There Is No Alternative

<—Read Part One Here—>

<—Read Part Two Here—>

Destroy trust within a broad movement and between more and less radical activists:

Some of the easiest protesters to smear are the “unwashed” in squats, with the tabloid phrasing linking back to a long history of anti-working class sentiment. With the wealth gap in the UK dramatically increasing, and the same picture repeating around the world, such sentiment is likely to increase. The most violent societies tend to be the most unequal, and while the needs of the poor remain unaccounted for in mainstream politics it seems unlikely that class prejudice and violence will decrease on their own.

Not only are the poor the most affected by cuts, but they are alo the most affected by aggressive protest policing due to differential treatment by race and class. With poverty associated with increased stress, greater likelihood of being the victim of violence, being unable to escape other forms of violence, and with having less time and energy for organising, it is unsurprising that those most affected by cuts are not always able to protest in huge numbers.

When protesters are more privileged, a new narrative comes into play, with charges of hypocrisy being made and smears targeted at prominent protesters. As previously stated, UK tabloids have typified all of the student protesters as “rich”, playing into a culture which charges all left-wingers with hypocrisy and demands that they constantly prove their credentials or else have “no right to complain”. When the actions of one protester are held to be the actions of all, it becomes both easy to drive wedges both among protesters and between them and the public at large.

While a few protesters are given the media spotlight, the police certain to be infiltrating their ranks are cloaked in secrecy. With the budget of the NPOIU, a body tasked with combating “domestic extremism” having more than doubled in the last four years, all that is certain is that there are a number of undercover officers tasked with infiltrating the protest movement. While the unit has been brought into the Metropolitan Police, its structure has not changed: one unit has a role “similar to the ‘counter subversion’ functions formerly carried out by MI5” in the 60s and 70s, and which involves working alongside MI5, likely to compile dossiers on large numbers of student and left wing activists.

To secure convictions, officers must be involved in planning actions and can be key to them happening at all. Police outside the UK have admitted to disguising themselves as demonstrators, and there are videos of them acting as agent provocatours. Whether police in the UK are acting to incite violence as part of undercover operations is unknown.

What is certain is that both courts and the media often come out against “career protesters”, even the Daily Mail and a former policeman admit that the picture of activists is mixed. This is a picture that does not fit with the news coverage of the student protests.

Another striking thing from the student protests were the attacks on activists for being “too serious” and “party poopers”, for having a negative attitude and making life difficult for the majority. This occurs even when many activists are also comedians, and when many actions are fun and entertaining.

Questioning the official narrative is allowed, but offering another in its place is not. Moreover, all questioning is depressing negativity on the behalf of the questioner, a personal failing. All other narratives can be is either fanaticism or the delusions of harmless hippies. When Obama’s adviser stated that “liberal naysayers” ought to be “drug tested”, it made news only because he conflated his attacks on hippies and party-poopers, rather than making them separately.

These attacks centre around the difficult to oppose idea of “reasonableness” in politics, which pushes discourse towards the centre. When the centre is always unspokenly moving to the right, the end result is a narrative that drifts rightwards over time with no counter to prevent it.

I cannot comment on cases coming to court, but there are a history of arrests that are unfounded but serve to stigmatise movement. The numbers of arrests can be announced in the media, and immediately a perception of “they must have arrested them for something” is established. When the media print numbers of unfounded arrests, this is never corrected, just as untrue press releases are never followed up on.

(At the time of posting, prosecutions have been dropped against over 100 of the Fortnum and Mason arrestees.)

Taken together with bail conditions preventing further protest, and punitive strategies by law enforcement, this renders political protest extremely difficult.

People can also be put off protest not only by the difficulty, but by alienation from experienced activists who often have strongly negative views of the police. When individual police decide to punish experienced activists for being too assertive, it can include takedowns, hands around their necks, use of pressure points for asking for police numbers (which they are legally obliged to give), and standing on people’s feet. Police have acted to disrupt benefit gigs for activists, and a smash EDO protest way back in 2010 saw all the now-standard tactics: kettling, mass arrests followed by release without charge, denial of toilets and water combined with press statements that proved flatly untrue.

The us-and-them mentality of police occurs any time that police anticipate conflict. In one anti-terror raid, police were rightly concerned about armed attack by one subject following the death by stabbing of another arresting officer months earlier. When he surrendered, evidence attests that police proceeded to violently beat and abuse the suspect once he was cuffed and kneeling, and again once he was in his cell.

The effects of the expectation of conflict, antagonism, and adrenaline produce brutal results, as the Stanford Prison Experiment and successors show.

There is extensive evidence behind differential treatment by police forces. Obama mentioned this in relation to race. There is no doubt that an antagonistic culture emerges between police and activists.

While checks and balances exist, many IPCC staff are ex-police, especially those in senior roles. Despite there being over 400 deaths following police contact in the last ten years, no police officer has ever been convicted of murder or manslaughter. There are also serving officers with dozens of complaints against them, none of which have been upheld.

When peaceful protest is constantly challenged and faced with violence, and the agenda is removed from the hands of the public, it is unsurprising that violence emerges. No effective mainstream non-violent action or debate is ever taken to stop violence emerging.

This is shown in sharper relief after the recent rioting to which the political response has largely been punitive, with little thought given to examining evidence or to preventing violence from happening again. The evidence on public order policing shows firmly that low-key approaches are far more effective than punitive ones. The causes of the UK riots are many and beyond the scope of this piece. It is worth noting that the effect of stop-and-search on crime reduction is doubted by criminologists, while those stopped multiple times report feeling angry and alienated just as people are by patterns of racial stereotyping.

While black bloc is a controversial tactic, masking up is often in direct response to FIT teams and surveillance. After the recent riots, the legality of masking up may face more questions, leaving police FIT tactics facing less opposition.

These police tactics are international, forming patterns of violence which replicate over the globe. Activists talk of structural and symbolic violence. Removing all of these forms of violence would constitute a systemic change in the way in which the world is governed, and talking about them explains, while it does not justify, violence by various groups of people including the violence the police are called upon to perform.

Suppression in action:

All of these systemic pressures on protest have combined, in the anti-cuts movement, to result in protester numbers being reduced to a core who are middle class, predominantly white, well educated, well informed on the history of protest movements and the UK law – a minority of people which are easily contained and controlled. The other result is that people who persist in protest must have both a strong narrative behind them and supportive friends, which alienates them from potential protesters.

None of the societal forces behind this are “natural”. Some are explicitly intentional. Many others occur simply through the isolated actions of well-meaning people, actions that have systemic effects which are usually not challenged. Some acts of violence are held to be more moral than others.

These circumstances result in moves which have public supermajorities against often being implemented. NHS blood services are set to be privatised with 64% to 74% against. A majority support renationalising UK railways outright in 2009. While support hovers around 50% for bringing back the death penalty, whether this would persist after a wider societal debate is unclear. At the same time voter turnout has fallen significantly in the last 30 years.

While opinion at the time was divided the Iraq war was pushed through against mass protest, but not direct action. Regardless of the conclusions of the Iraq enquiry, there have been hundreds of thousands of deaths while massive numbers of private security contractors remain, and war rages on elsewhere.

Even without direct pressure from right-wing forces such as Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp these forces serve to skew the functioning of a society intended to be both free and open. Direct collusion between police, the media and politicians serves to distort, repress and perpetrate injustice to a far higher degree. This piece was written before the current scandal engulfing the British political class and News International, and the degree to which intentional corruption and collusion has played in the suppression of the anti-cuts movement remains to be seen.

While it is well established that we live in a world of growing inequality and changing climate, our decisions are made in a framework which demands constant growth, and where that growth is increasingly measured with reference to ever more speculative bank holdings. These measures ignore human and environmental costs as “externalities”. As the implications of this continue to be ignored, rational questions have to be asked about how truly adaptive our society’s behaviour is.

All the facts behind the current News International scandal have been in the public domain for a long time, yet it has not been news. The effects of war, oil depletion, or cuts are only news long after the event. This is too late to change our behaviour, or even to consider how our society functions and these decisions are made.

We seem to be a society which keeps trying the same thing while expecting different results, yet in many cases the damage has already been done and we cannot go back.

This is what democracy looks like.

<—Read Part One Here—>

Make legal protest difficult, frightening and degrading:

The main focus of recent protests has been kettling by the police, with police ready to kettle at almost any excuse, or as a default response to any protest.

This omnipresence of police kettles means that protesters need to be young, energetic, and physically able to take care of themselves in kettles, as they are very dangerous places to be. The involvement in protest of people outside these groups is drastically curtailed. The kettle becomes a means to intimidate people away from protest by large numbers of police, designed to keep people from turning up to protest, or ensuring that they leave for fear of being detained.

The unpredictability of police violence serves as another strong deterrent to protest, with the cases of Alfie Meadows serving as an exemplar, and the case of Ian Tomlinson showing how death can be the result of even incidental involvement in a protest. Recent police actions have involved plainclothes snatch squads and “something you would have expected from the former Soviet Union”, and many at Millbank and during the student protests were hit with batons while not being violent in any way.

The arrest process itself is both traumatic and designed to be, requiring mental preparation to face loss of liberty together with potential humiliation and degradation, with police going so far as to place a 15 year old girl in a paper suit. Arrest is a process intended not only to detain the arrestee, but to put them through an unpleasant experience and to stop repetition. The more people the police can arrest with any potential justification, the more are intimidated away from protest. Bail conditions are often also set to stop further protest. UK Uncut arrestees have been advised by their solicitors to take part in no further activism while awaiting increasingly delayed trials, including not to tweet or blog about political matters.

Journalists are also intimidated away by using the threat of arrest, and “citizen journalists” asked by “official” journalists to upload footage have been arrested.

Networking is prevented by taking control of occupied space, through police raids on squatted homes and community centres, and the eviction of university anti-cuts occupations.

Control is taken over online space, with many activist facebook groups shut down for what has now revealed to be linked to “reasons of national security”.

Even with these measures the Evening Standard (31^st March) among others has argued for Twitter to be shut down on protest days, and for more anti-protest laws to prevent peaceful and legal protest.

Through these actions the formation of alternative narratives is prevented at source, with speakers being silenced or their forums for debate being taken away.

While individual police officers are often friendly, rational and reasonable, there exist many career incentives for police officers to go with the “spirit” rather than the letter of orders from above, and rather than the letter of the law. This occurs whether they believe in the “old fashioned policing” embraced gleefully by some officers or not. A “canteen culture” exists within the police which valedicts aggressive, “old fashioned” – often meaning prejudiced and threatening – and gung-ho attitudes and practices. Ex-officers often speak about police collusion in giving statements and evidence, which, due to the extreme unreliability of human memory, is a necessary measure to secure any defended convictions at all. Statements which varied so much as human memories of dramatic circumstances do would, without exception, lead to cases uniformly being thrown out. Though police themselves have called for wearable cameras, the technology to store such data continues to be out of reach.

Collusion has only grown slightly more circumspect since the 20^th century, and has the side effect of massively reinforcing the police side of contested circumstances. No matter the truth of events, police loyalties must lie with the other officers and bad practices cannot be challenged in a culture which would punish not being one of the team with, at best, ending any chance of promotion throughout the entire career of that officer. One narrative, forged by agreement in this environment, takes on the stamp of “official version of events” and is rarely, if ever challenged.

Once in custody, under whatever circumstances, treatment there, and thus how distressing and punitive an experience it is, varies drastically according to race and class, with it being enough to be “well spoken”, confident and assertive to get better treatment. Institutional and frequently individual police racism makes treatment in custody drastically different for anyone not white.

Police interactions with protesters are problematised from the start due to the collective blaming of all protesters for any violence. Analysis that steps beyond this scapegoats a minority of protesters, with a narrative of violent protesters “hijacking” demonstrations – a word evoking terrorism. As before, police press releases are often reported unquestioned in both left and right wing media.

After release, whether or not charges are brought, the disruptive effects of arrest on life continue. The seizure of mobile ‘phones together with computers takes away essential tools for conducting daily life and work. Some of those arrested must make their way home over long distances in distinctive jumpsuits and without telephones, maximising the practical and emotionally disruptive effects.

The punitive, forcibly controlling nature of this police behaviour can best be seen in light of the radically different treatment of “political” and non-political events. When 13,000 people took part in a flashmob, closing down Liverpool Street station and massively disrupting commuters, only two arrests were made for public order offences. When 20 people picnicked in Soho Square on the day of the Royal Wedding, they were told that “flashmob”was threatening and 18^th century, and were forced to leave the square in small groups under threat of arrest. Some were subject to “pre-arrests”, including a group arrested while drinking tea in Starbucks.

The disruptive effects of even a single unfounded arrest on long-term life and career prospects should not be underestimated, with entry to other countries rendered impossible or substantially more difficult, and, with CRB checks becoming massively more common, is a factor that would put many employers off a candidate.

In addition to using the threat of arrest, the police also use Forward Intelligence Teams for various activities including surveillance and keeping of intelligence on protesters never arrested, to harass activists and to make targeted arrests, and to follow and keep note of journalists, and to make police records on political activists which result in consequent harassment including frequent vehicle stops and stop-and-searches.

Police publication of “mugshots” of wanted protesters are widely picked up by the media, a technique which also serves to fix the image of all protesters as a series of mugshots, that of lawbreakers. Police arrest numbers also give an impression of criminality, when often activists are released without charge. Tabloids often go after activists with mugshots, private detectives and personal attacks, printing columns that bear striking similarities to police “spotter” cards.

The Met police’s tactics for suppressing dissent are so effective that they have recently sent trainers to repressive Bahrain as well as to Saudi Arabia (see Private Eye, issues passim), where being gay or belonging to a political party are illegal. While the UK police are not murderous in the same way as police in repressive Arab regimes, there are similarities in tactics. Egyptian activists have commented with shock on how violent the UK police are. Before the recent Egyptian revolution, protest was illegal in Egypt.

All of this together not only acts as a huge deterrent to protest but naturalises police violence and blames protesters collectively for all violence. Police involved at Stokescroft stated that “if you were involved in this disorder in any way – and there were more than 400 people that were there – then when we identify you, we will arrest you”. While the photographs on the police site make all of those people look like criminals, so do police photos make the many innocent people featured on spotter cards, and so indeed do the many profiles of activists in tabloid newspapers. 

Because this broad-based negative treatment only happens to those engaged in protest, the forcefulness of this suppression becomes something alien to those outside the event. The minority voice stands without emotional support or corroborative experience by the majority, and is easily dismissed.

<—Read Part Three Here—>

How to suppress a protest movement

It’s time to start talking about our democracy.

Shape the narrative, suppress competing narratives – the story of the student protests:

It began with the Millbank protest. From here the media narrative began to diverge from events on the ground, at first subtly.

Almost at once, attacks began on the protesters as “posh”, when many were non-white, not in any way posh, and there to protest the cutting of EMA, as the BBC photos – which concentrate on violence and property damage – show.

There was consensus by students in opposition to violence against people, and, unlike the BBC photos, most protesters saw no violence and took part in none. Protesters were indiscriminately attacked by police, and all protesters were blamed for the actions of any. There was shock at the anger of ordinary members of society, so much shock that scapegoats had to be found. The violence and property damage at Millbank was shocking because it was political, but not shocking on any British Saturday night.

At every stage actions that are described by those there as organic are blamed on a “tiny minority” – like reds under the bed. This is a narrative of “domestic extremists” that leads to crackdowns, scapegoating, and repression.

Subsequent protests were violently policed, kettled, and horse-charged,  yet all violence was attributed to protesters. The agenda remained firmly focused on violence. Police violence is rarely questioned, and only after evidence is gathered and put forward by members of the public, rather than by the media.

When there is violence the focus is always on “anarchists” and “thugs” rather than the actions of ordinary people. In contrast, hundreds were cautioned merely for entering Millbank, some after police dawn raids. These arrests may go on to affect their future UK and international career prospects, a cost to society far greater than the tens of thousands in property damage to Millbank.

“Dreadful violence” was still the narrative by March, when the cleanup of Trafalgar Square was around 2.5x the normal Saturday night cost. By now, violence to people and property are indissolubly conflated. A narrative that began with concern for the welfare of police and protesters has concluded with political freedom not being worth the price of a mid-range car.

How the narrative is shaped:

None of this comes to pass in a vacuum. The timing of major events is carefully chosen, from the date of the recent Royal Wedding to that of news of the scale of the NHS cuts, which broke on the same day. While scores of pages and supplements over weeks were devoted to the wedding, the effects of the cuts are rarely more than a footnote. Cuts over many years are not a story, the Royal Wedding is.

News stories now break in a different way to the past. Journalists are under increasing time pressure, and while investigative journalism is rarer, churnalism – the swift regurgitation of press releases as fact – is increasingly common. Even the comparatively left-wing Guardian straight-out reports press releases that – as in the case of Soho Square here – are factually untrue.

What editors want in a story is shaped by previous stories in that publication, as well as the feelings of owners and advertisers. In rare cases, a journalist quits over the blatant untruth of their expected output. In many more cases, owners admit to having tight editorial control, such as Murdoch over the UK red-tops. Stories that conflict with advertisers are pulled so frequently that experienced journalists take it as given.

Beginner journalists are told that top of the list for a successful story is topicality, that is that it seamlessly fits with the stories before it as part of one narrative. The first rule for freelancers is that pitches must fit with what already gets published, in a matching style. Any media with submission guidelines ensures that there is no appreciable divergence in copy, with the required prose style necessarily shaping content.

It is this environment that determines what “news” is. The way that news is constructed means that violence is news, whereas the effects of policy, anger, and open political debate are not.

Prevent formation of different narratives:

This monolithic narrative means that people are atomised, lacking contact with language to conceive of and express competing narratives. With the media narrative firmly centred on violence no discussion of the narrative behind the cuts becomes possible there. With spaces against cuts being prevented from forming or being evicted by police, public life becomes by default pro-cuts. With a massive recent drop-off in mentions of “neoliberalism” on the BBC news website, forming any alternative narrative becomes very difficult, even when there is massive evidence behind it.

Over time this unspoken narrative moves to the political right, with US presidents becoming economically massively more right-wing since WWII, the UK Labour Party moving ever rightwards, and politics in the west becoming dominated by neoliberal ideals despite the constant elision of the term, with discussion of it in the media bordering on the forbidden.

The closest the media are able to come to discussing the necessity for the cuts is reporting on a conference, while most dissenting time in media is spent responding to hyperbolic reporting in other media while sticking to the same cuts narrative.

The media also operate around a hierarchy of trust, with official media such as the BBC being perceived as more trustworthy than “just some blogger”, and more than non-media individuals who are seen as “politically motivated”. This takes place while the BBC cannot escape being political, taking the line of the perceived centre, a line which constantly evolves under attack from politicians who want coverage to reflect their interests and use threats to back this up. This leaves a BBC which can question whether Uganda was truly wrong to propose the execution of gays, but which cannot offer or allow any critique of the pro-cuts narrative. The result is a media which predicates questions on unquestioned, unjustified assumptions and posits a choice between a right-wing and far-right alternative.

With cuts affecting different groups over time, it becomes even more difficult to assemble questioning into one narrative. First student cuts were announced, moving onto local service and jobs cuts, and then arts cuts, then NHS cuts and structural marketisation. The effects of these will take place over years and in a geographically dissipated way, making resolving them into one story a herculean task.

This goes hand-in-hand with increasing modern demands on time that disincentivise any break from the mainstream narrative. As working hours increase over time alongside the increase in precarious work, and with rent in London – where there is still work – soaring, the need to work, to have fun, to spend time with friends and family, and not to spend time arguing about politics means that challenges to that narrative grow less frequent, and occur with less force. Even art, which often acts as a challenge to mainstream narratives, is not immune to these changes: in the 1990s 1% of top 10 chart acts came from public schools; in 2010 it is 60%.

All this takes place against a backdrop of many economic experts saying that the cuts are not necessary at all.

What diverging narratives do exist soon fracture across party political lines, with debate becoming about how much to cut rather than cuts being necessary, when most money the UK owes is in fact to the banks that were bailed out. Discussion centres around “how much to cut and where” with no linking with the reasons behind the collapse despite the enormous exposure of the film “Inside Job”.

Though there is an enormous amount of evidence showing that the cuts are not necessary, they are going ahead with any “mainstream” questioning being fragmented and incidental. It is as if the question has been settled before it has even been raised.

Under these established pressures, breaking from the main narrative becomes virtually impossible. Once one dominant narrative is established, a variety of factors inherent in human psychology – change blindness, attention fatigue, and the way in which we are influenced mainly unconsciously and by the people around us – mean that the vast amount of information contradicting this narrative is ignored or subsumed into the unconscious to fuel nightmare or art.

<—Read Part Two—>

Welcome to There Is No Alternative. I’m going to be blogging about Speculative Fiction, Pop Culture, and Politics, as well as those indescribable combinations of all three. Enjoy!