1.Six appeal - John Vidal
2.Protest is criminalised - George Monbiot
3."We have been lied to... I dared to speak the truth" - Walter Wolfgang
Here are two pieces from The Guardian (items 1 & 2) that deal with the recent court case involving the George Fox 6 protesters.
Item 3's a piece by Walter Wolfgang, the 82-year-old survivor of the Nazis who got dragged out of Blair's Labour party conference last week for shouting the word "nonsense" during a speech on Iraq.
Please aso note that the claim by Lancaster University's Vice Chancellor (item 1) - "The Crown Prosecution Service decided there was a case to answer, and from then on it was out of the university's hands" - is totally false.
A criminal trespass case can only be brought with the agreement of the landowner, ie the university had to want its students dragged into court. Indeed, we know from what actually happened in court last Friday that the Univesity Secretary was present throughout *advising the prosecution*!
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=5791
"As the parliamentary opposition falls apart, the extra-parliamentary one is being closed down with hardly a rumble of protest from the huffers and puffers who insist that civil liberties are Britain's gift to the world." - George Monbiot
More background on GF6: http://www.free-webspace.biz/GeorgeFox/
Sign the Petition: http://www.petitiononline.com/gfox6/
---
1.Six appeal
Eco Soundings
John Vidal
The Guardian, October 5, 2005
http://society.guardian.co.uk/societyguardian/story/0,7843,1584571,00.html
Outrage is growing at the criminal sentences that have just been passed on six Lancaster University students who for three minutes last year talked politely to representatives of arms manufacturers, GM, oil and other companies who met on their campus to discuss corporate links with academe.
The George Fox 6, as they are now known, will appeal against the two-year suspended sentences, but academics, students, environmentalists and human rights groups are all weighing in with choice expletives.
"Out-bloody-rageous", "Police state . . . closer", "Fascism . . . alive and well are just three posted this week on the Six's website.
http://www.petitiononline.com/gfox6/
Meanwhile, Paul Wellings, Lancaster's vice-chancellor, is desperately trying to shore up the university's crumbling reputation as a centre for independent thought and debate. He says: "Historically, we have a strong commitment to peaceful protest . . . The Crown Prosecution Service decided there was a case to answer, and from then on it was out of the university's hands."
---
2.Protest is criminalised
The police abuse terror and harassment laws to penalise dissent while we insist civil liberties are our gift to the world
George Monbiot
The Guardian, October 4, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1584114,00.html
"We are trying to fight 21st-century crime - antisocial behaviour, drug dealing, binge drinking, organised crime - with 19th-century methods, as if we still lived in the time of Dickens." Tony Blair, September 27 2005.
"Down poured the wine like oil on blazing fire. And still the riot went on - the debauchery gained its height - glasses were dashed upon the floor by hands that could not carry them to lips, oaths were shouted out by lips which could scarcely form the words to vent them in; drunken losers cursed and roared; some mounted on the tables, waving bottles above their heads and bidding defiance to the rest; some danced, some sang, some tore the cards and raved. Tumult and frenzy reigned supreme ..." Nicholas Nickleby, by Charles Dickens, 1839.
All politicians who seek to justify repressive legislation claim that they are responding to an unprecedented threat to public order. And all politicians who cite such a threat draft measures in response which can just as easily be used against democratic protest. No act has been passed over the past 20 years with the aim of preventing antisocial behaviour, disorderly conduct, trespass, harassment and terrorism that has not also been deployed to criminalise a peaceful public engagement in politics. When Walter Wolfgang was briefly detained by the police after heckling the foreign secretary last week, the public caught a glimpse of something that a few of us have been vainly banging on about for years.
On Friday, six students and graduates of Lancaster University were convicted of aggravated trespass. Their crime was to have entered a lecture theatre and handed out leaflets to the audience. Staff at the university were meeting people from BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce, Shell, the Carlyle Group, GlaxoSmithKline, DuPont, Unilever and Diageo, to learn how to "commercialise university research". The students were hoping to persuade the researchers not to sell their work. They were in the theatre for three minutes. As the judge conceded, they tried neither to intimidate anyone nor to stop the conference from proceeding.
They were prosecuted under the 1994 Criminal Justice Act, passed when Michael Howard was the Conservative home secretary. But the university was able to use it only because Labour amended the act in 2003 to ensure that it could be applied anywhere, rather than just "in the open air".
Had Mr Wolfgang said "nonsense" twice during the foreign secretary's speech, the police could have charged him under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997. Harassment, the act says, "must involve conduct on at least two occasions ... conduct includes speech". Parliament was told that its purpose was to protect women from stalkers, but the first people to be arrested were three peaceful protesters. Since then it has been used by the arms manufacturer EDO to keep demonstrators away from its factory gates, and by Kent police to arrest a woman who sent an executive at a drugs company two polite emails, begging him not to test his products on animals. In 2001 the peace campaigners Lindis Percy and Anni Rainbow were prosecuted for causing "harassment, alarm or distress" to American servicemen at the Menwith Hill military intelligence base in Yorkshire, by standing at the gate holding the Stars and Stripes and a placard reading "George W Bush? Oh dear!" In Hull a protester was arrested under the act for "staring at a building".
Had Mr Wolfgang said "nonsense" to one of the goons who dragged him out of the conference, he could have been charged under section 125 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, which came into force in August. Section 125 added a new definition of harassment to the 1997 act, "a course of conduct ... which involves harassment of two or more persons". What this means is that you need only address someone once to be considered to be harassing them, as long as you have also addressed someone else in the same manner. This provision, in other words, can be used to criminalise any protest anywhere. But when the bill passed through the Commons and the Lords, no member contested or even noticed it.
Section 125 hasn't yet been exercised, but section 132 of the act is already becoming an effective weapon against democracy. This bans people from demonstrating in an area "designated" by the government. One of these areas is the square kilometre around parliament. Since the act came into force, democracy campaigners have been holding a picnic in Parliament Square every Sunday afternoon (see http://www1.atwiki.com/picnic/). Seventeen people have been arrested so far.
But the law that has proved most useful to the police is the one under which Mr Wolfgang was held: section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000. This allows them to stop and search people without the need to show that they have "reasonable suspicion" that a criminal offence is being committed. They have used it to put peaceful protesters through hell. At the beginning of 2003, demonstrators against the impending war with Iraq set up a peace camp outside the military base at Fairford in Gloucestershire, from which US B52s would launch their bombing raids. Every day - sometimes several times a day - the protesters were stopped and searched under section 44. The police, according to a parliamentary answer, used the act 995 times, though they knew that no one at the camp was a terrorist. The constant harassment and detention pretty well broke the protesters' resolve. Since then the police have used the same section to pin down demonstrators outside the bomb depot at Welford in Berkshire, at the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, at Menwith Hill and at the annual arms fair in London's Docklands.
The police are also rediscovering the benefits of some of our more venerable instruments. On September 10, Keith Richardson, one of the six students convicted of aggravated trespass on Friday, had his stall in Lancaster city centre confiscated under the 1824 Vagrancy Act. "Every Person wandering abroad and endeavouring by the Exposure of Wounds and Deformities to obtain or gather Alms ... shall be deemed a Rogue and Vagabond... " The act was intended to prevent the veterans of the Napoleonic wars from begging, but the police decided that pictures of the wounds on this man's anti-vivisection leaflets put him on the wrong side of the law. In two recent cases, protesters have been arrested under the 1361 Justices of the Peace Act. So much for Mr Blair's 21st century methods.
What is most remarkable is that until Mr Wolfgang was held, neither parliamentarians nor the press were interested. The pressure group Liberty, the Green party, a couple of alternative comedians, the Indymedia network and the alternative magazine Schnews have been left to defend our civil liberties almost unassisted. Even after "Wolfie" was thrown out of the conference, public criticism concentrated on the suppression of dissent within the Labour party, rather than the suppression of dissent throughout the country. As the parliamentary opposition falls apart, the extra-parliamentary one is being closed down with hardly a rumble of protest from the huffers and puffers who insist that civil liberties are Britain's gift to the world. Perhaps they're afraid they'll be arrested.
---
3.Walter Wolfgang: 'We have been lied to about the war. I dared to speak the truth'
The Independent
My case is not important. But what happened to me when I was ejected from the Labour conference - simply for a one-word protest during Jack Straw's speech this week - tells us there is something deeply wrong with the culture of our Government under Tony Blair.
We have been lied to about the war. But not only that. The party has been manipulated so that it has not been allowed to discuss the issue properly.
Indeed, the Labour leaders have got so nervous of criticism that when I shouted the single word "nonsense"- when the Foreign Secretary sought to paper over the issue with smooth words - party officials sent the bouncers in. Even one word of criticism, it seems, was too much.
I had not intended to heckle, much less to make myself the centre of national attention and a debate about whether free speech still exists in the modern Labour Party. But Jack Straw spoke such nonsense - about Iraq, and about Kosovo - that it pushed me over the edge.
I could have said a lot more than that one word. I could have said that we should not have marched into Iraq at all. I could have said we were lied to about the war. But one word was enough. Even so I could not believe that stewards were bearing down on me just because I dared to speak the truth.
Tony Blair is the worst leader the Labour Party has ever had, Ramsay Macdonald included. Mr Blair's instincts are basically those of a Tory. He picked up this cause from the Americans without even analysing it. I suspect that he is too theatrical even to realise that he is lying.
There was no justification for the conflict in Iraq. It isn't only that there were no weapons of mass destruction. The war was simply unnecessary. It was done in support of the United States.
It has brought us to a turning point in history. When I was a child living in Germany in the late 1930s, with relatives who died in the concentration camps, things were very frightening. But the policy of the American government today frightens me too. And so does the attitude of the British Government.
Power corrupts, it is said, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely. This is increasingly clear in our post-Cold War era. There is today only one superpower and therefore that superpower has to be restrained by the good advice of its allies. But what Tony Blair has done is the opposite. He has confirmed the prejudices of George Bush, making it much harder for a superpower to get out of its bad habits. We made a mistake by invading Iraq and we should recognise that. Now we have got to leave. Our continued presence in Iraq is part of the problem. It cannot be part of the solution. What has happened in Basra illustrates the mess we have got ourselves in. The situation is difficult enough without us making it more so. The best thing is to confine troops to barracks and having done so bring them home as soon as possible.
The hard truth is that the British people know that. The public - and the Labour Party in particular - are becoming increasingly convinced that we made a mistake going to war against Iraq. And that we are making an even bigger mistake in staying there. That is why some people at the conference this week lost their cool with my single word of criticism.
The party chairman Ian McCartney apologised to me afterwards. He invited me and Steve Forrest - the chap who was also thrown out for telling the bouncers to leave me alone - for a meal with him at the House of Commons some time. That was kind of him and I am happy to draw a line under the incident so far as I am personally concerned.
But the issue for the party is far from resolved. It was foolish to have a foreign policy session at a conference in which the most important issues we face - Iraq and whether we are going to have more nuclear weapons - were barely discussed.
Party leaders have increasingly controlled conference over the last few years. We used to have a very inclusive culture in the party. But New Labour has damaged that. We must reclaim it before it is too late.