Entangled Alliances

photo credit: Alain Bachellier

Yesterday UK business secretary Peter Mandelson was approached by a woman named Leila Deen who proceeded to pour a cup of green custard over his head.  You can see the video here.  Deen, a campaigner against airport expansion, was protesting about the Government’s decision to give Heathrow a third runway, one which Mandelson allegedly had a large role in. After “sliming” Mandelson, she proceeded to give an interview to the press nearby and then calmly left the scene, the police briefly stopping her merely to ensure she wasn’t travelling to Parliament and to wish her a lovely day.

Mandelson’s reaction was to note “Whilst I’m prepared to take my fair share of the green revolution on to my shoulders, I’m less keen on having it on my face”.   Deen herself remarked “the only thing green about Peter Mandelson is the slime coursing through his veins”. Finally Gordon Brown pitched in: “If anybody doubted the greening of Peter Mandelson and his willingness to take the green agenda on his shoulders, we’ve seen it in practice this morning.”

So it was a bad day for puns. But, according to an article written shortly afterwards, it was a good day for liberty. Martin Kettle, writing in The Guardian, seems to think this was one in the eye for civil liberties campaigners:

If, as some too readily claim, we were all now living in a British police state, then the official response to Leila Deen’s green custard assault on Lord Mandelson in London this morning would not have passed off so easily. In a real police state, Deen might well be lying dead in the street as gun-toting security guards reacted to the assault. Or she might have been whisked away to a secret police centre to be tortured and locked away. Cameramen who witnessed the incident would have been rounded up, their video confiscated and their cameras smashed. And there would have been nothing on the state TV about any of it.

Why stop there? Why not bring in all the cliches? You surely aren’t going to miss this chance to express your surprise that you yourself, on pain of hearing about the incident, were not taken to Room 101 where a wire cage containing a rather lively rat would have been strapped across your face. And what about the mechanical hound that has your scent and will track your book-loving self across town? You can’t forget about the mechanical hound!

Oh, give me strength. The idea that since protesters like Leila Deen aren’t arrested – or worse – those pesky civil liberties campaigners need to dial the tone down is nothing more than a pathetic strawman argument and one that crops up time and time again in some form amid the rhetoric of those who want to put a curb on the entirely necessary cries of outrage from the civil liberties movement. Of course, when campaigners use terms like  “police state”, they don’t do so to insinuate that we are literally in one right now (though much legislation of recent times has shared its characteristics). No, the point of such a loaded term is to warn that we may be on the slippery slope to one at some point in the not-so-distant future. I can’t help but feel that if liberty campaigners were forced to be completely accurate then they would lose some of the urgency in their argument, since claiming we are becoming “a nation that is beginning to resemble one which could descend in a not too large amount of time into something that is most precisely described as a police state” is frankly not all that catchy.

To repeat: No-one’s saying we live in a bona fide police state right now. But if commentators like Kettle keep using ridiculous strawman arguments like this one, rather than addressing the undeniable and insidious erosion of civil liberties that is taking place, then one day not so far away cries of “police state!” will cease to be a warning and become a rather apt description.