Interview with an activist: learning lessons from the G20 protests

(c) Dan Vockins

Dan Vockins is a green activist who is currently a coordinator for The Age of Stupid film. Last month he was in the Climate Camp set up in the streets of London as the police decided to charge… here he tells Tom Hewitson his side of the story. This is the second part of the series. For the first part go here.

Why did the police behave like that if it was a non-violent movement?

In my opinion it was partly to promote violence and to make it seem like there were a bunch of radicals there who were hell bent on entering into riots with police. Also, they wanted to clear the camp to make sure it was gone for the next morning.

This isn’t an isolated incidence of police acting without due regard for people’s right to protest. Over the last few years there have been some very heavy police tactics used on peaceful protests. Whether that’s the way they are controlling journalists at rallies to alleged use of excessive force, sleep deprivation tactics or the wrongful use of laws at Kingsnorth Climate Camp and elsewhere. I’m convinced they are cutting down on the legitimate right to protest.

What the police are doing is sanctioned from the highest level. I believe that if you don’t have a Government that take human rights seriously then it’s no surprise that the police won’t either. It is the Government’s responsibility to make sure that powers are used responsibly. Either they are turning a blind eye or they are directly responsible. I would say it’s a little of both.

I think that under Ian Blair the police became a much more political organization, which lobbied for their own powers and were largely responsible for putting through anti-terrorist legislation.

The other aspect of all of this is the way the police have started to record and gather information on protesters. I believe that irrespective of whether or not you have committed a crime you’re being monitored just for attending a protest. They’ve been doing the same thing with journalists as well. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a fundamental crackdown on the rights of people to express their views politically and to cover it.

Do you think other protestors did anything to provoke it?

A lot of the riot police recognized that what was going on was wrong and that they were upping the mood and the ante. The Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights last week released a report looking into the misuse of police powers against protesters that recognized that the deployment of riot police could unnecessarily raise the temperature at a protest. That is exactly what they saw.

Did you or climate camp support those that attacked RBS?

I’m a non-violent protester so I wouldn’t sanction that use of force. I don’t think that climate camp had an official position on that apart from the fact that it’s non-violent so it wouldn’t do that. I’m not in this to have a fight with police. I don’t think that is something that is particularly productive.

I believe that police are tarnishing climate camp with exactly the same brush as those violent protestors. The people now policing climate camp are the same ones that policed the animal rights movement. I feel they’ve branded climate camp as eco-terrorists with absolutely no basis.

Non-violent direct action is almost obligated by the situation we’re in. In my opinion a set of very specific interests in the world have all the power and are making decisions that will commit everyone in the world to living a degraded life. To sit down and say “I will give my liberty to try and secure a future for all of us” is a wonderful thing.

What do you think of the coverage of the G20 protests?

The police have been talking up the idea that there was going to be violence at the G20 for weeks. I believe they created a lot of the hype. I don’t think the media are checking whether these police claims are true. At previous climate camps, the police have talked up violence and they’ve consistently been proven wrong.

I think that the police used much lower levels of violence whilst media crews were trained on them. When I was in the alley there were no cameras or anything down there, so they used a much higher level of physical force and were also much ruder and more aggressive in the way that they spoke to and treated us. I think it’s also telling that they didn’t bring in the police dogs and snow ploughs until after the cut off point for the next day’s front pages.

I think that the fact they would prefer the media not to see this is proven by the way they are pulling journalists out, monitoring them and making it more difficult for them to cover these stories. I’ve spoken to journalists a couple of times off the record now and they are genuinely quite frightened by the way that the police are treating them.

What can we learn from this?

I hope there will be a full investigation into the way that the police have behaved. I really hope the police will learn from this and that people will intervene at a high enough level to ensure it doesn’t happen again. We should be ashamed of the way the police acted and we should be very worried about the implications for the rights we have in society to make political protest and to affect change.