They dream up draconian laws, then give them moralistic titles such as the Violent Crime Reduction Act 2006. But the result is severe restrictions on our freedoms…
It’s not a crime to watch football, is it?
WORKERS, MARCH 2009 ISSUE
Occasionally the state reacts dramatically against the rights of the people, bringing in the police or army against strikers, perhaps, or enacting openly repressive laws. But usually the process is more incremental, a gradual whittling away of rights and customs won by working people over generations, as in Britain today. Local councils, supposedly the elected representatives of the people, have used anti-terror legislation to spy on their electorate, for example.
When such cases are brought into wider public view, it is claimed this was never the intention of the legislation. Nonetheless, the legislation remains unamended on the statute books ready to be used as the state sees fit.
The British state tends to work so that it can either deny or express regret about what it is doing. And always it is in the public interest, of course. Take a well-publicised social phenomenon like binge drinking and the terror it brings to the streets. The resulting moral panic enabled the government to pass the Violent Crime Reduction Act in 2006. A reasonable response to public concern? Setting aside the detail that people’s stoked-up concern is rarely justified by personal experience, consider just how that law is being used.
Control
Section 27 of the Act allows police to move someone from a specified area for 48 hours. The stated aim is to enable the control of small numbers of people mis-behaving under the influence of alcohol outside, say, a nightclub. But police are now using Section 27 against football supporters, some of them just standing outside a pub not having had a drink.
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Fans at Old Trafford: beware the new-found powers of the police. Photo: Workers |
There is no need for an offence to have been committed or even an immediate likelihood of one. The police are not required to have any evidence, merely their own suspicion. Essentially, they can then order an individual to vacate the locality and go home. For night club revellers this is a taxi ride, for an away football supporter it could be hundreds of miles. There is no compensation for unused match tickets or the wasted cost of travel.
What action can an individual take if subjected to a Section 27 order? Essentially nothing! Refusal to comply can lead to arrest, so although no crime has been committed the person becomes a de facto criminal. As always, the official explanation centres on the public good, the prevention of football-related violence.
How would people feel generally if they were prevented from entering their local shopping centre under threat of arrest on the grounds that they might, just might, become involved with shoplifting? If it becomes accepted that a demonised group, like football supporters/hooligans, can be treated this way then why not political demonstrators?
Workers gathering in support of others taking industrial action might well be deemed drunken sots liable to outbursts of violence and thereby subject to Section 27 orders before the picket could take place. Similarly, those well known inebriates, communists and anti-war protesters, could come under the baleful eye of the Rechabite constabulary and be sent on their way, or be arrested should they dare contest the ruling.
The contest between the power of the state and the rights of the people in Britain has a long history. Royal authority was challenged initially by Magna Carta and then given effective limits by the Forest Charter. Both documents embody elements of traditional local laws and customs. These were always important to ordinary people, being rights and freedoms referred to throughout the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. While the industrial revolution formed the circumstances for the rising working class movement, these traditional rights and freedoms formed the political roots. Organised working class politics were the expression of ideas going back beyond the thirteenth century given material form by the economic circumstances of emerging industrial capitalism.
This is a question of democracy. The freedom to attend football matches, or demonstrations, is no trivial matter. If the agencies of the state can on a whim prevent people going about their lawful business, and even arrest them should they fail to acquiesce, then there is no democracy no matter how often elections are held.
Democracy in Britain is not the gift of rulers nor a privilege granted to the working class somewhat grudgingly by their “masters” through nineteenth and twentieth century parliamentary reform acts. There is a popular confusion that associates suffrage with democracy. Of course voting can be a democratic instrument, but it is not a guarantee that democracy exists. Totalitarian systems often make use of plebiscites, as did the Nazis for instance who also used enabling laws, without being in any real sense democratic.
Democracy and history
How democracy is manifested in a particular country will reflect the customs, traditions and the whole history of political expectation and aspirations. The realisation of democracy is a dynamic process, or at least it should be if it is to be achieved. In Britain today that process is in dire need of reinvigoration.
Section 27 and legislation like it is dangerous. It is the result of the capitalist media working in cahoots with the state to create a moral panic and then legislate in such a way that the powers assumed are far more wide ranging than the original “problem” would suggest. The use of those powers can then be casually exercised in wider and wider contexts until they become commonplace and people have not realised another freedom has gone. It is important to recognise that binge drinking and football hooliganism are not the issue here; it is our liberty which is at stake.