What's love got to do with it?

So this happened:



If nothing else, a rather embarrassing display of Brand's new age proclivities. If it was that alone, it would be best to pass over in silence. I But, "love the police", what's that about?

I've made my feelings about our constabulary known before. I'm more interested in Brand's politics of love. The four-letter word only gets a mention at the end of his video, but was integral to the subsequent rough and tumble on Twitter under the #lovethepolice hashtag. And love has been a recurrent theme in Brand's political pronouncements and writings.

Love, for Brand, is a warm fuzzy feeling. It is antithetical to anger: witness his deplorable commentary on an enraged woman, rounded off with an amateur psychiatric diagnosis. He is not alone in this: love is - by common popular consensus - a feeling. It makes one happy, and therefore causes thoughts of conflict or dissatisfaction to recede. This is only good news in a certain sense: if the state we take to be characteristic of our most intimate relationships is an emotion, then it inherits all the uncertainties and fluctuations of emotions: alien creatures that they often are. Nor is there any prospect for a politics of love that is anything other than deeply reactionary, reconciling us to our lot, at best encouraging us to win round our oppressors with fine words and coy smiles. The problem here is that, at the end of the day, when you have put a flower in the policeman's gun, he still has a gun.

For good reason then, a lot of left-wingers regard any use of the 'l' word in politics with suspicion. It speaks of patronising demands for the cooling of anger and the seeing of reason. Thus, for instance, one of Christie Moore's better covers:



Interestingly, there's an older understanding of love (what it is about the modern age that causes it to be de-emphasised is an interesting question). For Aquinas, as for an entire classical tradition, love is the willing of another's good. This is not simply a matter of feeling; love might render certain feelings appropriate, but then again the warm fuzzies might stop me being sufficiently clear sighted to see how to promote your good. It is certainly less fickle than is love on a purely emotive understanding. Nor is it a matter of doing whatever will make you immediately happy, or of treading the path of least resistance. Indeed, Aquinas - who considers himself bound to love his neighbours - takes this love to be compatible in some cases (a just war, for instance) with fighting them. If you are damaging yourself by oppressing and exploiting then I should stop you. And that might not be a pretty affair. Such is love.

This older politics of love, I would argue, finds its modern continuation in Marxism. For Marx, the bourgeoisie are alienated - they fail to flourish as human beings (or to realise their species-being, in the slightly less poetic terminology of the 1844 Manuscripts) because of the very social relations which consist in their exploitation of the working class. It's just that, tragically, this alienation can only be overcome by the victorious struggle of the working class against that same bourgeoisie. Appeals for social peace simply prolong the mutual agony.

The hard work of love involves a disillusioned confrontation with dehumanising power - yes, even when it is wearing a police uniform. Only on the other side of that will we be able to indulge the Brands of this world, for whom presently there is seemingly no structural injustice so great that matters can't be improved by a hug.

The City and the City

Like my previous post, this is salvaged from the old blog

It must be from 2011. People less lazy than I can probably date it.

Earlier on this evening I was standing with the remnants of a small group of protesters outside the Millbank Tower. We were facing a line of police, who were clearly in the business of preventing a repeat of last year's escapades. Our day of demonstrating was coming to an end; somebody invited us to a party. At this point I said something to the effect that I'd prefer to go home and put my feet up with a mug of cocoa. I followed this up with an apologetic, "I'm a crap revolutionary". Perhaps, on the other hand, the point of socialist politics is to create a world where we can put our feet up with a good conscience. Either way, I should tell you how I ended up outside Millbank.

Millbank by night is a glorious sight

It was a long day for me, consisting of one meeting and three protests, surely the title of a less successful film by Richard Curtis. The early afternoon was spent at the Labour Briefing AGM. For those of you who don't know it, Briefing is a socialist journal read mainly by left-wingers within the Labour Party and the trade unions. I am involved in producing it and, since today's meeting, am on the editorial board.

The meeting itself was engaging. We were addressed by John McDonnell MP and George Binette from Camden UNISON. Louise talked to us about the UKUncut movement. We discussed the future direction of Briefing in particular, and the Labour left in general. To sum up the feeling of the meeting, there was a sense that this is an important time for the left, coupled with a realisation that the left in the Labour Party is in a weak state. For some people this issued in a certain pessimism, for others in a resolve to fight hard. I'll return to this.

During the meeting I followed the progress of the day's anti-cuts protests on my smartphone. I shared, to much amusement, the news that the baleful Aaron Porter had been escorted away by police from the Manchester march "for his own safety". Meanwhile, the ever vigilant Laurie was a constant source of news about events in London. It became clear that a large group of protesters had made their way to the Egyptian embassy in Mayfair to express their solidarity with the present struggles in that country. When the AGM finished, Louise, her partner, and I joined them.

I quickly lost the other two, as Louise went off to take some excellent photos. The mood of the demonstration at the embassy was exhilarating. By the time we got there a few hundred people, of all ages and backgrounds, were there, joining in chants alternately in Arabic and English. There was both an anger and a confidence about the gathering, both sustained in spite of the bitter cold. As is becoming traditional at such events, fires were lit to counteract this.

It was whilst warming myself by the above pictured fire that I learned that a group of protesters had gone to the TopShop on Oxford Circus - TopShop boss Phillip Green is a notorious tax avoider, and his stores have been frequent focuses for anti-cuts anger in recent months. I'd been inspired by Louise's account of the UKUncut demos, and decided to head over to Oxford Circus.

I was not, I'm afraid to say, very impressed with what I found there. A small group of anarchisty types were sitting down in front of the building, with a few others - one guy with a makeshift Green Party sign - standing around. Police lined the building. Shoppers made their way in and out of the building, ordinary people on their days off from work, many of them obviously confused, and even frightened. It was not clear who the chants of "bourgeois scum" were supposed to be directed against, and there were no apparent efforts to engage with shoppers about TopShop, tax, and the cuts.

I fully support targeting tax-avoiding and evading businesses as a protest tactic. It ties up the act of protest against cuts with a vision of an alternative, and it provides an opportunity for communicating with the wider public. Last year's UKUncut actions were exemplary in both respects. Unfortunately, what I saw this evening wasn't - it looked like a bunch of clichéd middle-class activists attacking shoppers. That wasn't what it was; but that's what it looked like. In some people a moralising anti-consumerism wasn't far from the surface - one of the assembled commented that "people are just annoyed because they want to buy shiny things on Saturdays". Yes, and why not? If this movement is to win, we need the great majority of those shoppers on side.

I retreated to a café for refreshment and to consider my next move. Twitter told me that stuff was happening in Piccadilly. So I decided to make my way there...

I didn't get very far before I was met face-on by a crowd of about two hundred people, mainly school-age, marching down the middle of the road shouting "Whose streets? Our streets?" Their placards revealed them to be part of the anti-cuts protest, something which was confirmed when the chant modulated to "No ifs, no buts, no public sector cuts". I was put in mind of Laurie Penny's description of one of last year's marches as a "children's crusade". I saw people who could not have been more than nine or ten years old. I went along with them.

For the next couple of hours we weaved our way around the West End, studiously avoiding being kettled by the police. A couple of vans' worth of police were omnipresent, but either unable, or unwilling, to halt the progress of this dexterous snake of dissent around the highways and byways of Westminster. Once two police horses rushed at a group of kids in an attempt to clear them from the road; they were promptly chased back in the direction they had came. On another occasion, officers made moves to arrest two teenage boys for the heinous crime of removing a traffic cone from one of Her Majesty's highways. The efforts of the boys' fellow protesters quickly dissuaded the constabulary from this course of action.

Our route was too convoluted for me to fully recall. Highlights included a second visit to TopShop. As we marched past this time there was no doubt what the message was - "Phillip Green, pay your taxes". We called on the Liberal Democrats at their HQ. Alas nobody was in: or if they were, they weren't letting on. Finally, we made our way to Millbank, a site which I suppose is the closest thing this movement has to a place of pilgrimage. As time went on, we became fewer in number, partly because we split up as an anti-kettling tactic, and partly because people began heading home. Throughout it all, I was buoyed up by the experience of marching alongside passionate and politicised people, some of them a third my age. There is a freshness and vibrancy about this movement which must be preserved.

So there we have it: two very different political experiences. The organisation and experience, tempered by a tendency to pessimism, of the seasoned labour movement activists at the AGM. The energetic rage and enthusiasm of the marchers, tempered inevitably by a certain inexperience - the dangers of which, whilst pleasingly absent on the march, were all too evident outside TopShop. The challenge for the left in the months to come is to act as a bridge. It falls to us to communicate the intensity, the desire for change, and the activist innovation from the anti-cuts movement to established labour movement institutions. That movement needs a voice within Labour, it needs political representation. At the same time, we have to make socialist ideas and analysis available to a new generation of protesters. This, it shouldn't (but probably does) need to be said, is something very different from co-option.

One thing, at least, is certain: this is going to be an interesting political year. With which reflection, I retire to put my feet up with a mug of cocoa.

A beautiful day....

...to bury the news that Boris Johnson has decided to spend £200,000 on three second hand water cannon. From Germany.

On the topic of German water cannon, they did this to a man in Stuttgart:

But still your disquiet. They will only be used in cases of 'extreme disorder'. And we can, of course, trust our friends at the Metropolitan police to identify that. After all, you will recall how guarded they were in their use of force against student fees protests a couple of years back.

Budget Day, a pre-emptive slow hand clap

Well. it's budget day. Expect austerity. More of it. Expect the projection of heavily gendered moralising into the economic sphere by much agonising about 'working families' to the exclusion of lone parents. Expect to have to pay more for a pint or a packet of fags. And expect the Labour front bench to be just a tiny bit better than the Tories in a way that is more disappointing than reassuring.

What would social democratic reforms of a sort that make a difference and throw open debate look like? A favourite of mine is the land value tax. As a replacement for the Council Tax, it would put more money into the vast majority of peoples' pockets and, via its effect on land prices, put downward pressure on housing prices. Which can't be bad.

Also, increase benefits, tax the rich, and so forth.

 Edited to add (14:29): So I was wrong about the beer. But I find myself in pleasing agreement with Stella Creasy:

So people who can afford to save will do well, as those struggling to make ends meet will pay for it … #smartspenders #twonations #budget14
— stellacreasy (@stellacreasy) March 19, 2014

Nine million adults, by the way, have no savings. And, given that growth is predicted to fall in 2017/8, one might on tediously orthodox economic grounds wonder about the wisdom of massively incentivising savings in the manner that Gideon has done. Unless, of course, that wisdom is exercised in the cause of the already rich, with scant regard for anyone else. Perish the thought.

Inheritance tax waived for emergency workers killed in the line of duty? Populist nonsense. What, after all, is the rationale of not including others killed at work? It is tragic when a paramedic is killed (not that paramedics tend to leave vast amounts of wealth, but anyway). Is it less tragic when a train driver gets killed in a crash or a shop worker in a robbery? And what does this have to do with unearned wealth anyway? I note, by the way, that those killed by the police, a considerably bigger number than police officers killed in the line of duty, remain susceptible to inheritance tax. Not that the poor black people disproportionately represented in this group have much to leave.

The real question, of course, is how much of this crap Miliband and Balls plan to reverse.

PC Dinsdale

These are the Kray twins. For a good few years they ran a heavily armed gang that managed to kill Londoners with impunity.

These days we have the Metropolitan Police.

"Now steady on", I can almost hear you say, "Whilst I have my problems with the Duggan verdict, you're going too far here. Unlike criminal gangs, the police are basically on our side. They are there to protect us. Yes, things sometimes go wrong, and that is sad, and sometimes demands protest as a response. But you can't make people suspicious of the police, that way lies lawlessness, criminality, and violence".

To which I reply that, in the only sense of those words that matter, the Duggan family have already experienced lawlessness, criminality, and violence. So did the family and friends of Jean Charles de Menezes, those of Ian Tomlinson, those of Smiley Culture; so did Alfie Meadows, so did those still awaiting justice after the death of a loved one in custody.

But I did once agree with you, or at least I think I did.

I am white and was born away from any large urban area in a place lacking any significant ethnic or religious diversity. My left-leaning family would not be averse to criticising the actions of the police in places like South Africa or northern Ireland; but the police here, well they were just there, they were a local service you would call in certain circumstances, one of the options available if you called 999. The friendly local beat constable would come into my primary school from time to time, sometimes to tell us not to talk to strangers (except, that is, strangers in police uniforms), and sometimes to tell us about his work. He emitted an air of general joviality and came across as an avuncular local service provider, on a par with the woman in the sweet shop and the people who held lollipop sticks while we crossed the road. The policemen, and they were always men, in my Lego kits were no less smiley. I used to make them catch the pirates from another Lego kit; retrospectively this lacked something in the historical realism department.

Occasionally you'd hear people moan about the police, usually because of someone having been caught out by a cunningly placed speed trap, but this occurred against the backdrop of a much wider culture of confidence. With the benefit of hindsight, the local police were - and still are - engaged in a low grade war of attrition against the young unemployed (an important demographic in the region) executed through arrests for possession and catch-all public order offences. To the extent that people were aware of this, and awareness could only be had by reading the local paper very carefully, there was a widespread impression that it was a good things. 'Yobs' had to be dealt with, 'respectability' and 'decency' preserved. These sentiments came from normal, working class, people. At this stage in my life the phrase 'divide and rule' was something heard only in history lessons.

The thoughts of @Cwtsh (via Twitter)

I was not unaware that there was a grittier side to the police. We watched The Bill twice a week. And here we saw people with skin colours other than our own, often on the receiving end of the constabulary's attention. We saw knives and guns, and the fictional world constructed for us seemed a very dangerous place. Thank goodness the good men and women of Sun Hill nick were there to protect its inhabitants. To be sure, there were a few wrong'uns amongst the televisual cops. But they were usually rooted out in the end, and anyhow the script writers ensured they were shown in a bad light, as a break from the norm. In as much as these PCs had prejudices they were ones shared with a good proportion of the TV-viewing public. On this point, at least, the series could have been on to something.

My naivety was not total. The bubble was punctured by news reports showing the police evictions of travellers from Stonehenge; as a teenager I got involved in a local campaign against the Major government's Criminal Justice Bill and became more aware of suspicion of the police over their behaviour towards travellers. And hadn't the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six been set up by police in Britain? However, it was moving to London that really changed the way I saw the police.

I got more involved in politics, of a fairly run-of-the-mill Labour Students sort, and this led to me ending up on demonstrations: against student tuition fees, in support of striking workers, and against racism. From the word go I saw heavy-handedness and routine surveillance by Forward Intelligence Teams. I felt a real hostility from those policing demos. This feeling, as it turns out, was not unjustified, since from time to time the police's active dislike of protesters spilled out, denting the image of them as neutral keepers of the peace. On one occasion a police officer shouted "get a job"; given that this was directed at a group of workers striking in defence of their jobs, it didn't suggest a high level of awareness. It did serve to disabuse me of any uncritical belief that the police were on my side.

What I saw then, in the mid-1990s, is - with one exception I will mention later - nothing compared to what I have seen in the way of policing of recent anti-austerity demonstrations. I have seen hundreds of people kettled for hours on end, having done no more than protest against government policy. I have seen people, including friends, people I know and trust, snatched by undercover squads from protest marches. I have seen people punched and pushed to the ground by police without provocation. I have seen the routine deployment of riot police against perfectly ordinary, everyday, protests. The behaviour of the Metropolitan Police with respect to political events in the past four years has been often horrific , sometimes also tinged with absurdity. We have witnessed highly politicised policing, with the police actively taking sides against people opposing government attacks on their livelihoods and communities, acting with impunity and subject to no real accountability.




At this point there is a certain sort of person who will say that if only these people had kept their heads down, not made a fuss, and just got on with life, they'd never have ended up on the wrong end of plod's truncheon. This isn't very adequate, not least because the people in question were fighting for precisely the right to get on with life in the face of governmental attack. For other people, the mere act of getting on with life is enough to attract police attention. The homeless provide one example. Black and Asian people provide another.

If the policing of demonstrations I saw during the 1990s was heavy-handed, the policing of an anti-racism demonstration in Southall was something else altogether. The presence and actions of the police spoke of an assumption of criminality against the, overwhelmingly Asian, participants in the demonstration. Helicopters hovered overhead, riot vans sat on side streets, the main streets being lined with police.


Smiley Culture, killed during a Met raid, 2011.

Subsequent years confirmed in me this awareness of an assumption of lawbreaking from which I, because of my skin colour, am free. There are the 'random' stop and searches in London railway stations I have seen target young black men, and more recently anyone of obviously Muslim appearance. There are the, similarly 'random', vehicle checks which happen regularly on a road near my house, which almost always seem to involve black drivers. Less abstractly, there was the elderly black couple who attended a church I used to attend, as everyday and 'respectable' in their lifestyle as anyone I'd met in childhood, who said they would never phone the police because they simply didn't trust them. There are the young black men for whom being stopped and searched is a normal part of life. There is the young mother to whom I was supposed to be delivering a food parcel on behalf of a local charity. She wasn't in. I phoned her mobile. She said she was hiding in the bathroom with her children, because she was scared I was from the police. What kind of experience does that to someone?

None of this should surprise us. Racism and other prejudices exist in our society. They inevitably exist therefore in the police force. It is not as though donning a blue uniform magically does away with bigotry. Yet the police don't simply reflect the prejudices of the society in which they exist, they reinforce them, every stop-or-search or violent arrest of a black person reinforcing, via the lies that 'there is no smoke without a fire' and 'those with nothing to fear have nothing to hide' the racist narrative that sees black people as a threat. It is this narrative, for instance, that has convinced so many people that Mark Duggan had a gun with him in the taxi, in spite of no evidence having been presented to this effect. As the police find themselves under attack for racism, the spirit of collegiality, of looking after one's own, kicks in, toughening their resolve, embedding stubbornness, and reinforcing racism. A similar process takes place when the police are deployed against protestors - and the police are structurally positioned within capitalist society such that they will inevitably be deployed against protests from time to time, especially in times of economic crisis when wider ideological narratives seek to deflect blame from governments and the ruling class (onto 'scroungers', 'extremists' etc.), and that buoyed up by these narratives and by group spirit, officers will see themselves as 'us', fighting against 'them'.

The problems with the police are not the result of a few bad apples, of residual 'institutional racism' that is in the process of being sorted out, nor even of tragic but inevitable human error, resulting from false 'honestly held beliefs'. No the problems are systematic, and structural, issuing from the way the police function in a fundamentally unjust society. That is to say, the problems of the police, the polis, are political. And they demand a political response.

So in conclusion let's talk about the Labour Party in London. A good proportion of its electoral base does not view the Met, unambiguously at least, as protectors. Yet, in the face of government cuts to local authority spending, the party has consistently headlined opposition to police cuts as a priority, including during Ken Livingstone's last unsuccessful mayoral campaign. Let's be clear - the Met is well resourced, in spite of its present attack on its civilian staff. Its well-resourced nature reinforces its sense of immunity from accountability or consequence and makes it practically easier for it to act in an oppressive fashion - cash-strapped public services rarely turn up to small protests with dozens of vans, use several helicopters to police peaceful marches, or deploy paramilitary-style TSG units to make arrests for minor crimes, as happened in the aftermath of the 2011 riots.

Boris Johnson is an ally of this bloated force, and wants to buy them water cannon even while closing fire stations. As NWA so very nearly put it, cut the police.


ETA: See also Mark Fisher here.

Duggan : Twitter speaks its branes

Now why would you say something like this,

6 innocent people killed in the #duggan riots, and the media is obessing over death of this gun-toting drug dealer. #wato
— Edward Catflap (@Edward_Catflap) January 9, 2014

given that no evidence was presented in court to the effect that Duggan had a gun? Well, one reason would be that you are a massive racist who assumes that all young black men are drug-dealing gangsters.

Now, although they are evidence for a diseased society, Twitter trolls are one thing.  The quoted tweet is one of hundreds along similar lines - look at the #duggan hashtag. What is altogether more concerning is that a similar process of reasoning seems to have gone on inside the heads of eight jurors.

Friends who kill

This was posted a few weeks ago on UK Cop Humour - a Facebook page that deserves your attention as a unique insight into the, well, interesting mindset of our constabulary.

I wonder if, as a child, Mark Duggan ever encountered anything like this.