By IRNA,
London: British police have gone to elaborate lengths to exert full control over Saturday’s huge London protest against government cuts after being criticised for the way student demonstrations were handled last November and December.
Tactics have included co-opting the organisers, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) into the police operation, training hundreds of stewards, dictating who will provide human rights observers and even publishing an 8-page information to welcome the expected up to 250,000 or more protesters.
The police have also written businesses along the planned route through central London, asking them to clear buildings of loose equipment or debris that could be used as weapons, assign visible security staff to premises, secure doors and ensure that all CCTV cameras are working.
The TUC, which represents nearly six and a half million workers, has spent the last three months organising its national ‘March for the Alternative’ in protest against the extent of public service cuts announced by the coalition government since coming to office last May.
Student groups, peace campaigners, tax avoidance protesters and anti-capitalists, have also announced plans to stage a variety of occupations and actions to coincide with a mass anti-cuts demonstration on March 26.
In a new report on Friday on facilitating peaceful protest, the joint parliamentary committee on human rights welcomed the “high degree of cooperation” between the police and the TUC in planning the march and hoped that the “example of good practice will be followed and generalised in the future.”
But Fitwatch, set up in 2007 to resist and monitor forward intelligence policing, criticised the collusion of the TUC and Liberty civil rights group, which is providing some 100 legal observers, in helping to bring about a “whole new level of police control” over protests.
“The stance taken by TUC and Liberty is at best naive, and at worst complicit. Protest should be independent and not state controlled,” Fitwatch said in a statement.
“These actions are being justified under the guise of protester safety, but this level of collusion between protest organisers and the police is unprecedented and unjustified,” its statement warned.
“Freedom of expression and assembly is not just about marching from A-B, and by adopting this stance, Liberty and the TUC seem happy to adopt the police’s view of dissent. This is a dangerous step and has to be resisted,” it said.
The march, which is to be policed by more than 4,500 officers with the help of up to 2,500 stewards, is the largest staged by the TUC in decades and comes after students held the biggest protests against the trebling of university fees since the height of opposition to the Iraq war in 2003.