“…worryingly authoritarian…” link returns an error.

Not only Olympic surveillance however. The Olympic nomenklatura get their own traffic lanes as they whizz in convoys between East and Central London.

In case ‘they’ are reading this, I for one, welcome our Olympic overlords and wish them God speed on their journeys…

Excellent piece, John. The sole purpose of much of this erosion of our liberties is to reinforce the hold of those with power. It’s not to combat terrorism,organised crime, offences against children or whatever the bogeyman de jour is. A fearful population is a pliant one, and super-surveillance inhibits and instils obedience, while those with power escape any effective scrutiny and surveillance themselves.

Link was, for some reason, clogged up with the first few lines of the article. Pruned it looks as follows:

http://www.mattwardman.com/blog/official-harassment-of-photographers-in-the-uk-i-have-a-little-list/

Excellent articles, both.

Another excellent, high-quality piece from The Publican.

I’d just suggest one, tiny, refinement though: explore the way “deterrence” becomes “intimidation”.

That is, what FIT teams do is more than just deter protest. They actively seek to intimidate – and that is profoundly worrying.

What I’m getting at is that there are many situations when society might think it perfectly legitimate for the police to “deter” certain kinds of behaviour. Of course, I (and I suspect you) don’t believe protest is one such case…so that FIT teams’ purpose is to deter legal protest in a free democracy is, as you point out, worrying. But when we’re just talking about deterrence, it looks like a case of the powers that be simply making a mistake about what it is appropriate to deter with state power.

But when the deterrence goes further and becomes outright intimidation – as anyone who has observed a FIT team in action knows it does – then it becomes something altogether more troublesome than just a mistake about what needs to be deterred. It becomes the state actively and purposefully intimidating its own citizenry.

a subtle distinction, but I think there’s something important in it…but as I said, a minor point.

whoops – link sorted

@ 2&4:

Thank you.

Alisdair Cameron @2:

It’s not to combat terrorism,organised crime, offences against children or whatever the bogeyman de jour is

Yes indeed. Fear is in the interests of government. The myth of the bearded furriner with the IED in his rucksack is too convenient to both the militant Wahabbist and the authoritarian Western plutocrat for either group to let it melt in the face of evidence.

Pagar @4:

But when the deterrence goes further and becomes outright intimidation – as anyone who has observed a FIT team in action knows it does – then it becomes something altogether more troublesome than just a mistake about what needs to be deterred. It becomes the state actively and purposefully intimidating its own citizenry.

This had me thinking for quite some time, for which, thank you.

The conundrum I’m thinking about is to do with Venn diagrams of aggression. Deterrence, to me, seems to include intimidation: again, the example of speakers under CCTV cameras. “Pick up that litter!”, “Don’t open that can of Fosters!”, “Cross the street now so that white girl isn’t scared of you!”. This attitude is designed to prevent a behaviour by making it unmistakeable that the subject is being watched. The threat of future penalty is an intimidation and thus a deterrence, just like taking your children to the auto da fe used to be.

However, you’re also right that in terms of people like FIT, there are two distinct elements to their work. Just making it apparent that you are being watched and documented would be enough to give a pause for thought to any serious lawbreaker: I’m thinking of serial arsonists and the kind of person who shoots abortionists here. If they’re watching you, they will have the evidence needed to convict beyond reasonable doubt. FIT getting right up in your face is indeed something different.

But your last line gives me problems.

The very definition of a state is an organisation which purposefully intimidates its own citizenry; with a standing army, with tax collectors, with bailiffs, with armoured paramilitaries on Bishopsgate. That’s what states do. But I recognise that you’re speaking at a practical level rather than a philosphical one; so it’s about “contractual” intimidations (I accept that laws against theft are good for everyone so government intimidations are done with my/the electorates’ sanction) and unilateral ones (political dissent is legal, but not in the interests of a specific group of governing political figures, who have chosen to use the contractual mechanism of intimidation on dissenters).

This is not, in my analysis, about the government making a mistake regarding who it can contractually intimidate; it’s about our political establishment having completely forgotten that its habitual intimidations are consensual at all. They take the power for granted, as it were: which is why “safe seat” should be an oxymoron in any democracy.

People are doing something the government don’t like (speeding, burglary, vast-scale international theft and fraud, political protest). It is habitual for those in government to respond with armoured paramilitary force to people doing things the government doesn’t like [1]. So they used that force, having forgotten that popular consent is required.

As NightJack and I have both independently argued, this was a feature of early policing in the UK and has returned since Thatcher figured out (using the miners and the hippies as test groups) how to get away with it.

[1] Except international theft and fraud, which gets preferential treatment and a fucking huge taxpayer-backed loan which is then used to pay direct bonuses: yes I’m bitter.