First things second

There are a number of reasons I set up this blog. Having contributed articles to a number of anarchist papers and websites over the years, I wanted somewhere of my own to put up information and views which interest me. And few other people seem to be doing what I'm interested in.

I've been to all the big 'offs' in London in the past two decades. But while I've learned a thing or three about public order policing in that time, many people still fall into the same tired traps. By airing some of the things I've taken on board, I hope that people getting involved now won't have to learn painful lessons the hard way. This blog doesn't seek to replicate what other people are doing well, for example the people at Fitwatch. Rather, I hope to complement what other people are doing by putting up some of the stories behind the development of policing and security in the UK.

Some of these are 'sexy' things, to do with what's going on in the world of public order policing. But behind the TSG lies a whole hidden milieu of 'soft' policing which few people have as yet taken a decent look at. Take Safer Neighbourhood Teams, for example. This isn't simply bread and butter policing, there's a different agenda there. You don't get former TSG personnel, like the Lambeth SNT officer who was at the Poll Tax Riot, or people like Elaine Van Orden, in charge of SNTs in Hammersmith, late of the Met Police Specialist Training Centre at Gravesend, involved with Safer Neighbourhood Teams unless there's some sort of security or intelligence function there. There's VIIDO - the Visual Images, Identification and Detection Office - headed by DCI Mick Neville. You may recall that last year he said that only 3% of CCTV was of any use as evidence in court. He's making the running in the forensic use of CCTV. There's the Forward Intelligence Team, so ably covered by Fitwatch but only recently receiving the coverage in the mainstream press that they deserve.

All these things taken together add up to a network of policing intiatives, many apparently unobjectionable when taken singly, which combine to form a very worrying totality. A new academic discipline, surveillance studies, has started to look at part of this, at the new geographies and social implications of the 'surveillance society'. This has as yet not been accompanied by the 'security studies' which would put the developments of the last twenty or more years into a proper perspective. There's scope for scores of academic careers here: but, more importantly, the new trends have not been placed into context for the people who really should know about them, the man and woman in the street.

What appears to be happening is the formation of a counter-insurgency state without an insurgency as yet. Jihadist terrorism does not predate the start of this trend, but is used to justify it. The state's strategy appears to be to put in place the lessons from the north of Ireland plus extra initiatives to preempt any insurgency and to create threats where none exist, such as the furores over the Climate Camps or anarchist demonstrations. Playing a long game, the state, not simply the Labour party, is putting into place a host of organisations devoted to keeping tabs on what's going on. Although not on the scale of the Total Awareness projects of the US military as yet, what is being established should worry everyone who simply wants a bit of privacy, as well as people whose goal is changing society for the better.

Anyway, that's what this blog's about. I hope you'll find it interesting enough to return to.