White poppies from the Peace Pledge Union

It has reached – hopefully – its zenith this year with an argument with FIFA about whether British football players would be allowed to have some poppies embroidered onto their football shirts during international football games over the next few days. Even though there has never been any desire on the part of British football players to do this before, even though to do so is clearly against the FIFA kit rules, and even though no other nation which observes Remembrance Day has been clamouring to do this, all of a sudden the wearing of a poppy has become An Historic National Tradition, the initial refusal to allow it was Political Correctness Gone Mad, and the compromise which has been reached with FIFA is a Victory For Common Sense.

Apart from my early years in primary school (when I didn’t understand what the whole thing was about, and when I was basically intrigued by the actual physical product) I’ve never worn a poppy, and I’ve never actively participated in Remembrance Day activity. Usually when 11 November falls on a work day, out of respect to the 99% of my colleagues who do wish to observe the two minutes silence I usually absent myself to the toilet around that time rather than ostentatiously sit there carrying on working, but this year it’s probably fortunate that I’m actually off on leave on that day because, the level that poppy fascism has now reached, I might end up saying or doing something somebody else might regret.

Why do I feel this way?

There are a number of reasons for it, but many of them can be summed up in one succinct phrase.

Because it’s bullshit.

The message of Remembrance Day as it was conceived was supposed to be Lest We Forget; it was instigated in the aftermath of The War To End All Wars to honour the millions who gave their lives – or rather, were forced at gunpoint to give their lives by their so-called class superiors – in what was humanity’s biggest act of utterly pointless industrial slaughter ever. In its early years it was a noble tradition, but sadly even then probably not truly believed in by those responsible for that slaughter.

But now? Lest We Forget has nothing to do with it; we Remember for precisely four minutes every year (or only two minutes if 11 November happens to fall on a Sunday). We barely Remember in the lead-up to Remembrance Day, and at precisely 11:02, after we’ve done our Remembering, we immediately Forget. The killing continues, the political grandstanding continues, and nobody in any position to actually do something about stopping the killing does anything about doing anything to stop it; our media and political class publicly and ostentatiously mourns every one of Our Boys announced to have died, whilst publicly and ostentatiously celebrating the deaths of The Baddies. And similarly the other way round; in their own communities jihaddi terrorists are fêted as Heroes Of The Revolution, whose deaths at the hands of the kafirs will be avenged, regardless of the number of children of those kafirs who were liquidised by the bomb planted on the bus or outside the pavement cafe.

Rarely does anybody stand out from the crowd to say Enough! Rarely do we hear anybody call for the madness to stop; the few who do, and the few who refuse to play the game, who refuse to stand up in a sham token of respect, are pilloried by the media and their peers.

Whilst the original meaning of Remembrance Day was about Remembering those who had given their lives in defence of Freedom, it has mutated into being about showing visible support for Our soldiers who are engaged in State-sponsored killing overseas; to question that support is framed as being unpatriotic, and of Spitting On The Graves Of Those Who Died That I Might Spit; the meaning of Remembrance Day is no longer a moment of private reflection, but instead has become a When Did You Stop Beating Your Wife? question.

But apart from anything else, why are only soldiers given a special day to be Remembered anyway? Why do we have no Remembrance Day for firefighters who’ve died saving lives? Or police officers? Or paramedics? Or accident and emergency nurses? They too risk their lives in the line of duty, but we have no special symbol or special day to remember their sacrifice. Our soldiers are acting under their own consciences on the orders of our government – but so are Their soldiers. It is patently ridiculous to assert that Our soldiers and government have always universally been Morally Right and Their soldiers and government have always universally been Morally Wrong – so whilst Remembering Our soldiers who have been killed in action, why can we not also remember Their soldiers who Our soldiers have killed? As the throwaway line in Austin Powers goes, “henchmen have families too you know”.

Some people often suggest that I might sport a white poppy instead; it’s an attractive suggestion, but actually I see it as a bit of a cop-out – whilst it promotes a conversation, it’s still buying in to the whole attitude that for the first two weeks of the year people must display their support.

Now, whilst I fit into the wider set of people called ‘pacifist’, I’m not a naïve one – I do agree that regrettably there are indeed Bad People in the world, who end up running countries, who manage to inspire other people to kill on their behalf, who cannot be stopped with strong language and the promise of a trip to the seaside if they promise to be good, and that We need soldiers to stop them. I’m the kind of pacifist who accepts that whenever a situation reaches the state of armed conflict, then armed conflict is the inevitable consequence – but that the seeds of the next conflict are always sown in the aftermath of the ending of the last one. I accept that sometimes there’s no reasoning with Bad People – but I do wonder if some Bad People might turn out to be not so Bad after all if our media and politicians were willing to make just that little bit more effort to reason with them.

Don’t get me wrong – I accept, respect, and support right of you, the 99%, to hold your Remembrance Day commemorations. Why do so many of you have such difficulty in accepting my right to dissent from them?

(Further reading: Adrian Short on the crass commercialisation of the Poppy Appeal, and Dan Slee recounts a moving personal family tale)

Picture credit: BBC News

Of course, it’s still too early to say right now at the time of writing how this will pan out, but so far the signs are at least positive; the caretaker military administration have promised open elections as soon as practicable, they’ve promised to abide by all the existing treaties which are in effect (which is hopefully a good sign for the Israel-Palestine process), they after all chose not to suppress the protests in the first place, and, following Tunisia’s starting of what might prove to be a Middle East domino effect, protests are now starting in Algeria.

But what can we learn ourselves from the events of the last three weeks?

Most of all, we learn perhaps the most important thing, that (broadly) peaceful protest, even in the face of a 30-year oppressive regime, can work – that ultimately, even when the regime is backed up by tanks, helicopter gunships, and fighter jets, the people really do reign supreme; if the people can be arsed. When a million people turned up to march on parliament in 2003 intent on stopping our government from going to war in Iraq, we turned up, we shouted at the bricks and waved our banners, and we went home. Subsequent protests about various issues in Britain have had similar effects – a lot of people have turned up, shouted, waved flags, thrown bricks, and buggered off home. In contrast, in Egypt a million people turned up in Tahrir Square and stayed there. They stayed there and refused to go home until their demands were met – and they knew that their demands were righteous, and those who could have stopped the protests in a stroke, the army, also knew their demands were righteous. Rather than act as agents of the oppressive state, the army remembered what their first and overriding priority is – to defend the nation. The People held their nerve, and The People ultimately won.

We also learn that effective protests are ones which are owned by The People, not by professional agitators. The message for us in the UK is clear – Socialist Worker, you’re not welcome. Whenever you and your crowd turn up to a protest, all you do is poison it. You have no interest in creating a fair and just society, your sole interest is in replacing one unfair and unjust system with another unfair and unjust system. Whenever you and your ilk turn up to a protest, you’re there with violence and mayhem as the goal, not the means of last resort. It’s because of the likes of you that modern protests are accompanied by an equally obnoxious response by those tasked to police them. So go home, and don’t come back until you’re prepared to camp out in the cold for three weeks.

What can our government (and by that I do not restrict myself to those who happen to be living in Downing Street this week) learn from the Egyptian protest?

How might they respond to a three week occupation of Trafalgar Square by a million people?

One of the reasons why is summed up neatly by Laurie Penny in her article ‘Inside the Whitehall Kettle‘:

I didn’t understand quite how bad things had become in this country until I saw armed cops being deployed against schoolchildren in the middle of Whitehall. [my emphasis] These young people joined the protest to defend their right to learn, but in the kettle they are quickly coming to realise that their civil liberties are of less consequence to this government than they had ever imagined. The term ‘kettle’ is rather apt, given that penning already-outraged people into a small space tends to make tempers boil and give the police an excuse to turn up the heat, and it doesn’t take long for that to happen. When they understand that are being prevented from marching to parliament by three lines of cops and a wall of riot vans, the kids at the front of the protest begin to moan. “It’s ridiculous that they won’t let us march,” says Melissa, 15, who has never been in trouble before. “We can’t even vote yet, we should be allowed to have our say.”

When talking about democracy, it’s usually understood to be basically just about the vote we have every year / every four or five years, in which we select our politicians to run our cities and our country, and the lucky few actually get the politician of their choice representing them.

Democracy is about more than just voting in elections, though – democracy is about participating fully (or at least to the best of one’s ability and interest) in civic life; jury service is an essential act of democracy, as is serving on the bench as a magistrate. It’s a common complaint of younger people that the magistrates are all a bunch of posh old duffers – but actually, the pool of magistrates in any given city is supposed to be representative of the population of that city, be it young, gay, black, single parent, whatever. So why not give an application a go?

But I digress. The other important pillar of a fully democratic society is the right to protest. In a democratic society, the Government is not the master of The People, it’s the servant of The People. And – vis the magistrate point – the Law is also not the master, but the servant. Where the Government and the Law are out of step with the will of the People, the People have a duty to make their views known through the medium of protest.

Cuddly liberal types generally tend to baulk at the idea of protest (except when the topic of protest is something they have a personal interest in), preferring instead to advise people to write strongly worded letters to their MPs, being horrified at the idea of other people breaking the law. But actually, important as writing a strongly worded letter to one’s MP is, no bad law ever got repealed by the power of green ink. That law which Henry VIII instigated mandating every adult male to do an hour’s archery practice every Sunday morning? It was people breaking it which eventually got it repealed. More pertinently, that law which made every adult pay a flat fee in order to have the right to even exist in this country (aka the Poll Tax) – it wasn’t people writing letters to their MPs which got it repealed – it was people, in mass numbers, in the first instance refusing to pay it, and ultimately the People turning up to a mass protest in Trafalgar Square to make their views unavoidably heard.

Over the last 25 years, there have been a number of laws – and amendments to laws – introduced which have further and further curtailed the right to protest; in fact, those laws in their letter are actually so restricting that the Public Order Act 1986 technically makes it a criminal offence for a group of more than six people to walk down the street together. It’s a testament to the high ethical standards our police forces (much maligned, with good reason, in the 1980s) have maintained that, by and large, they’ve wilfully refused to make use of powers they’ve had at their disposal.

But in the last couple of years there has been a much uglier undercurrent around protests developed where police and mindless anarchists alike have each upped the ante, with the result being that reasonable protests are emasculated at birth by the appearance of the riot squad, and what should have been a reasonable protest has been needlessly turned into a riot because that’s the only way the protesters have been left as the way to get their voices heard.

And as Laurie Penny says, when the same policing techniques that are used against a bunch of anarchist G8 rioters are used against a bunch of schoolchildren, you know there’s something gone badly wrong. And something needs to be done.

“About £2bn was underpaid via the Pay as You Earn (PAYE) system in the past two years, with about 1.4 million people owing an average of £1,500 each. But £1.8bn has also been overpaid and some 4.3 million people will get a rebate because they have paid too much. Treasury minister David Gauke said that in the current financial climate, the government was ‘not in a position to just wave goodbye to that £2bn’”.

Surely that’s something which would be worth going to court over?

Saying ‘the good news is people won’t have to start repaying it until April 2011′ is hardly the point – £1,500 would account for a repayment of over £100 a month, which is a lot of cash to be removed from anybody’s monthly budget at the best of times, let alone for people who won’t have had any form of pay rise, not even an annual Cost Of Living Allowance, for two years.

If you buy a product off a supplier, and the supplier sends you an invoice and you pay it, the supplier can’t turn round two years later and say ‘sorry, I got my maths wrong – you’ll have to pay me some more’; it would just be tough on the supplier.

So why should the government be exempt from those same consumer protection laws? If the government is not in a position to just wave goodbye to £2bn, how many millionaires are there in the country who would completely fail to even notice the shortfall being divvied up between them?

In fact, the government (in the shape of HM Revenue & Customs) aren’t exempt from the law: if the taxpayer has a reasonable belief that they paid the correct amount in the first place – such as for example having had a bill from HMRC which looked about right in the first place – then the tax collector has to just accept their error and write off the underpayment.

“The home secretary has said he will back any request from police or local government to ban an Islamic group marching through Wootton Bassett. Alan Johnson said he felt ‘revulsion’ at the thought of Islam4UK’s proposed march through the Wiltshire town”.

Now indeed, it is quite offensive that the group is indeed planning on holding its protest march in the town which has become synonymous with returning dead soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan, and by choosing to hold their protest march there – regardless of their rationale that by proposing to hold it their they well get maximum publicity which they almost certainly wouldn’t have got anywhere else, by choosing to protest in such an inflammatory manner, they will almost certainly drive more people away from their point of view than bring them to it, especially in the current climate of broad public sympathy for members of the armed forces regardless of broad public opposition for what those forces have been sent to do. If they have any sense, Islam4UK will reconsider.

However, what I do find even more offensive and repugnant is that the home secretary wants to ban the march, simply on the grounds that he doesn’t like it. So much for freedom of speech.

Much has been written all over the blogosphere today about the outrage of this assault by a brutal policeman in the cause of ‘maintaining order’ causing the death of an innocent member of the public. Even had Ian Tomlinson been a protester throwing bricks at the police line, his death would have outrageous – we don’t have the death penalty in this country, not even for riot. But the fact that he had had nothing to do with the protests on the day and was simply going home after his day’s work compounds that outrage by orders of magnitude. Apart from anything else, would he have been assaulted by the policeman had he been dressed as a banker?

Nobody who believes in Civilised Society denies the need for police, and indeed nobody with any sense denies the police do a difficult job in difficult circumstances, in which mistakes will inevitably be made – and in many of those difficult circumstances, the police are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t. And whatever one’s personal opinion might be of the Jean Charles de Menezes case and its outcome, it does remain the fact that it was a tragic accident caused by a failure of intelligence and poor training, rather than a wilful attempt to kill an individual.

As can be seen in this video, however, the assault on Tomlinson was wilful – he was behaving perfectly compliantly, walking along, not resisting, not rioting, not protesting. There was absolutely no need for the police officer in question to whack him with his riot stick or throw him to the ground. Obviously the police officer in question wasn’t to know – or reasonably predict – that his actions would result in Tomlinson’s death, but were anybody else to hit somebody with a stick and push them to the ground causing a fatal heart attack internal bleeding, a charge of manslaughter would almost certainly ensue. A failure to bring such a criminal charge against this police officer would be nothing short of a travesty of justice.

Ironically, this case also highlights another aspect of our increasing V-for-Vendetta society – strictly speaking, the people videoing and photographing this incident were in breach of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008, which since 16 February has made it a potentially criminal offence – with a penalty of up to 10 years in prison – for taking a picture of a police officer on active duty.

Never has there been such a clear example of how wrong – and damaging to a free democratic state – that law is. It deserves to be repealed immediately.

What’s not mentioned in the BBC News article linked, but was described as what the proposal actually is on the Today programme this morning was that The Government^tm are going to ‘force’ social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to give them access to the friends lists of users. Not actually see what messages pass between them, just the lists of friends.

Needless to say, there has been an immediate outcry about how terrible this is, what a total disregard for our liberties, totalitarian state etc this is. You might expect me to be joining that outcry.

But woooaaaaaahhh there.

Erm, Facebook already allows any logged in user to see the list of friends of any user. As does Twitter. In fact, Twitter even lets anybody see what people are saying to each other – it’s the whole point of it!

So, much as I’d like to join in with the gubnint-kicking on this, I’m afraid there’s no story there.

Now, of course, there is information which the police have which us in the general public don’t have, which may be relevant to this story.

But looking at what we have been told, we have a Home Office whistleblower who apparently revealed:

• in November 2007 that the home secretary knew the Security Industry Authority had granted licences to 5,000 illegal workers, but decided not to publicise it,
• in February 2008 that an illegal immigrant had been employed as a cleaner in the House of Commons,
• a whips’ list of potential Labour rebels in the vote on plans to increase the pre-charge terror detention limit to 42 days, and
• a letter from the Home Secretary warning that a recession could lead to a rise in crime.

And Damian Green was the conduit through which this information was brought to the public knowledge.

Although technically the Official Secrets Act applies – as indeed it does to the information about what brand of tea is served in the Cabinet Office – the items which were leaked were far from being issues of National Security, and everything to do with being issues in the National Interest.

In this instance, Damian Green was clearly performing his public duty, a duty he was elected, as an Opposition MP to perform – to act on information received about areas where Government was clearly failing, to publicise it, and to oppose it.

The Government denies involvement in the arrest – during which, apparently, his home was turned over by eight anti-terrorism officers, presumably all donning riot shields, battering rams, and machine guns – although it did take place following a complaint made by the Cabinet Office. On the Today programme it was vehemently denied that ministers were aware of the arrest before it was on the news broadcasts, although it is a fact that the Tories themselves called an evening briefing in the House of Commons well before it hit the news.

The words ‘Orwellian’, ‘Stalinist’, and ‘Fascist State’ are of course well overused; usually when they’re used in the context of Western politics you’ll always find at least one apologist who will jump up and say “look at Zimbabwe! Look at North Korea! Look at Stalin!”.

But when we’re increasingly moving to a state of being where criticising the government becomes an arrestable offence, what other words can be used?

Of course, the fashionable knee-jerk response from many hearing this new this morning will almost certainly have been ‘it doesn’t matter, they’re only prisoners – they don’t have any rights anyway’ etc. Which is, of course, ‘a point of view’.

But whatever your views about whatever rights prisoners might not have, don’t you think their families have rights ? Their children ? Might you not think a five year old child – whatever it’s parent might have done – has the right not to be the subject of a hit from, say, a rival criminal gang ?

Even if you don’t think that – might you think subjecting the families of criminals whose personal data has been lost in this way to potential criminal attack themselves is not a total waste of police time ?

In other news, the BBC news website also has a handy aggregation page of other epic cases of government data loss.

“ID cards – do you still think they’re a good idea ?”

It’s almost unsporting of me these days to continually be referring to instances of this or that security breach when it comes to Government’s ability to keep secure our personal data, whilst at the same time the Government continually pedals the line that the proposed national identity card will be safe and secure, prevent fraud, protect us from terrorists, and end the Looming Credit Crunch(tm).

At present there’s been no evidence made public to prove one way or another, but it does seem just too much of a coincidence that the thieves might have been expecting a van full of painting & decorating equipment and got lucky; it does seem much more likely that this was a theft-to-order – that the thieves knew full well what was in the van, where it had come from, where it was going to, and when the best point for the sting was likely to be.

For once, there’s no real accusation of incompetence to be made (though Keith Vaz does ask why such documents weren’t being transported in a more secure manner) – against such a determined professional gang, there’s probably little anybody could have done better which would have made any difference.

Which is my whole point.

If a highly organised professional gang can run a heist on a van load of blank passports and visa documents, they can run a heist on a van load of blank ID cards. If they’ve got somebody on the inside – which in this case surely they must have done – then so much the easier for them.

So again, the reported benefits of the national ID card scheme – to guard against fraud and terrorism – are just pie-in-the-sky flannel, which will do nothing to keep us safe and secure, but will just provide another revenue stream for organised crime, criminalise the innocent, and potentially have a counterproductive effect on security by encouraging complacency.

The passport service said the stolen documents could not be used by thieves because of their hi-tech embedded chip security features.

But fraud experts say they can still be used as a form of identification and even for travel in countries where the chip technology is not used.

Indeed; I wonder if they are the same hi-tech embedded chip security features which are in use in the Oyster card used for paying for public transport in London?

The hi-tech embedded chip security features which themselves have been hacked – the details of how to do so being due to be published this coming October?