed unparalleled economic prosperity since Labour came to power. There are more billionaires in the UK today than ever before, there are more shiny things to spend our money on than you could possibly imagine, and, despite widely being portrayed as America’s lapdog, we do appear to have some standing in the world at large. But who else lives in Britain apart from all the high-flyers, over-achievers and entrepreneurs who have helped this great land to secure membership of the G8, the club for the most economically powerful nations on earth? How does Britain seem to everybody else who lives here? You know, the other ones. You and me. Those of us floundering in the highest levels of debt in Europe; the ones afraid of poverty in retirement; the ones being forced to work forty-plus hours a week with only four weeks off a year; the ones terrified of violent crime, of their children being adversely affected by the MMR jab; the ones suffering from depression because they can’t handle the stress of their jobs; the ones Carol Vorderman is hoping will consolidate their debt so she can keep her no doubt lucrative advertising contract; even those who aren’t born yet, hoping to live here one day too, the future generations who will be around when the icecaps start to melt and vast swathes of this country vanish under the ocean.

  To find out, I went on a journey around Britain to meet some of the people still fighting for Albion among the uniform high streets, no-go estates, monochrome offices and shopping malls of corporate Britain. I found an unlikely selection of eccentrics to guide me on my journey who, incidentally, weren’t fighting against the government or the corporations profiting from this land; they were fighting for something instead, which is a much more powerful incentive. On one level they were simply fighting for themselves and their communities; on another they were fighting for every one of us hoping to enjoy Britain’s future. People like the pensioners who let off stink bombs to force an extension to a public inquiry. The hairy history expert who got paid to have custard pies thrown at his beard by Ant and Dec. The man who dresses like Chaplin’s tramp and keeps getting arrested outside Downing Street because we no longer have the right to remain silent either. The world-famous fisherman with a penchant for firing home-made rockets into space. The man who enjoys howling like a wolf in his back garden. The Robin Hood of the squatting world who gets into empty buildings and hands the keys over to ho
meless people who can’t afford anywhere to live. The woman living on the roof of a bus station in Derby. An activist who organizes picketing campaigns outside the homes of drug dealers. The ex-MI5 agent now reduced to peddling conspiracy theories to complete strangers about 9/11. Along with encouragement from Billy Childish (one of Kurt Cobain’s favourite musicians), Gavin Hills, Arthur Pendragon, George Orwell and William Blake. Britain needs these people.

  It needs them all because things are getting a bit Monty Python down in Albion. From the towns we live in to the countryside itself, the cult of overwork and overconsumption is spreading like a disease, bringing with it a greater dependence on anti-depressants and huge numbers of stress-related health problems and tightening us all in an ever-growing grip of fear. Fear of violent crime, fear of poverty in retirement, fear of global warming and, of course, the greatest of them all: the fear of terrorism. Today, the wonder of Albion, if it ever existed, certainly seems to have been obliterated by Britain pic.

  And it’s not just an ideological shift being discussed over cigars and whisky by the political fraternity, it’s a reality that’s changing every aspect of our daily lives. As you’ll soon discover, anyone who actually wants to behave like a citizen of this country, rather than just a consumer of it, quickly finds themselves on the wrong side of the law.

  Dan Kieran Brockley Autumn 2006

  Chapter 1. Don't Let Them Eat Cake

  My descent into Britain’s shady, criminal underworld began at the Young Men’s Christian Association on Fitzroy Square in London, where I attended a meeting with a group of protesters, five of whom had been arrested for eating a picnic in Parliament Square.

  Now, picnicking in Parliament Square may not strike you as much of a crime. Back in 1992 when Tony Blair was a lowly member of the opposition he pledged that Labour would be ‘tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime’; few could have guessed that picnicking was what he had in mind. After all, even Marie Antoinette was prepared to let the peasants eat cake. But this was no ordinary picnic. The picnickers were eating cakes with the words ‘Freedom of Speech’, ‘Freedom* to Protest’ and ‘Save our Speech’ written on them in icing.

  According to Section 132 of the Serious and Organised Crime and Police Act (SOCPA), it is illegal for anyone to protest within a thousand metres of Parliament without the prior consent of the police. This designated area encompasses parts of the South Bank, Trafalgar Square, Downing Street and Parliament Square itself. The law doesn’t do a very good job of defining what it means by a ‘demonstration’, so a single person wearing a T-shirt with ‘Freedom’ written on it who wanders within a kilometre of the seat of government could be arrested for holding an illegal protest. Neither does the Act specify in which directions the thousand-metre zone applies, so if you find yourself on the Jubilee Line below Westminster having a heated political debate, passing overhead in a light aircraft talking about the pensions crisis, or even on the London Eye pointing out all the rubbish on the streets below, make sure there aren’t any police around or you may end up spending the night at Charing Cross police station.

  Now you may think that it doesn’t matter if the law is a bit weak when it comes to defining what is or isn’t a protest or a demonstration. You may trust the courts never actually to convict anyone for something as innocuous as wearing a T-shirt, or pinning a slogan on their jumper, because that would be ridiculous. Maybe you trust the government’s motives despite the authoritarian nature of this law. But how would you feel if the courts did convict someone for standing in Parliament Square with a banner that read ‘Freedom of Speech’? What if someone was convicted for reading out the names of dead British soldiers by the Cenotaph outside Downing Street? Would that be something to worry about? Ask Maya Evans. She got convicted at Bow Street Magistrates Court for that last one. She’s now got a criminal record, for remembering Britain’s war dead.

  In Parliament’s defence, not all MPs were convinced that making a spontaneous act of protest within a kilometre of the House of Commons illegal was a very well-thought-out proposal. During the Second Standing Committee for SOCPA on 12 October 2005 the Conservative MP Edward Garnier commented that the terms of Section 132 were so vague that a single person walking across Westminster Bridge wearing a badge with ‘Bollocks to Blair’3 written on it could be deemed to be holding a political demonstration and would therefore be breaking the law.

  So why would the government want to remove the right to protest near Parliament? Withholding basic rights of protest and free speech from your citizens isn’t something undertaken on a whim. After all, we don’t have rights because the government -deigns to give them to us. The whole point of ‘rights’ is that they are ours to begin with; if an elected government wants to take them from us they’d better have clear, compelling arguments for doing so. Other governments of the world that have recently banned spontaneous protest include Zimbabwe, the Ivory Coast and the Sudan. You can’t imagine the government would want to join a club with those three nations on a whim. So what possible reason could there have been to force them into such drastic action?

  Section 132 was added to SOCPA in an attempt to evict one slightly deranged man, Brian Haw, after he’d spent over four years camped outside the House of Commons opposing the government, first on sanctions being imposed on Iraq and then on the Iraq war itself. It’s hard to believe that a British government would amend a law in order to criminalize protest simply to put an end to one man’s peaceful, non-violent demonstration outside the seat of our democracy, but that’s exactly what they did.

  On 25 March 2004 the Speaker in the House of Commons, Mr Michael Martin, told the front bench that he was losing patience with them for not dealing with Brian’s protest. Apparently, Brian affected the running of the House whenever he expressed his views through a megaphone in the street outside. Some MPs said you could barely hear him, and even when you could it was impossible to understand what he was saying; others remarked that he wasn’t as loud as Big Ben, which was far more annoying, chiming as it did every half hour. (Unlike Brian Haw, Big Ben wasn’t spouting forth antigovernment sentiments, so the great clock was allowed to stay.) Peter Hain MP replied to the Speaker that David Blunkett, the then Home Secretary, would bring before the House proposals to end the problem when they were ready, and attempted to allay the Speaker’s fears that the issue would drag on. Mr Martin, who isn’t the biggest fan of freedom of choice, having gone on the record to oppose abortion, replied, ‘I want it dealt with as quickly as possible.’

  On 3 November Peter Hain confirmed to the House that current legislation did not give the police the power they needed to control demonstrations and protests outside Parliament and promised new legislation that would, in the form of an addendum to the Serious and Organised Crime and Police Act. This Act was designed to give police increased powers to track down drug lords, human traffickers and gangsters; exactly why people protesting outside Parliament should be named alongside such criminals was far from clear to many MPs. Labour’s John McDonnell commented, ‘I accept the right of Brian Haw to make his statement out there. As soon as we start to undermine that process of free speech it becomes a slippery slope to intolerance.’4 But not all MPs took the threat to freedom of speech so seriously, especially the architect of Section 132 himself, David Blunkett, who joked that introducing the thousand-metre exclusion zone just to get rid of Brian Haw was ‘a sledgehammer to crack a nut’.5

  Cross-party opinion began to unite against the government’s attempts to force the amendment through. David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, told the BBC, ‘This is a contempt of democracy and a contempt of people’s right to protest.’6 Mark Oaten, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman at the time, also saw it as a threat to democracy: ‘This government has shown itself ready to play fast and loose with hard-won British freedoms.’7

  Despite such objections the bill was passed into law on 1 August 2005, but not before Brian Haw’s legal team had challenged it. They went to the High C
ourt on 23 July. Outside the court, Brian told the press, ‘For centuries, British citizens have had the right to protest outside the mother of parliaments. Now this is to be left to the diktat of the police.’8 Three days later the High Court ruled that because Brian’s protest pre-dated the Act - it had started in 2001 - he would not have to leave the designated area outside Parliament after all. So, the one man the law had been targeted to remove could now stay there indefinitely, while everyone else living in Britain would now have to seek permission from the police if they wanted to hold a demonstration within a thousand metres of their Parliament.

  You would assume that the government would have been ashamed of the way they had tried to manipulate the parliamentary process simply to remove an irritating man with whose opinions they did not agree. You would imagine that once a High Court judge has told the government that their badly drafted law doesn’t add up they would admit it was a terrible mistake and confirm to the public that those involved would resign. After all, you can’t go around making up laws because you don’t like the behaviour of one man when a High Court judge has ruled that he is simply exercising his right to free speech. Not in a democracy, at any rate. Think of the outcry! The public wouldn’t stand for it. The government would be forced to back down.

  The newspapers certainly got excited for a few days. Most people assumed the government would be forced to apologize — that’s if they thought about it at all. Then we all got on with our lives and forgot about it. Socrates once said that people who work too hard don’t have the time to fulfil their responsibilities as friends or citizens. Perhaps it was that. Perhaps it was a jaded sense of resignation drawing yet another veil between the people and their government. Whatever it was, the Cabinet didn’t budge. They simply changed their reason for pushing through the amendment. From the moment Brian’s eviction from Parliament Square was ruled out by the High Court the government stopped talking about Brian Haw when anyone asked them about the exclusion zone. It had nothing to do with Brian Haw, they said. Oh no. It was never about him, it was about something else entirely. It was all about security.