Robert Sharp

The atmosphere in Westminster is oppressive. Hop up the steps from the tube and the cries from the Tamils on Parliament Square bite your ears. I’ve seen plenty of protests on that piece of green over the past few years, but this one crackles like a storm-cloud ready to discharge a bolt of lightning.

The wind seems angry too, sweeping through Victoria Tower Gardens, pulling the hats off tourists and messing up their grey comb-overs. The pigtails on school children billow in syncronicity with the union flag above the tower.

Meanwhile, the press and the suits hurry in and out of the building. They ignore the angry mob and the red flags across the street, and yet they are under attack. They shrug off the violent wind, yet there is a storm brewing inside.

A man of about thirty moves slowly through the crowd. He has a grubby brown jacket and a bad back, both of which accounts for the angry expression on his face. He is hungry and slightly dazed from some painkillers, which accounts for the punch-drunk gait. The protesters, the tourists, the wind, don’t help his mood. Seeds, pollen from the trees, waft down and interfere with his eyes.

And as he approaches Millbank, a tall man in a light grey suit emerges from one of the offices, and turns back towards the Palace. Around his neck hangs a security pass, one with the green and white stripes, the most sought-after there is. He walks with his head bowed, looking at his feet, and doesn’t see the man in the brown jacket lumbering towards him. And the man in the brown jacket has no inclination to move. Only when they are in each other’s personal space, does the man with the green striped security pass feel the presence of the other. He twitches only slightly but is visibly startled. It is as if he is expects to be mugged on the street.

He, the politician, regains his stride and heads towards The Commons. I, the man in the brown jacket, haul myself into the coffee shop on the corner, the better to take refuge from the storm.

This is precisely what Dan Hill was talking about.

David at Minority Report offers some words of warning, regarding the slow trickle of citizen generated footage of alleged brutality at the G20 protests earlier this month:

Reconstructing events by using any number of restricted viewpoints is no replacement for vital missing facts. If I present you with a black box that contains a photo I made of a scene, I’ll happily let you make as many pin holes as you like - you will still struggle to make out whats going on. Especially if I choose the image.

Different circumstances, but I felt this way after Saddam Hussein was executed.  There is a real danger in allowing snippets of grainy amateur footage to act as the definitive account of an event.  The result in this case has been yet another trial by media, only this time the police seem to be on the receiving end.  In reality, we have no way of knowing precisely what killed Ian Tomlinson, and the account of the Nicky Fisher assault makes me uneasy (although admittedly this feeling is entirely based on her sightly spaced-out media interviews).

Was it inevitable that the police would lose this PR war?  Or is that some kind of optical illusion brought about by 20:20 hindsight?  My feeling is that these stories, which trickle out over a few days, played to our preconceptions, feeding into an easily understood narrative.  Clearly, the public have lost trust in the police.

This is a desperately dangerous state of affairs, of course.  However, I think the vilification that the police now receive is a delayed punishment for earlier and more egregious clusterfucks.  Despite the fact that no-one in authority was punished for the Jean-Charles De Menezes killing, it is not unreasonable to draw a line between that incident, and the current debate.  Although neither Sir Ian Blair or Cressida Dick (or for that matter Tony Blair or his Home Secretary Charles Clarke) lost their jobs over the incident, the security services certainly lost credibility as a result.  They were ‘punished’ in the sense that they lost the public’s trust, a vital form of political capital.

There should be a bittersweet satisfaction to this: we’ve learnt that institutions simply cannot maladministrate, or violate our civil liberties, with total impunity.  We’ve learnt how to ‘police the police’, and some thuggish elements will be brought to prosecution through evidence collected by citizen photographer.  However, its also true that the men and women currently tasked with policing our capital city were not the ones who ordered a policy of violence upon us.  Those people who made such decisions still walk free, and unaccountable.  This latest success for citizen journalism is a Pyrrhic victory.
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Riot Police at the G20 Protests, London, 1st April 2009. Photo by PublicCCTV.

At the CentreRight blog (via LibCon), Graeme Archer has posted some ideas for reform of the police in light of the appalling Ian Tomlinson incident.

He begins

The police, particularly in London, appear to have forgotten that they police only with our consent. They are not the armed wing of the state. Some reforms are therefore long overdue

Of the suggestions he lists, I have mixed feelings about this pair:

• Just as the storage of DNA from wholly innocent citizens is an outrage, so is the routine video-ing of members of the public by police officers. This must stop.
• In contrast, members of the public must never be prevented from recording the activities of police officers.

I recall a point made by the former pedant Cleanthes, commenting on my Notes for Michael, who cited Robert Peel’s principles for policing:

An agent of the state???? That, Robert, in one succint phrase is the most daming indictment of the damage that has been done to the ethos of the Police over the last few decades.

Read Peel’s Principles here. Especially no.7:

Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

Libertarian Ian Parker-Joseph made a similar point in the comments to the CentreRight post.

On the issue of filming, it seems to me we can’t have it both ways. If the police are indeed simply citizens in uniform, then they surely have the same rights to film people in public, as the rest of the citizenry? If we are allowed to film them, surely they should be allowed to film us, no? Placing a different set of restrictions on the police on this issue would violate Peel’s principle.

And before anyone brings up CCTV, Cleanthes and I have already discussed the difference between automated and eyeball policing at The Select Society.

Cycle Mounted Police at the National Theatre.

Rush Hour Crush, by Simon Perry

Twenty-seven minutes past eight in the morning. The tube doors cry out in pain as they roll shut, and we are sealed into the train. I find myself facing the the door, my neck and head bent back, tracing the shape of the curved window an inch from my face. Its an unbearable torture, so I pivot myself around. Other bodies bob against me, someone takes a step, and we find ourselves in a new, pressurised equilibrium.

I stop turning, too late to realise I’ve twisted plumb into someone else’s personal space. We are belly to belly. The first thing I see is a brown, manicured hand cluching the strap of a handbag, which is enough to tell me that its a woman, and she’s young. Instinctively, before I really think about it, I raise my eyes to check her out.

She is facing away from me, her head just moments from my chest, and I’m looking for just long enough to behold the divine curve where her neck sweeps up to join her chin, before she turns back to face me. Our eyes meet, and I do that quick, guilty glance away that you do when a stranger catches you staring on the train. I focus intently at the plastic roof of the carriage, and inside, I cringe.

But then I realise that she’s still looking, directly at me. Nervously, I steal another glance, and she stares right back. Dark Asian eyes. A mop of hair, still damp from a shower somewhere, skimming her shoulders and framing that neck.

I think I can see a faint expression on her mouth. I wouldn’t call it a smile as such, more a look of contentment. Her face is the absence of anxiety, and it fills me with great joy. I half smile back at her, and suddenly there’s a slight flick of her tongue as she moistens her lips.

We inhale each other, all the way to Old Street. It is a moment of sincerity, a moment of unfettered trust between two people. An abrupt and unexpected moment of true love.

As the train lumbers in to Angel, she breaks our shared gaze, and turns towards the door. As it opens, I know she will steal a glance back at me, an unspoken farewell. I have never been more certain of anything in my life.

But it does not happen. Her gaze is fixed ahead. As she coldly brushes past me and steps onto the platform, I can just make out a bright white wire losely woven into her hair, travelling from her ear, down into the folds of her coat. It is then that I reach an understanding: For her, I have never existed. Since London Bridge, she has been staring into a void of her own thoughts. It was nothing more than unlucky chance that my eyes, and my soul, should have stumbled into that blind plane of view.

Thirty-seven minutes past eight in the morning. The tube doors cry out in pain as they roll shut, and I am sealed into the train. Only then do I remember that Angel was my stop, too.

London Tube by Crystian Cruz

I just had a meeting at the Inn the Park restaurant in St James Park. Its not too far from Downing Street, or Buckingham Palace, two places between which President Obama has been travelling.

Its funny that he and Mrs Obama should be so close geographically, yet still seem as remote to me as if they were in the White House.

This fine gentleman is providing us with an embarrassing story from his life, for every £100 he gets in sponsorship for running the marathon next month.

Here’s the conundrum I am grappling with today, concerning the Northern Line on the London Underground.

When you embark at London Bridge, the Northbound and Southbound lines are arranged in what I would describe as the Continental style.  That is, to the right of each other.  It is the left set of doors that open.  However, when you disembark at Angel, the two lines are arranged in the Commonwealth style.  That is, they are to the left of each other.

How is this possible?  It must mean that the two lines twist around one another, like a double-helix.  Either that, or we have some sort of Subway Named Mobius beneath London.  Can anyone explain the peculiar engineering or physical geography that causes this to be the case?

I wonder, do maps of the actual underground network exist anywhere online?  Not the Harry Beck maps, or its Google representation but a accurate scematic of the actual tracks, junctions and stations.  I fancy it might be quite a fascinating labyrinth.

Underground Ad Space. I only use this image 'cause I haven't taken one of the actual tube trains yet.

Update

A rollercoaster that’s a mobius strip.

Another Update

Eurostar enters the fourth dimension?

Every day thousands of travellers take the Eurostar to a strange and foreign land. No, not Paris; the Fourth Dimension. Although many visitors to Paris don’t realise it, at the heart of the city is a portal to hyperspace. As you emerge from the Paris subway into the financial district at La Défense you are greeted by a huge four-dimensional cube.

English PEN (my new employers, for those who haven’t been paying attention) have just published a letter in The Times, backing an ammendment to Coroners & Justic Bill by the the Liberal Democrat Evan Harris:

On Monday Parliament will have a unique opportunity to repeal the arcane and antiquated offences of seditious libel and criminal defamation. These two crimes date from an era when governments preferred to lock up their critics than to engage them in debate, and are incompatible with the universal right to freedom of expression. Their repeal is long overdue, and will send a powerful signal to states around the world which routinely use charges of sedition and criminal defamation to imprison their critics and silence dissent.

There’s more at the Times Online…

As politicians from all sides condemn the brutal killings in Northern Ireland, one word seems conspicuously absent from their comments: terrorism.  Gordon Brown seemed particularly careful to label the perpetrators “murderers”.

I am reminded of a Matthew Parris column from two-and-a-half years ago, comparing the British Government’s approach to violence in Northern Ireland, and the radical Islamist threat:

Let’s treat the plotters as common criminals, not soldiers in a global war

It is clear why this distinction is made.  Labelling the attacks “murders” suggests that these are isolated incidents, divorced from ideology.  Meanwhile “terrorism” would point to a Second Troubles.  No-one but the Real IRA wants that.  If/when we fall victim to another Islamist terror attack, it will be interesting to note what language the Government uses then, especially now that the “War on Terror” has fallen out of vogue.