By George Monbiot (Published in the Guardian, 21st April 2009.)
The rightwing press has briefly turned against the police, but normal service will soon resume.
If a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who has been twatted by the police. As the tabloids turn their fire onto an unfamiliar target – the unprovoked aggression of Her Majesty’s constabulary – the love affair between the cops and the rightwing press has never been more fragile.
The policing of the G20 protests at the beginning of this month was routine. Policemen hiding their identification numbers and beating up peaceful protesters is as much a part of British life as grey skies and red buses. Across 20 years of protests, I have seen policemen swapping their jackets to avoid identification, hurling people against vans and into walls and whomping old ladies over the head with batons. A friend had his head repeatedly bashed against the bonnet of a police van; he was then charged with criminal damage to the van. I have seen an entire line of police turn round to face the other way when private security guards have started beating people up. I have seen them refuse – until Amnesty International got involved – to investigate my own case when I was hospitalised by these licensed thugs (the guards had impaled my foot on a metal spike, smashing the middle bone).
But none of this featured in the conservative press. The story was always the same: we would stagger home after our peaceful protests were attacked by uniformed skinheads to discover that we were “Anarchist Thugs on the Rampage” whose attempt to destroy civilisation had been thwarted only by the calm professionalism of the police. Violent police action mutated into violent protests. The papers believed everything the police told them.
This began to change when the police foolishly attacked a Countryside Alliance march in 2004. In the spirit of impartial policing, the cops gave these reactionaries the treatment they had been doling out to generations of progressives. It was grotesque, disportionate and entirely familiar policing, but there’s a world of difference between bloodstained hemp ponchos and bloodstained tweeds. The exposure of the lies the police then told about the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes and the shooting of Mohammed Abdul Kahar made the newspapers – which had reproduced the official version – feel stung.
In other circumstances, Ian Tomlinson, the passer-by who died after being thrown to the ground by police, would have been treated by the press as a violent anarchist who had assaulted the road with his body. But video footage and disillusionment has changed that – for a few days at least. On Friday the front page of the Daily Express carried lurid pictures of the injuries sustained by a woman at the G20 protests, under the headline “Police Did This to Me: It was just like being whipped by the Taliban”.
Yesterday the Daily Mail posted up a film made by climate camp activists(1). Its columnist Melanie Phillips, who is yet to be celebrated for her support of radical causes, opined that “there are always elements in the ranks [of the police] who want to give people a good kicking.”(2) A column in the Telegraph explained that “there are individuals who join the police just because they like hitting people”(3), while the Spectator lamented the “disgraceful actions of a few Met officers”(4). Today’s Guardian poll suggests that the police are losing the wider battle for public opinion too.
The papers maintain that a few rogue officers got out of control. But as testimonies collected by Climate Camp’s legal team show, police violence at the G20 demos was organised and systematic(5). It is true that the police appear to have been carried away by testeria (a useful word which describes testosterone-fuelled male rampages). But this keeps happening, and senior officers make no attempt to prevent it.
Before the protests, the police fed stories to the media about terrorist plots hatched by G20 demonstrators(6). “We’re up for it and we’re up to it,” Commander Simon O’Brien told the press(7). Organisers from Climate Camp asked if they could attend police briefings to journalists in order to put their side of the story. They were rebuffed. The police initially refused to meet them even to discuss the protesters’ intentions. The police plan was called Operation Glencoe: it was named after the site of a notorious massacre.