As I’ll explain in a bit, this sort of thing happened to me a couple of year ago in London. From Henry Porter’s blog on the UK Guardian:
I meet a lot of nice, intelligent people these days who say they aren’t aware that their lives have become any less free. Maybe your life is unaffected, I say, but a lot of people are now experiencing Labour’s authoritarian laws. Then I choose a story such as this one from yesterday’s papers about the artist and photographer Reuben Powell who was arrested and held for five hours under terrorist laws.
I point out that Reuben, who was photographing the old HMSO print works in London, was doing nothing wrong but he had everything to fear from the police who treated him like a criminal, fingerprinted him and took his DNA. But for the action of Simon Hughes MP, a member of the one party that seems to understand the threat we face from the police state – the Liberal Democrats – Mr Powell would have spent a lot more time in custody. . . .
Oh but this is just a one off, they say. Well, actually it isn’t. Photographers, artists, naturalists, trainspotters, journalists are being routinely harassed and persecuted up and down the country. Today, there are reports of a Tory MP, Andrew Pelling, who was arrested while taking photographs of a cycle path. People’s fundamental rights are being eroded and nobody seems to give a damn.
It really seems that Britain in the last 15 years or so has gone barking mad. Since ‘New Labour’ took over the shop in the 90s, the moral inversion of traditional British sensibilities has accelerated. And while Britain has a serious terrorism problem (from you-know-who), Labour seems intent on persecuting ordinary British citizens, including those who happen to use their camera in public.
Among those most frequently stopped are trainspotters. A 15-year-old boy in school uniform was accosted last year and made to sign a form under Section 44 of the anti-terror act. (Plainly part of any New Labour’s modernised tyranny is form filling. We have form 27 of the Violent Crime Reduction Act which is being issued to football fans, form 696 required by the police for those staging live events in London, and this week we had first sight of the 53 questions to be issued to all people travelling abroad.
It seems that anyone who takes a picture in a public is at risk of prosecution and harassment. A Polish man who photographed a woman who was “ill” outside an Edinburgh pub was fined £100 under public order laws and told by the sheriff that he was “unchivalrous”. Maybe, but he was hardly a threat to public order. Perhaps that sheriff needs to be sent on a course to learn about Britain’s fundamental rights.
And now for my own story: in November of 2005 I had just completed an interview on Cornmarket adjacent to the Bank of England. As I walked up the street, I turned to take a picture of the square, including the Bank of England. Here is one of the suspect photos:
I was immediately accosted by a female police officer who asked me to explain why I was taking pictures. Bear in mind that I was dressed in business attire (pinstripes, white shirt and tie) and that I was in the midst of the financial center of the City in broad daylight during business hours. The officer was polite enough and the exchange went well, but I did find it unnerving to be accosted by the police merely for taking a picture.
What the British government has created is a nation of suspects – always being watched. If you prize your freedom, you should have a problem with that.
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