Dominic Lawson: If you think China is a police state, just look at us in

Friday, 8 August 2008

Beijing seems to have been turned into one giant Potemkin village.
Everybody smiling, everybody happy. The universally joyful welcome has
already drawn gasps of admiration and astonishment from visiting British
sports journalists. The BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, who speaks
Mandarin, took the trouble to roam further afield, to a village near
Guangzhou, where farmers three years ago had protested about the seizure
of their land by local Communist Party officials. He was speedily
surrounded by what he described as "a phalanx of young men with cropped
hair, who followed me wherever I went".

Wingfield-Hayes reported that "Whenever I tried to talk to the locals,
they moved in close, a look of menace in their eyes. The locals stared
back, defiant but silent. They knew what talking to a foreign journalist
would bring." Indeed, they did: China still has a network of labour
camps and "psychiatric wards" to teach political dissidents how to love
Big Brother.

So we should bear all this in mind when we watch the collective rictus
of fixed grins at the Olympic Games opening ceremony today. In four
years' time, however, it will be our turn to come under the scrutiny of
the international media, when they arrive en masse in London to report
on the Games of the Thirtieth Olympiad.

I wonder how free a country they will be visiting, and what they will
make of it. The good news is that they will be reporting from a
democracy, in which incompetent or merely unpopular governing parties
are kicked out of office via the ballot box.

They will not find any psychiatric wards in which the "patients" are
given electric shocks for the invented condition of "political
monomania". However, if things continue to develop as they have done
over the past few years, they will also find a country whose people have
become increasingly pestered and persecuted by a distended and
inflexible empire of officials.

In one week alone, there have been several reports of such behaviour,
which would have been unthinkable even a decade ago. Exhibit one: on 18
July it was reported that Mrs Jayne Jones was told that she had to stop
accompanying her 14-year-old son, Alex, in his journey to school in a
council-financed cab, until she had been "cleared" by the Criminal
Records Bureau.

Alex, who is severely epileptic, has frequent convulsions, and her
mother insisted that, nice as the cab-drivers are, they did not have her
ability to give the boy the necessary medication if he had fits while in
transit.

Merthyr Tydfil council defended their actions as follows: "For the
protection of the council and all vulnerable persons in its care it is
essential all those endowed with an authority, implicit or explicit,
should meet the security requirements within the transport contract
provisions." Ah, the language of compassion: perhaps it sounded better
in the original Welsh.

Exhibit two: on 23 July it was reported that Julie Maynard, her husband
and their 12-year-old son, Joshua, found their car surrounded by 10
police officers at the Channel Tunnel entry in Folkestone. For reasons
which have never been explained, they were accused of "trafficking"
their son – who has cerebral palsy and is autistic.

Ms Maynard and family were then taken to a detention room and warned
that they could be held for nine hours under "section 7 of the Terrorism
Act". They were released after "only" two hours, still with no
satisfactory explanation. Subsequently, Kent Police have apologised and
have paid a "substantial sum" to Joshua's school – which at least shows
contrition not usually associated with bureaucracies.

Exhibit three: on 24 July it was reported that a painter and decorator
called Gordon Williams was given an on-the-spot fine of £30 by
Ceredigion council officials, after they observed him smoking a
cigarette in his blue Suzuki van. You see, the officials had determined
that this van was his "place of work" and therefore Mr Williams was
breaking the new law banning all smoking in the workplace. Mr Williams
protested that "I decorate houses, not vans", but nonetheless paid up,
having been told that the fine would be doubled if he didn't comply
swiftly.

This made me realise that, as a responsible citizen of New Britain, I
should report our cleaning lady to the authorities for smoking in our
home: it is, after all, her place of work. Or perhaps I should turn
myself in as well, as a delinquent employer in breach of health and
safety regulations.

Exhibit four: on 25 July it was reported that Haringey council officials
had fined a boutique owner called Sangita Ibrahim for putting out her
rubbish in black bin bags, rather than the grey sacks required by the
council. The officials fined Ms Ibrahim £300 – made up of four fines of
£75, one for each offending bag of the offending colour. Nicole
Rosbrook, who works at the boutique, told the London Evening Standard:
"The two guys who came in were incredibly rude to us – and to the
customers. We were shocked, especially when they turned on the
customers."

She added that "We had repeatedly asked the council for a delivery of
grey bags, but it never came, so we had to use ordinary black bags. The
two men actually went through the bags, leaving them open and rubbish
strewn all over the pavement."

Haringey council commented that: "The notice was lawfully issued by our
enforcement fly-tipping patrol who followed proper procedures."

This is known as the "we're only doing our job" defence-just one step up
from "I was only obeying orders."

A friend of mine got a similar response when she was queuing at a
British airport a few weeks ago and was shocked to see a security
officer at the hand-luggage scanning device rudely ordering an old lady
in a wheelchair, who was wearing surgical boots, to "take yer shoes
off". Even if he did believe that the frail old woman might have been
smuggling nitroglycerine or some other implement of terrorism in the
base of her boots, this was still a repulsive way to talk to her.

When my friend remonstrated with the BAA security man, he responded,
naturally, with "I'm only doing me job." The sad thing is, he was; but
perhaps the outburst by another passenger might cause him to do it more
politely in future.

The trouble is that, increasingly, it is only the law-abiding who are
frightened of the police and other security officials; awareness of this
fear encourages the enforcers of petty regulations to behave even more
truculently.

So when the Olympics come to London, I hope that the international press
let the world know what sort of officialdom they have encountered.
Probably, however, they will be hoodwinked Beijing-style, as the great
bureaucratic armies of the state smile sweetly at foreign journalists,
while continuing to scowl and snarl at the captive domestic population.

d.lawson@independen t.co.uk

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