Another reason to be radicalised

If I understand correctly the way that govenrment officials and the media in general use the term "radicalised", it is used to describe the state of having gone through a process by which a peaceful person is persuaded by others to adopt a more extreme viewpoint that encompasses political violence as a means to an end. It's most commonly used in the context of "radicalised Muslims", where the specific meaning is referring to the way in which young Muslims are persuaded by terrorist organisations such as Al Qaida to join those organisations and support their operations.

But taking the term in a more general sense I believe that I am, if you will, a "radicalised democrat" - meaning that I am persuaded that political violence is becoming necessary as a means of protecting democratic rights within our own country (in my case, the UK; I am less certain regarding the US or other European countries, although the Lisbon treaty strikes me as a clear assault on European democracies). I first began to feel this way when in 2003 the largest ever political demonstration in the history of the British Isles (in terms of gross numbers; it certainly outstripped the New Model Army, the Peasants' Revolt and other major revolutionary movements) was blithely ignored by Parliament (even dismissed as "unrepresentative" by some ministers)

The latest assault on democratic liberties is a plan by the police to use airborne military-style reconnaissance drones as part of "the routine work of the police, border authorities and other government agencies" (quote from the "South Coast Partnership", which is "a Home Office-backed project in which Kent police and others are developing a national drone plan with BAE"). Anyone who's read Mark Thomas' As Used on the Famous Nelson Mandela, which outlines just how easy it is for arms and torture dealers to bypass international law, will be familiar with just how corrupt BAE's association wht the British government can be.

Here's what the "South Coast Partnership" has to say about the uses of the drones:

• BAE and Kent police say that civilian UAVs would "greatly extend" the government's surveillance capacity and "revolutionise policing".
• The scheme is considered a pilot preceding the countrywide adoption of the technology for "surveillance, monitoring and evidence gathering"
• Kent police's assistant chief constable, Allyn Thomas, said that drones would be useful "in the policing of major events, whether they be protests or the ­Olympics".
• Under a section entitled "Other routine tasks (Local Councils) – surveillance", another document states the drones could be used to combat "fly-posting, fly-tipping, abandoned vehicles, abnormal loads, waste management".
• Detecting theft from cash machines
• Preventing theft of tractors
• Monitoring antisocial driving
• Road and railway monitoring
• Search and rescue
• Event security
• Covert urban surveillance.

If that list isn't creepy enough, with spying on protesters, on people in cities, and enforcing "good manners", there is also the suggestion that "Partnership officials have said the UAVs could raise revenue from private companies. At one strategy meeting it was proposed the aircraft could undertake commercial work during spare time to offset some of the running costs." Our democratic limitations on police powers are steadily being eroded, but we have absolutely no democratic control over private companies - unless we're lucky enough to be able to hold a significant amount of shares in those companies (Mark Thomas again, advises that you have the right to speak at AGMs if you hold just one share, but doing so gives one very little control in how the company does business - the book mentioned above describes how protesters who are shareholders are frequently ejected for "disrupting the meeting").

Are you scared yet?

The worst is yet to come. It appears that the police are well aware of the cocnerns about civil liberties and privacy rights, and deliberately devised a strategy to find a way around those concerns:

Previously, Kent police has said the drone scheme was intended for use over the English Channel to monitor shipping and detect immigrants crossing from France. However, the documents suggest the maritime focus was, at least in part, a public relations strategy designed to minimise civil liberty concerns.

"There is potential for these [maritime] uses to be projected as a 'good news' story to the public rather than more 'big brother'," a minute from the one of the earliest meetings, in July 2007, states.

That's the attitude our supposed protectors take towards democracy and rights - they are an awkward thing to be got around using a "good news story".

In the meantime, they are opening up use to all and sundry, it seems: the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, the Maritime and Fisheries Agency, HM Revenue and Customs and the UK Border Agency. The observant reader will have noticed that local councils were also included in the earlier bullet-point list.

And here's my radicalised response to this encroachment upon democracy:

Get up there in 2-seater aeroplanes from airfields around Kent, take up a gun with you (illegal, I know, but breaking the law is made necessary by these assaults on democracy), find the fucking things and shoot them down. I don't care how. Or, if that proves impossible, find wherever they launch them or store them, and shoot them or blow them up or anything to kill the drones.

Successive governments have proved that they won't listen unless they are forced: the only protest to do any real good in recent times was the Poll Tax riots in 1990, which effectively deposed Thatcher from government. Those were violent protests, not peaceful ones. As long as the government has powers like these drones to use against peaceful protesters, it will see no reason to change or restore democracy - and that goes for any government, not just the New Labour government. Anyone who pretends or believes that the Conservatives would do anything differently is living in cloud-cuckoo land.

How are we supposed to trust a government that feels the need to spy on us constantly? How are we supposed to be satisfied with such oppressive tactics?

just over 230 years ago, one of the most fabled documents outlining the basis of democratic and just government, made the following claims:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Well, I believe that the British government - indeed, successive British governments in the last quarter-century or more (thus rendering our current democracy not fit for purpose) - have made just such a train of abuses and usurpations, have indeed pursued just such a design. I believe that with the progress of the Lisbon treaty, that the EU now has also joined that design. I was never a Eurosceptic; greater union with Europe I see as a good thing. But the undemocratic manner in which the EU has taken shape and that the Lisbon treaty enforces upon the European citizenry I view as a compete abrogation and rejection of the principles of democracy.

By the same mode that led the Levellers' cause to be declared at the Putney Debates must British citizens who love democracy force the hand of our would-be leaders; sadly, by their own actions it seems to me that our government is forcing it upon people who love freedom to act in such ways.

Just the act of writing these thoughts, in British law, makes me technically a terrorist. And yet, do I not have a right to feel angry and to express that anger, about these matters?