Kettling , an efficient form of mass arrest, has been declared a perfectly legitimate means of suppressing political dissent in Britain’s healthy democracy.

The Appeals Court overturned last year’s High Court ruling that police acted illegally when they violently broke up the Climate Camp during protests at the G20 in 2009.

Last September the High Court threw out a case claiming that the kettling of thousands of youth for six hours in London during the 24.11.10 walkouts breached their human rights.

A further case relating to kettling during anti-capitalist protests in 2001 is ‘awaiting judgement’ at the European Court of Human Rights.

That every attempt to challenge the legal basis of kettling has failed should not be a surprise. The judiciary are not, after all, independent champions of the downtrodden. They are bribed with positions, peerages and awards; while their wage ensures they mingle within the elite social classes whose business it is to run our lives. This  acts as a constant reminder which side their bread is buttered.

The appearance of impartiality is a charade – our laws are enforced by a wealthy, white, conservative elite for a reason. Such people have absolutely no desire to challenge the status quo which guarantees their privileges.

Judges cannot be elected or held accountable for their decisions; we are told to trust in the infallible judgement of an elite that is capable of doing little more than wallowing in the pitiful self-importance that comes with being an overpaid enforcer for the capitalist state.

The capitalists’ must be able to rely on the judges identifying their relative material privileges with the current system.

But what of the police? The people who get paid to enforce their own monopoly over violence – by whatever means necessary.

Police had been experimenting with ‘kettling’ demonstrators for years, but it only became controversial when Ian Tomlinson died after being attacked by police. During the Student movement of winter 2010 kettling was applied in an arbitrary and chaotic style.

That kettling is a clear breach of someone’s right to freedom of assembly, protest and speech is beyond dispute. Challenging these infringements everywhere we can is clearly important – we must use every channel we can to expose the hypocrisy of a system that delivers freedom abroad via laser-guided bombs, and protects our security at home with lead-weighted batons.

But we must acknowledge that we cannot strangle the system with the very apparatus it has honed over decades to oppress us.

The question over the technical legality of kettling shouldn’t distract us from the fact that the police make the facts on the ground, confident that their superiors will cover-up any fuck-up. If the maintenence of an effective and efficient system of repression means amending, restricting or even discarding rights altogether then the police will lead the way in arguing for this. Just as they did with kettling, detention without trial and youth curfews.

The mainstream media veers between liberal distaste for crude violence, tempered with the knowledge that newspapers have a long tradition of calling on the courts and police to ban strikes and industrial action. The cosy relationship between the police and the media was exposed by the phone-hacking scandal. Several police officers have been arrested, dozens are being investigated, few are likely to be convicted of any crime.

While ‘policing by consent’ requires that police be notionally subject to the same laws they enforce, the unpunished murder of more than 40 people in police custody over the last 10 years shows that, in practice, they are not.

This is why police officers rarely get convicted for any except the most petty offences. Their paymasters need them to feel confident that they can do ‘whatever it takes’ without fear of punishment from a squeamish population who don’t understand why murder, racism and corruption is necessary to defend the  grotesque privilege of a tiny class of exploiters.

Today’s ruling will certainly give police a morale boost, and make them ever more aggressive when they kettle us in future. We should continue to organise against this judgement and support the challenge at the Supreme Court.

Above all though, we should take this at face-value; a warning to the hundreds of thousands of people, from all backgrounds, who have taken to the streets against the devastaing austerity which is wrecking lives and communities.

Organised self-defence of our marches, meetings and organisations against police repression is vital in the face of a state gearing up for a decisive confrontation.  Talk of water cannon and rubber bullets is not idle bluster.

The bosses and their governments fully intend to win the battle over who pays for the economic crisis. The August Riots, Fortnum & Mason’s, and today’s decision leave no doubt that they will set their murdering enforcers loose on all who oppose them, using whatever violence it takes to set a sufficiently cowering example.

We have only our numbers, our traditions of resistance and the fact that we are an international class, with everything to gain from uniting across borders to bring down the elites who guard their privileges behind them.

For those who feel today gives them a free hand to ramp up the violence against protesters; we say you can’t watercannon our ideas, and you can’t kettle all of us.

See you on the barricades.

Read more

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The police: only doing their job?

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Police threaten students with rubber bullets

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Stephen Lawrence: racism, lies and reluctant justice

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