07 January 2009 9:47 AM
'It's not debatable,' they bawled. My chilling encounter with Britain's jack-booted paramilitary police
This posting is about the horrible thing that has happened to our police, which I will get to in a moment, but first let me explain how I had the unpleasant experience I underwent last Saturday evening. First, let me explain what I was up to. I was absolutely not taking part in any street demonstration. Nothing could have induced me to join the march to protest against Israel's attack on Gaza. This is not because I agree with the attack - as readers know all too well by now. It is because I am not prepared to demonstrate alongside militant Islamists, supporters of Hamas or people who carry ridiculous placards calling for a 'Free Palestine'.
Whatever the formerly occupied territories might be under the unlimited rule of Fatah and Hamas, they would certainly not be free in any normal meaning of the word. They would fall under the rule of repressive, intolerant and ( especially in the case of Fatah) corrupt mini-despots. The fate of the Arabs of the region, since the creation of the Palestinian Authority, has been shameful. This is one of the many reasons why I do not support the 'Two-State Solution'.
For the same reason I never took part in the demonstrations against the Iraq war, though I opposed it as much as anyone who did. The same people, the Islamist fanatics and the 'Free Palestine' crowd, would be along too. And I once turned down an invitation to speak at such a demonstration. The old Roman saying "Non Tali Auxilio" "Not with such allies" seemed to apply very strongly. My cause wasn't theirs, even though I shared an objective with them. I don't imagine they missed me all that much.
This sometimes happens if you follow your own instincts and stay true to yourself. You lose all ways. Your former friends suddenly become your snappish, scornful opponents. Your enemies suddenly applaud you, if rather faintly. It isn't specially pleasant ( in fact, praise from foes is more hurtful than the denunciations of friends, in my experience).
In this state of mind, I left the Mail on Sunday office on Saturday evening, planning to walk to Paddington Station and go home. The Israeli Embassy is nearby, on Palace Green, but Palace Green is a closed street, blocked by gates, and anti-Israel demonstrators cannot get close to the actual building. Instead, they tend to gather opposite the gates, and when there are more than a few dozen of them, they block the whole street.
This is what had happened on Saturday. I couldn't get through, so I went round by back streets to the other side of the (fairly small) protest. I began walking eastwards along Kensington Road. Suddenly, out of the gloom I saw more demonstrators approaching me, presumably stragglers from Trafalgar Square, come to shout at the Israelis. That didn't bother me. They were quiet and peaceable.
What did bother me that, in front of the demonstration was a sort of skirmish line of black-clad, helmeted figures, each carrying a large round black shield and a big club. All were wearing clompy, macho boots and ( if my memory serves me right) leather trousers as well. They were both ridiculous and creepily frightening, and - to my eye - wholly unBritish.
I've seen riot squads lurking (and on some occasions turned loose) in Moscow, Prague, Paris and East Berlin. In such places, everyone knows that they are the fist of the strong state. But when I observed these formations, they were one of those interesting things about being abroad, rather than in Britain, where we had no need of such things. You knew never to approach them, make eye contact with them, get within range of them. They were dangerous, officious and all-powerful, and longing for trouble. Ask them the way or the time? They'd think you were mocking them and club you over the head for your pains.
I agree that things have been changing here for quite a while. But this lot were far more fearsome than anything I'd previously glimpsed in this country.
They were part-astronaut, part-samurai, all menace. They were also pointless. I couldn't see any reason for this riot squad to be there. There was no trouble, before or behind or beside them. Later on, they might be needed, in which case I'd stay well away from them. But now, they were just there. So I behaved as if they were what they weren't, normal constables. I carried on walking towards them, peaceably, on my lawful business. I'd already made a big diversion to avoid the main demonstration. If I had to go back the way I'd come, I'd need to go miles to get round. If there had been any obvious reason to do so, I'd have done it. But there wasn't.
That was when they started bellowing at me. "Get back!" (or something like that). I looked round to see if I had accidentally got into the middle of a sudden melee, but the street was as peaceful as it had been before, and the marchers were still advancing quietly behind the black-garbed figures.
I held out my hands in a shrugging, mock-pleading gesture and began to ask why I couldn't just walk on the pavement undisturbed. "I am", I began to say " a private person on his way to Paddington station".
I didn't finish. I couldn't. The figures began bawling again, in a strange robotic chorus of Arthur-Mullard-like voices. And this is what they bawled :"It's not debatable!" . Then they bawled it again "It's not debatable!". And then one more time, I think. I don't think words like "debatable" come naturally to such people. I think this is what they had been trained to say in some riot-rehearsal long ago, to clear aside some imaginary band of quarrelsome troublemakers with fancy ( and outdated) ideas about their rights. Instead, they had to make do with me, the only man in London silly enough not to flee at the very sight of them. It even crossed my mind to think that they might have been longing to bawl "It's not debatable!" ever since they had been trained to say it, and here was their chance.
It's an interesting set of words, especially for police officers to use in a free country with free speech, where power is supposed to subject to the law and the police are supposed to be the servants of the people. It was clear that they thought I had no business even looking at them, let alone asking them ( as I believe I'm entitled to do) under what law they were acting. Until recently I'm quite sure they'd have had no legal right to order me about like that without explanation. Nor would they have tried. I'd have been allowed to pass, as it was quite reasonable for me to do. I know this as the veteran of many demonstrations in other days, and one who developed some respect even as a far left-winger for the restraint and level-headed, humorous good sense of the police ( as they then were) on such occasions.
But all that's gone. Such persons are not, like old-fashioned coppers, servants of the law. They are servants of the state and you'd better believe it. Technically the law now supports them, but only because the whole purpose of the law has been subverted so that it doesn't restrain the police at all in such circumstances. 'Terrorism' of course, has been the pretext for it. But most of us, most of the time, don't see the ugly face of the thing we have created by letting this happen.
No doubt some catch-all 'Anti-Terror' statute, making disobedience itself an offence, without regard to what was being ordered, would have been absurdly invoked if I could have found one of them willing to answer such a question. If it hadn't been for my polished shoes, middle-aged professional appearance and expensively-acquired plummy baritone, I suspect things might have ended rather more abruptly. Even these robocops are still a little restrained by the dying conventions of our disappearing freedom, and they could have guessed that it would have been faintly unwise to get rough with someone like me. Ten years from now, this won't be true. We'll be like the continentals, hating and mistrusting our cops and being hated and mistrusted by them in return.
As it was, I had time to ask the foremost of them, in what I hoped were wondering tones "Are you a police officer?", with the emphasis on the word "police", and then to answer on his behalf "No, you're not. You're some sort of paramilitary force" . The expression I was groping for was 'militia' but by then I was too enraged ( my patriotism was grounded in, amongst other lost things, pride at having an unarmed, peaceful police force - and the loss of this precious possession brings me close to tears) and dismayed to find the right word. They continued to advance towards me, like a sort of human street-sweeping machine, so I admitted defeat and stepped into a side road to watch them go by.
This, alas, was not enough. After the robocops had passed, a second rank, this time of more ordinary but still militarised officers in high-visibility vests, came hurrying importantly up , brusquely and arrogantly ordering me and several other baffled subjects of Her Majesty to move back down the side-road. What was coming? A nuclear convoy? Barack Obama? The national gold reserve? I resigned myself to missing several trains and waited to see what all the fuss was about.
What then passed was two parts of the square root of nothing. The mighty, bass-voiced police escort preceded a high-pitched straggle of perhaps 300 demonstrators, many of them women, walking quietly down the road and followed in turn by a phalanx of police vans. Then nothing. In my demonstrating days we'd have turned round and gone home rather than marched, with a group as small as that.
Quickly, before another riot squad turned up, I returned to my original route and went home, only to find that my mobile phone had mysteriously stopped working. It recovered soon after I left the area.
This horrible development, the transformation of our police into a state gendarmerie, has many causes. One of them is the way in which our politicians - and much of the public - have simply forgotten, or never even knew, the intricate arrangements made to ensure that we did not suffer this fate. Parliament at the beginning of the 19th century resisted the foundation of a Metropolitan force precisely because such bodies had invariably become engines of repression all over the continent. Sir Robert Peel only got the measure through by ensuring that our police force was subject to law, policed by consent, and was not allowed to become a militia.
The rules were set ( see my book 'the Abolition of Liberty') so as to ensure we didn't have a Prussian or Gallic riot squad in London, and very effective they were until quite recently. But now we are moving quite fast towards the very fate that MPs feared 200 years ago.
The paradox is that we have these grim jawed enforcers ( predicted rather accurately in Constantine Fitz Gibbon's amusing future fantasy thriller 'When the Kissing Had to Stop' back in the early Sixties) but that the criminal classes have never had such an easy time.
How can this be? My theory is fairly simple. In a liberal state, the police are weak on crime because it is officially regarded as a social disease, not really the fault of the criminals. But they are tough on individuals who tackle crime themselves, because they threaten the state monopoly of law-enforcement (worse, their methods, if generally allowed, would be more popular than the feeble methods of the state police); and they are tough on street protest because they represent a state which regards itself as good, and so sees all protestors as automatically malignant. How do you think totalitarianism would establish itself in a once-free country? What do you think it would look like? I think it would look like this. Fortunately, it is still debatable.
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