Us and Them
A year ago today Ian Tomlinson died. He was the latest in a long line of people who have died at the hands of the police. Also on that day hundreds of people were assaulted by police using batons and shields, and thousands were denied the right to move around their city and forced into ‘kettles’, again this is part of very long history of police activity that shows that the attitude of police is not that they are their to uphold the law, but that they ARE the law, and the people are, albeit to varying degrees, outside it.
At a vigil for Ian Tomlinson the next day a video camera caught an incident in which Sgt Delroy Smellie slapped and then hit a young woman with a baton, so far he has been the only police officer to face charges, yesterday he was acquitted of assault, Judge Wickham said: “I am satisfied he honestly believed it was necessary to use force to defend himself.”. In a way the acquittal of Sgt Smellie was correct – the police as a group are taught to fear everyone in these kind of situations and to expect the worst, they are given the tools to deal with this (physical, psychological and legal) and, unsurprisingly, they use them.
Give up politics and start changing things instead
This is a guest post by James Holland, a climate camp and a local community activist.
Please add your thoughts below and join the debate.
People who want to make the world a better place usually start with the big things – war, poverty, climate change etc and they usually look to make changes on a national and global level, because surely you can have more impact more quickly that way?
But I want to convince you that in fact you change more by working on apparently very small and local issues. ‘Politics’ as it is, is simply too remote and too conservative, you could spend your whole life lobbying governments and international organisations and get absolutely nowhere, but a few days working to help local people stop their school being closed or even just making sure that someone unfairly denied benefits gets what they’re entitled to could have a much greater effect. This is because in addition to directly helping those specific people the more we give people hope that sticking together and solving our own problems actually works, the more people will have the confidence to try it. In short working on small local stuff is a virtuous cycle of empowerment and small victories, whereas the opposite is true of ‘politics’ where even success can mean that people as a whole feel less able to do things for themselves.
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