The end of peaceful protesting?

The tactics used by the police during the G20 demos raise important questions about the right to protest

A large number of people have expressed their unhappiness at the treatment they received from the police after they protested in the Square Mile on April 1st.

The police employed a method called “kettling” to hem in protestors whereby people are surrounded by the police and not allowed to disperse. This is a tactic that will be familiar to football away fans, but they are unlikely to have been held for up to eight hours and only granted permission to leave after giving their name and address and then photographed.

I noted in a blog posting last week that the police would hype up the possibility of violence and they have pointed to the destruction of the Royal Bank of Scotland building as some sort of justification for hindering the freedom of movement of several thousand people. If they did think that people were intent on violence, why didn’t the police direct their energies at those people after they had committed crime rather than the peaceful majority who had no such intention.

Under whose orders were the police refusing to let people go home after they had protested? Is this now the future of policing protest? If so, is it deliberately designed to deter people form protesting in the future? I was lucky enough to get away from the Bank of England before the police began to refuse permission for people to leave. I thought that we had made our point, would get on the news and therefore had registered our displeasure at the way the interlocking world of finance and government had conspired to wreck the economy. But there are a number of letters to the Guardian by some of those who were detained.

The House of Lords ruled this year that the tactics used by the police were not illegal. Further evidence for some therefore that Britain has become a police state uninterested in protecting the rights of its citizens.