This is one of a series of posts about my experience of the Defend our Juries (DoJ) 'Lift the Ban' campaign. See my Lift the Ban page for more.
Another new experience from this one. I was manhandled by the police.
This was back to our original sign-holding, arranged to take place in Liverpool outside the Labour Party conference.
We wrote our placards and took our seats in silence, facing away from the conference centre, at 1pm. The police started arresting people quite soon after 1 but were being ridiculously slow. I think it was at a rate of about six an hour, despite the fact that there was a massive police presence. In London they always did lots of arrests in parallel: here it was one at a time. (Perhaps they only had one police station to take us to, so were only arresting people the rate they could process them at the station.) They had been trying to encourage us to give up our placards and give them our personal details in exchange for being allowed to leave. We were not willing to do that.
However at about 6 pm the message was going around (in whispers) suggesting we all walk away together en masse at 6:30. We tried to do that and it took the police by surprise (I'd thought they might have realised what we were planning, but it seems not). They looked panicked, and tried (mostly successfully) to stop us by 'kettling'.
S (who I'd travelled up with from MK) and I managed to break through their ranks but were caught by "outfielders". If we would give up our placards and give them our details they said they would let us go. That would have just been capitulating to what they had wanted us to do anyway, so we refused. There was a bit of a kerfuffle with them pushing us around, and us passing our placards between us, and by the end of that I had both placards and S managed to walk away. The police didn't pursue her, presumably since she didn't have a placard.
I still refused to give up my placards (I now had two 😀) so they arrested me which meant they could force me to hand them over. At that stage I had a decision to make: do I give them my details (they had said that if I did that they would be de-arrested me and I could go) or do I hold firm and not give them my details which would force them to take me to a police station for processing? I found this difficult and stressful because by now I really wanted to go home, but I also knew that Defend our Juries would want me to force them to take me to a police station.
I chose the former, giving them my details, justifying it to myself with the argument that I had not voluntarily given up my placard so it was not just capitulation to what they had wanted. They de-arrested me (see comment below) but said they had evidence of my contravening Section 13 of the Terrorism Act (photographs, video and TWO placards, of course) and would follow it up by post. My arresting officer even apologised for manhandling me, but claimed it was necessary.
I have since heard that some of those who didn't escape the kettle - the vast majority of the 100 - were there being arrested until long after midnight.
There were reasons I wanted to get away when I did. If I didn't get the 20:43 train from Lime Street I wouldn't be able to get another train until 9:43 the following morning, and there was a lot to do back home. But all the same, I feel a bit of a failure not to have held out, and have massive respect for the heroes who were there in the cold and dark into the early hours of the morning.
I don't really know what de-arresting is (I've not yet made any effort to find out). In practice, the arrest/de-arrest seems to have just been a wheeze to force me to give up my placard, without the need to take me to a police station. Does the de-arrest have the effect of wiping away the arrest? Or is the arrest still on my record? At some other protests, the police have set-up a tent on location where they can process people and then issue them with 'street bail'. Most recently, most people who have been arrested and given bail (either on the street or at a police station) have subsequently been 'released under investigation' RUI. That has now happened to my second and third arrests (I've been charged following my first arrest and the bail from my fourth arrest is still in place). On de-arresting me, the police said they would continue investigate my deemed contravention of Section 13, so that sounds very much the same a RUI and the arrest/de-arrest sequence seems as though it should have pretty much the same consequence as street bail. Anyway... they said they would be writing to me, so maybe I'll find out in due course. At the moment, the whole lot it is just a load of paperwork for me.
Reflections
It is really important that I come back to why I'm doing this, and that it is not about me. Any discomfort to me is trivial compared the sacrifices of the (mostly young) people fighting the Elbit Beast, and in turn they say that even their sacrifices are trivial compared to what has been done, and continues to be done, to the Palestinians. Remember: more than 70,000 killed, of which more than 20,000 are children and more than 1000 are babies. Everyone of us at the protest would say the same, and indeed, several protestors were interviewed at the time and said just that.
If I'd had any doubts about going ahead with this action (and I am always trying to rethink things, to make sure I know what I'm doing) they were more than overcome by watching Channel 4 Dispatches: Britain’s Gaza Secrets Exposed last week. Britain has been selling arms to Israel, long after we knew they were in violation of international humanitarian law (IHL) in the most heinous way imaginable.
And one final, maybe controversial, reflection. I have been impressed (-ish, sort of) by the diversity of the police in London. The police in Liverpool did not look diverse. I don't remember seeing any of them who were not white. (I'll delete this comment if someone shows me that I just didn't see them!). And, this made me uncomfortable. The fact is that I find an all-white squad more intimidating than a diverse squad. That's just how I feel.
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