Why quarantine and isolation are wrong

QI is another aspect of this disgraceful fraud and tyranny that need challenging, but I’ve not yet found anyone who’s written any guides or downloads to assist. So I felt that I should offer one.

I’m not a lawyer, but I reject the notion that we have to put paranoid disclaimers on our work to avoid falling foul of lawyers, part of the elite. A legal attack on me will bounce right back with bells. Big Ben sized ones. In excess of 13 tons.

That’s the spirit I want all of you to have. I’ve had enough of stress and fear and glass ceilings and this tell tale culture and bully boys and girls.

Who exactly are these people – these unelected rich few who think that they can dictate to us?!

How exactly do they think they are safe from our wrath and justice?

POLICE, POLICYMAKERS, PROPAGANDISTS ARE ACCOUNTABLE TO US

Some statements you can share with anyone trying to make you isolate:

1 THE VIRUS IS GREATLY EXAGGERATED TO CREATE FEAR – and I think I have to add, to control the populace and commit genocide. I really don’t see how that can not be true

2 THOSE THAT PERPETUATE THE NARRATIVE ARE PARTY TO TREASON

Yes, really. Disclosures are coming, trials are coming.

As per Article 61 of Magna Carta: to defy an unjust government is our duty

Those who stop us commit treason.

And all of you ever owned by Britain – that’s many of you – can claim this article.

(Yes there are arguments claiming this is invalid, but the principle remains)

Covid rules have broken every article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – now that’s all of you! And your country’s constitution

3 SOME OF THE OTHER CRIMES COMMITTED VIA COVID & ITS RESTRICTIONS:

(several are ‘crimes against humanity’ – marked in red: genocide is one too)

Tick which apply – most will:

• battery (including manhandling and handcuffing)
• assault
• harassment
• unlawful imprisonment: this includes temporary hold up – a blocked door – curfew, and the perception of punishment and fear to make you feel you can’t go out: lock, key and guard not required
• medical rape
• biowarfare (the disease, the tests and the vaccine)
• energy weapons (that’s what 5G is, and yes, covid is connected)
• aggravated trespass (that’s for enforcement and health workers entering your home or place of work or worship without your explicit informed consent, with intention for any of these)
• mass experimentation without informed free consent WE DO NOT CONSENT
• exaggeration of powers: as this is all based on wrongful laws, that’s pretty much everything that police try to do. Covid Marshalls and private security have no authority as they have not taken oaths; those that have (police and military) must be held to them… they are operating under the law of the sea, not the Universal Common Law of the LAND and to uphold the rights of the people they serve – that’s us, the people (not their puppet masters)
• kidnap – that’s taking you in their car, to the station, to prison or court, to ‘quarantine’
• parking a car to cause inconvenience, alarm or annoyance (so that’s road blocks and screeching up on the pavement to arrest)
• intimidation

4 YOU AND THE GOVERNMENT ARE ACTING ‘ULTRA VIRES’ – ie beyond your powers Nice pun (virus/vires). Abuses of position are the crime of malfeasance.

***AS THE GOVERNMENT IS A FAKE CORPORATION, IT HAS NO POWERS***

And neither do its police. It’s a slight of hand usurping company – it’s true round the world.

5 AS THERE’S NO STATE OF EMERGENCY, THE LAWS FALL – THEY ARE NULLED

As the ‘pandemic’ isn’t one, there’s nothing for you to be able to compel me with, and no way for you to punish me

6A UK’S HEALTH MINISTER PUBLICLY SAID THAT SELF-ISOLATION WAS NOT MANDATORY VIA THE CONTRACT TRACING APP So if you get an alert on your phone that someone you’ve allegedly contacted has tested positive and has to isolate, you are not in danger of a fine. https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/coronavirus-ignoring-selfisolation-request-from-the-nhs-app-is-not-illegal-matt-hancock-confirms-182555267.html

6B WHY SHOULD THOSE WHO DIDN’T CHOOSE THE APP OR THE TEST TO ISOLATE?

We didn’t enter the contract with you – and if we did, there wasn’t full disclosure. So it’s null & void

7 ****AS THE VIRUS ISN’T INFECTIOUS, YOU CANNOT RESTRICT US!*****

WE DON’T EVEN REALLY UNDERSTAND WHAT A VIRUS IS (LET ALONE THIS ONE)

Germ theory has been prevalent, but it was contested at the time of its creation – the 19^th C – and new evidence further negates the notion of infection. Antoine Bechamp mooted the ‘terrain’ theory – that getting ill is about the milieu or terrain of the host. (Germ theory is good for money and control, so that one got picked up, even though the proponent, Pasteur, is said to have died stating that Bechamp was right). Some facts now becoming commonly accepted in science:

-Our bodies teem with bacteria – they’re the major part of who we are (NB bacteria aren’t viruses)

-Viruses are actually neutral information carriers, and ‘disease’ occurs as the body’s attempt to heal

-We’re still learning what the nature of viruses (tiny gene code) and their building blocks really are

-Scientists have misidentified viruses when they’re actually looking at something else

-The discovery of the microbiome ‘decimates’ the germs as enemy (so let’s hide and vax) theory

-Viruses clear up dead and diseased cells and purge toxins (wonder what that could be right now?)

-Viruses are the response team to something wrong: they share information with other life forms. You’ll only show symptoms if your body has the same problem that the virus is trying to clear up. This is NOT contagion! What’s airborne and dangerous is unnatural toxins, not viruses

-Viruses don’t actively infect, or have the motivation or force to. They’re not even alive

-Viruses need a living host to transmit, so not from surfaces, and only enter us via injection

-Neither Pasteur nor scientists at the Spanish flu of 1918 could prove being to being transmission: despite coughing and sneezing on healthy people, touching the same things, even injection, they didn’t get sick. They also tried it very unethically with polio and monkeys. Same outcome

We also know this anecdotally ourselves: sometimes we get sick when others do, sometimes not

-Pandemics have always come when new technology is rolled out (also near wars of some sort)

-You can’t be an asymptomatic pathogen carrier! You only have it if you are ill with it

IE-You cannot transfer viruses between species – ZOONOSIS IS A LIE; CONTAGION’S A MYTH

https://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/why-only-thing-influenza-may-kill-germ-theory August 2020

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Germ

The Deception of Virology & Vaccines | Why Coronavirus Is Not Contagious

see also the work of Andrew Kaufman, Tom Cowan, and Stefan Lanka…and people for 100 years

This isn’t about health protection, it’s a nefarious agenda.

HEALTH CANNOT BE A BASIS FOR CRIME

The only thing that’s being spread is fear and disinformation – now, that is a crime!

8 AS THE VIRUS HAS A 99% RECOVERY RATE, WHY ARE WE HIDING FROM IT?

9 THE FIGURES ARE COOKED AND THE TESTS ARE WRONG

The deaths figures are cooked, where ‘covid-19’ is put on death certificates of many other causes, sometimes without a test; the PCR test is over 90% wrong, scientifically meaningless, and can’t diagnose a disease which can’t technically be recognised (it has never been isolated in a lab), can’t distinguish between old and active pathogens (does this test first developed 27 years ago really understand them?). It’s the treatment that the vulnerable get (or lack of) which causes the deaths. Most experience it as a nasty flu.

10 AS MOST OF US DON’T KNOW WE’VE GOT IT, WHY ARE WE HIDING?

Respiratory illnesses are not asymptomatic. Ie, you’re ill if you’ve got it.

11 VULNERABLE PEOPLE GET WORSE BY BEING ISOLATED INDOORS (and treated with ventilators, dodgy drugs and being subjected to more EMFs)

12 WHY ARE YOU ASKING ME TO SELF HARM?

-Loneliness kills, it’s an underlying condition (doctors attest to what anyone lonely knows)

-if I’m not living alone, do you want my household relations to fray?

-why do you expect me to starve? (or unable to stop someone I who depends on me from starving)

-why are you expecting me to disappoint someone else’s hope (that one treat with a loved one)

-why are you expecting me to lose money or even my business or job?

-why are you denying me association, an alienable right?

-why do you expect me to lose my mobility by not walking?

-why do you deny me air and sunlight, essential for life and immunity?

-why don’t you recognise the crushingness of disappointment?

-why are you withholding comfort from me or another in distress?

-why are you denying me this long held appointment? especially if it’s about wellbeing

-why are you denying me justice? (if you’re awaiting a court hearing)

-why are you denying me my one treat and pleasure, so looked forward to and needed?

-why do you deny me the chance to know my kids as they start life and loved ones as they end it?

-why are you denying me the chance to say goodbye to someone in this life?

-why are you tempting me to self harm and commit suicide?

13 WHY DO YOU THINK MY LIFE IS LESS VALUABLE THAN YOURS?

Do you know what’ it’s like to live alone in a small flat or bedsit with no garden?

Or to fear going home due to abuse or something else frightening in the home?

Had it occurred to you that I might have medical issues which you’ve now worsened?

14 WHY BELIEVE THE RHETORIC THAT IF I’M OUT I’M SPREADING IT and doing so on purpose or thoughtlessly? Can’t you see that you’re being manipulated and lied to?

15 WHY WERE YOU SELFISH ENOUGH TO GET TESTED AND DOWNLOAD THE APP WHEN IT CAUSES SO MUCH INCONVENIENCE AND SUFFERING FOR OTHERS WHO DIDN’T, INCLUDING STRANGERS? Aggressive, but you see my point (it reverses the usual)

16 DO YOU WANT TO BE AN ACCESSORY TO ALL THIS AND HELP TYRANNY?

17 WHY DO YOU TRY TO TAKE WHAT ISN’T YOURS TO TAKE IN THE FIRST PLACE?

Hopefully you felt empowered and maybe a wry smile. That’s the spirit. You might want to make this into a formal letter form.

WHY THIS MATTERS

If the person who’s allegedly ‘ill’ re-tests and still shows positive, it can mean a long cycle, not just for that person, but those who supposedly have come into contact. It means that quarantine isn’t just the 14 stupid days after you got off a plane, it could be rolling. As Fox news presenter Laura Ingram impersonated NZ prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s traveller quarantine, “you’re not getting out til you’re negative.” And that could mean your class, your team, your church, your household, those not in your household if you are an address of multiple occupancy. It could mean people on the same bus or cafe, people you don’t even recognise. It could happen at any time, whether worsening a lockdown or in a time of relative ease. You seem to be expected to hunker down pretty quickly at hearing the news: can you get your supplies, re-arrange your life for a week, and another, and another….?

It gives the state these ULTRA VIRES powers (ie powers it doesn’t have but creates as a legal fiction to pretend they do) to hold you in imprison without trial, without you being able to defend against them or having an advocate if you wish. You are expected to subject to their system – a test or other treatment – to be released. This is also BLACKMAIL and HOSTAGE TAKING. It’s not even for money but your genetic material. It’s a dangerous, uncomfortable test (why did Kary Mullis get a prize for it?). Or a vaccine which is giving all sorts of reactions – convulsions, burning skin, even swift death. There are concerns about the test being not only a way of getting your DNA for biometric recognition, but actually a way of inserting a vaccine without your consent or knowledge. Many think it is more of an operating system than a true vaccine. It is certainly not properly tested and full of unknown synthetic material.

Submission now means more submission, for you and others. It says, YES, you can hold me at home at will. You can tell me where I go, who I see, what I buy… my body is the state’s, not mine.

And we say: POPPYCOCK (or just the last syllable) to all of that.

Police and enforcement, we need you to stand with us, or sit down forever (in a cell of your own).

YOU TOO ARE BEING LIED TO!

Neighbours, friends, bypassers – we need you to stop tittle-tattling. There is a special article coming about you. But be aware that all the crimes I list are being committed by you – as an accessory and/or conspiracy to commit. It’s just as serious as actually doing it.

Oh… and I’d argue mental and physical cruelty, and attempted constructive manslaughter.

Is that enough for you to back off?!

Stand Down! A sermon for Remembrance 2020

https://shows.acast.com/between-the-stools/episodes/stand-down

https://shows.acast.com/between-the-stools/episodes/stand-down

In Britain, we have two national acts of civic remembrance within a few days. These early November events are the only two – save occasional royal nuptials or wartime special anniversaries – where we publicly participate in secular ceremony.

One of them – the latter, today – is also joined to churches, or more truly, the [reluctant capital] Church, for it is very much a civic show in those Anglicans designated as such. I don’t know about other faiths, but I do know that the Christian denominations I’ve experienced – which is most – mark this Sunday nearest to the 11^th of November each year. If the 11^th falls on a weekday, there is an additional marking, with a 2 minute silence that is even announced on trains and in work places. There is also the wearing of a poppy, which I have remarked on before. This year, it feels comparable to the wearing of a mask, which we can suffer for socially: Where’s yours? Why isn’t it red?

I only wear white (for peace) and purple (for animals in the war) and I’d like a yellow one – for the conscientious objectors. They too feel contemporary, because those of us not complying during this war-like event of covid are increasingly feeling a sense of persecution, or fear of it. We note that in both cases, that official resources are found to fight your own – not just ‘the enemy’ – a foreign body, in one sense or the other. This clearly casts suspicion on the justness of the conflict, and whether we can trust authorities we are meant to submit to.

I’ll be getting to that passage in Romans anon.

Armistice Day is the annual remembrance of a war that ended 102 years ago. Note that no veterans of the first world war – and very few if any of the second – are still with us. It is meant to be broadened to all conflicts, but we recall those especially.

Bonfire Night on the 5^th is about an event 415 years ago and it is marked in a very different way. For the war, those with uniforms don them – boy scouts and girl guides, military personnel past and present, mayors and clergy. They parade solemnly through aisles and down streets to the secular altar of war memorials and lay oblations with slow speeches, lone bugles, and bowed silence. It is in the late morning – the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. 11:11:11 has a meaning in numerology which I’ll be referring to in my next piece on that date/time, but it was unlikely to have formed the decision for ceasefire, allowing shelling and killing right up to that last moment.

Bonfire or Fireworks Night is by its nature a nocturnal affair. It requires dark for the fireworks to be seen against the sky. Participants wrap up warmly but – except for the poppies they may have already donned in anticipation – there is no dress code. It is noisy, with amplified music and fairgrounds perhaps; and the fireworks themselves let off with alarming bangs, distressing humans and animals alike. Indeed, this period around the 5^th is one that sensitive beings dread, as families, fellowships and cities mark this day on a rolling basis, which can mean 10 days worth of skyward explosions as each group’s night fits in their show, in their garden, park or town square. As well as the misuse of fireworks, there are the misfiring of them, and I’m told that hospitals and police are busy – right after Halloween’s unwelcome import.

Why the explosives and the fires on this night? In Britain, we have but two other annual occasions: our local festivals, and new year. We may end a large party with them. But the most common time for incendiary incandescence is something that, via a rhyme, we are told to remember. Not an independence day, like America, but the day that someone who, along with 12 others, tried to fight for theirs by blowing up our parliament and was stopped and executed as a traitor.

“I can think of no reason why this should ever be forgot” goes the well recited rhyme. Gunpower, treason and plot. We’re just missing the gunpower this year.

Not just because in England – the setting of this treasonous tableau – has just gone into a second national lockdown, thus spoiling the opportunity to mark either event, but because the other two words are so apt to what is happening.

——

When covid was new I posted the first of several articles on it, comparing it to V for Vendetta, which swiftly came to mind as the virus was announced. I am not alone in seeing that comparison. It enjoyed a brief return to the cinema last week because of its timeliness. Now our cinemas are to close again.

I have seen the film – and read the script and graphic novel it’s based on – several times in the 14 years since the film was released. (It just missed the quadcentenary). But it was never more chilling than now. New likenesses have appeared since I wrote that early March piece. I am not going to incite further fear by enlisting them, or in predicting further stages. I do note that this story has been prescient in its timescale. The film mentions 2015-18 as years of comparable freedom and joy… and then a series of horrifying events occur which leave England in stultified acquiescence for a decade and a half, whilst America simmers in insignificance, civil war and poverty.

I think that V for Vendetta, by David Lloyd and Alan Moore, shows us what could happen, and I hope that flash of scrying mirror into our possible future makes us not wait almost a score before settling it with tyranny. The film doesn’t make clear what inspires V to act this particular Guy Fawkes Night. For he – Guy – has been the unnamed elephant thus far. Some of us drop his moniker from our November 5^th hot chestnuts and soup fuelled firework viewing, but there is a horrific re-enactment element to this event. The bonfire sometimes has an effigy on it – his effigy. This is the man who history has blamed for the attempt to blow up London’s houses of Parliament and its Scottish king, James I/VI (depending on which side of the border you are). The high heeled Stuart had united the warring neighbours, but forsook his homeland to travel to the big and aggressive sister to rule from there henceforth. Many Scots felt – and still do – that he betrayed them.

V of the film title wears a mask that deliberately emulates and pastiches this early 17^th century man from York, who is portrayed as a wicked traitor, and whose like we must never allow again. The film decries V as a terrorist – a title which he doesn’t try to throw off. Filmmakers make clear that they see this unnamed masked titular character – played with such a beautiful voice by Hugo Weaving – as a complex antihero. They do not suggest that his behaviour is always right; they do not justify his assassinations or his bombs or general violence. They certainly do not exhort that we follow him in those ways.

Here I approach a V of my own, in logic of which narrative path to take next. I want to tell you that what we in Britain and beyond popularly know of this story is carefully curated. A few years ago, Kit Harrington of Game of Thrones fame brought an alternative story about his forebear Robert Catesby to the screen. He showed that the throne game wasn’t what we got told in history books, and that Guy may not have been the ring leader. It is the story of a harsh Protestant king squashing Catholics as much as would-be regicidals. This same king had a Bible put out in his name, often touted as the true Bible in English, and one of our great literary works, comparable to contemporary Shakespeare. In this tome is a particular rendition of some infamous passages, one which I will share and discuss shortly, which underpins a vital point in V for Vendetta’s world and our own.

My other V was to contrast Guy Fawkes with William Wallace. Both died a traitor’s death for fighting the government and crown based in London. But whereas Braveheart is famous as a hero, with a large monument in Stirling, and a well known movie – made with an Australian star (as is Hugo as V) – Guy is denounced. Note that the Scottish/English factor is reversed: William Wallace fought the English king trying to take over their land, but King James is a Scot who took England – not by battle, but not by referendum either. William Wallace, a bloody fighter, is seen as a warrior for freedom who was martyred by an unjust king; Guy was rightly put to death for what he was going to do to the parliament and king. We celebrate the thwarting of his wickedness and the victory of the King.

I note that V is a story about England – Scotland and Wales aren’t mentioned – although apart from the location of Larkhill camp near Salisbury and the Valerie flashbacks, everything takes place in night time or interior London. It makes London the synecdoche for England, which provincials are annoyed by. We’re supposedly a united island – with Northern Ireland – but since covid, we’ve largely devolved into our four countries and we’ve all got strong identities. England has the least, so it’s interesting that the comic and film made ‘England prevail’ rather than Britain. A quick moan: that this film is made by Americans is clear from slips such as the pronunciation of ‘lever’ and ‘standing in line’. We queue here, Natalie, James McTeigue and the Wachowski brothers. And V’s underground lair – like Lex Luthor’s in Superman The Movie – wouldn’t have natural stone in it if in was anywhere near London, for London doesn’t have natural stone – and there’s none nearby that colour. And Lewis Prothero, Voice of London on the official British Television Network, is more of an American or Australian style talk show host than anything I’ve seen here.

Gripes over…. I’ve more important points to make, and I’m going to the Bible now to make them. A little exposition is coming…

Romans 13 is famous, or infamous. It says – or appears to say – that we should submit to authority. No rebellions, then. No questioning. It’s God will and way.

I note that Americans on both sides of their revolution used those verses – mostly 1-7 – for each of their positions. I note that some of the advocates for the alternative version come from the more conservative Christians, which I am not. But despite big theological and moral differences on many other topics, I am pleased to see that this end of the Christian spectrum is speaking out and thinking for itself, and thus I claim them as brothers and sisters.

I feel that skewing of this passage happened in the King James Bible. Note that it appeared just 6 years after the Guy Fawkes incident. It suits our leaders – who were then as now closing down playhouses due to the plague – to have us not question but obey them. In response to those outraged by recent US immigration policies, Jeff Sessions took this passage in a speech to basically tell Christian critics to shut up and let them continue to split up families at the border.

There is argument about the meaning of the Greek word for ‘power’ in Romans 13, and it is often rendered in English as ‘higher power’. Hence, it’s taken beyond earthly authorities to spiritual realms. Some commentators list the use of this word throughout the Bible and point out that the word sometimes rendered as ‘obey’ doesn’t mean that, and that another word could be used instead if that was what was intended. They urge us to be familiar with the preceding chapter of Romans, and the Bible as a whole. They remind us that Christian heroes went to prison because they upset the authorities. In Acts, Peter – champion of the established churches – told the court he was dragged before that contrary to their bidding, he would not cease to teach about Jesus. Paul – author of this letter and much of the NT – was martyred by the authorities, as were other apostles. Those who built the early church were often in prison, as have more recent believers been. They saw it as a proud duty to have put their faith and principles first before an unjust government – and not only over freedom to worship and preach. (C of E and Hillsong, take note). In the century of James and Guy Fawkes, many Christians were in prison or in threat of it because they weren’t Anglican – from Quakers to Baptists to Catholics. The famous German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was imprisoned during Nazi leadership, and he criticised those Christians who obeyed Hitler and allowed those atrocities to take place.

So there is a strong precedent of Christian non submission, despite that verse. I also remind that Daniel and his friends in the book of that name in the Old Testament defied rules, and showed incredible courage in the face of furnaces and lions – and were delivered from both. And in the end, a hand wrote on the wall denouncing the tyrant king and ‘requiring his soul’. It was taken that night.

This is obviously a story which our Jewish friends share, as you do that of Moses who asked Pharaoh to let God’s people go – or face the plagues. Note that it was God who made the demands and exacted the punishment on the unjust earthly ruler.

There is also the argument that ‘what God ordains’ is more like God saying: I foresee and allow some people to take their place on the world stage. I don’t think that God creates them and plots them, for that takes too much freewill from us and makes God tyrannical. But with the authorial point of view which I spoke of in my Easter sermon, he can see that these sorts of leaders are not only possible with the choices given to humans, but drive the human story forward.

I think that they’ve driven it long enough. I’m told that we’re at the end of a multi-millennial cycle. The abuse of power and the lust for it is not going to serve or be possible for much longer. It’s in its death throes. Sometimes we need the most of extreme circumstances to take action and break free, as happens in V for Vendetta.

God pushes us to make us what we need to be to become heroes of our own story and of other people’s. That’s what is meant by God ordaining those powers.

Personally, I believe that the Bible does not have to be an eternal mandate to us all – for Romans was a letter to one young church – and that Paul is not all wise. I am appalled that he did not speak out against slavery and thus his words about obeying masters were used to justify this unspeakable system. But if we do wish to follow Paul’s ideas, I am interested in the argument that he is saying that a good prince is he who inspires fear only in the wrongdoer. Thus those of us who do good and keep the Biblical commandments which he goes on to enumerate should not fear our rulers; if we do, then something is wrong with the rulers. In the Wycliffe Bible – the earliest translation into English – verse 9 and 10 of Romans 13 read:

…Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. [note the ‘as’] 10 The love of thy neighbour worketh not evil; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. 11 And we know that the hour is now that we rise from sleep… 12 we cast away the works of darkness and put on the armour of light (cf Ephesians 6).

Paul asks us to ‘not be conformed of this world’ in the previous chapter (v2).

Remembering that Jesus was killed by the authorities, as was John the Baptist, for speaking out; that another John wrote Revelation as persecution literature from a prison colony, and the Old Testament features prophets and advocates who took risks to speak to ungodly rulers, I find it hard to square a reading of Romans 13 with a mandate to always obey. (I’ll get to taxes another time).

——————–

In an intense film of wonderful dialogue, the immense vocabulary of V, and several poignant moments I am spoiled to choose a favourite part of V for Vendetta. Many have already become famous – not least the courageous tagline:

People should not be afraid of their government

Government should be afraid of their people.

But the line that moves me most comes at the denouement of the film. It is indeed the most critical moment. It’s not the beauty of the words – it’s what they signify.

It’s the scene where the army gathers in Parliament square. Thousands, millions, of protestors likewise gathered, as they have around the world – from Indonesia to Nigeria to Nepal – ever since. Yes they even gathered this week, with all the restrictions, including in London which had gone into lockdown again that day.

All are wearing identical caricatured Guy Fawkes masks, just as V himself does. “What do you think will happen?” wondered one police detective to another, seeing the throngs of military in their riot gear, with not only hand guns but tanks and weapons big enough to blow them up. It seems set to be another Tienanmen Square. “What normally happens when people without guns stand up to people with guns.”

But, as the general phones for permission to launch on ‘the enemy’ – his own people whom he swore to protect – the line is silent. The evil leaders are dead.

And so this general has to make his own decision. Will he tell his troops to fire on these unarmed people, close range, for simply standing in the street with a mask on? (note the irony of that this year). No; he will not.

Instead, he shouts: stand down!

And the army lets the myriad masked march approach and pass them without incident. In this way, this Guy Fawkes night is celebrated Remembrance Sunday style – a reverent silent parade, symbolically going in the other direction to the military meant to stop them. They gather, not at a cenotaph for The Last Post, but for a firework display and rousing overture to accompany gazing on an edifice which is blasted away before their eyes, signalling the end of dictatorship forever.

Let us not need a V to galvanise us. Let us not wait until the horrors of the last war resurface, or that we’ve accepted a new normal for over a decade.

Fireworks in the film meant the end of an old era, not the subjugation of those trying to overthrow it. I’m not advocating blowing parliament up, but I no longer see it as the world’s most beautiful building, but the cipher of an empire of inequality and elitism and unjust power. I was moved by the very different ideas behind Scotland’s modern parliament which is the only one I know which displays a Bible verse and mentions love. Outside in the pavement on the Canongate in Edinburgh are other worlds attributed to Paul, in Scots: [from 1 Corinthians 13]

Gin I speak wi the tungs o men an angels

but hae nae luve i my hairt

I am no nane better

nor dunnerin bress

or a ringing cymbal

But it isn’t living it. None of our authorities are. They’re showing us that despite the promises they may have made to us and the precepts they are founded on, that they are capable of the greatest darkness of the human heart.

Like V, a great game of dominoes has been set up – but the downfall is theirs.

Let us stand up… and let authorities who support those not living in love and truth stand down. Let us live in love, of God and each other, and not be ‘dunnerin bress.’

Let us hear a new sound. This year, fireworks aren’t annoying me. They are the pops of freedom and the bangs of the pangs of a new world birthing and the old leaving.

Here is Isaiah 2:4 – almost the copy of Micah 4 – reworked:

hammer your spears into pruning hooks

your lances into ploughshares

melt your rifles down for kiddie’s toys

your tasers into vibrators [turn the power down]

your spy cameras into plastic alternatives

your riot gear into outré party gear

Let us stand together in love and have this as the anniversary that we remember November for. Let us a year on from now see that world shaping on its first birthday.

The next planned sermon is 6th Dec, for the festival of the 8th

What can the police do instead?

I’ve been running a series which from the outset has tried to show that the current and past actions of police and their reasons for being are often dubious and about an unequal society.

I’ve been calling for a massive rethink, starting with not involving them.

I also want to ask bigger questions about all enforcement. Do we need traffic wardens to fine us, border staff to look through our bags, and even us, and contain us if we’re from somewhere else?

We absolutely don’t need bailiffs, and when they act for the government or a large corporation (same thing) it’s reprehensible. Do you find it comforting or offputting when there is security outside a venue? How do you feel about seeing the army on your streets?

I especially do not think that there’s a place for SWAT teams, which are used on nonpayers of child support (I have heard a bludgeoned victim say so more than once), or drug search teams.

(I will be posting about drugs sometime).

I cannot see how spying on us or arbitrary stoppage and intrusion are ever necessary and justified, and are really part of wider power games, not safety. Surveillance needs to stop. Now.

Nor should police be about towing the party line and taking our rights to speak out, as we’ve seen this year especially. Right now, they are often containing people for no more than having a positive PCR test (which are wildly inaccurate), or being out without a mask or beyond curfew.

Their response varies from harassment to atrocities.

This makes them commit crimes, and crimes against humanity on a fundamental level.

Thus, I don’t think that police and enforcement (especially as we’ve hitherto experienced them) are appropriate for a free, fair world.

The question you’ll be saying is: what do all these people do instead?

You might also say – especially if you are such an officer – do you not value what I do at all?

Do you believe that I have never helped anyone, never saved anyone, never had anyone grateful for what I do? Do you not know the risks I take? Do you think we’re all thick and unfeeling?

Have I never tried to help you?

I acknowledge all that.

So from here, I want to change my tone, for I’ve deliberately been critical of police and empowering to the people.

But all enforcement are people too, and yet we’re often encouraged to see a line – another division.

We’re – both sides – expected to see police (army, warden, watcher) first, fellow human later.

I say that we should see human and fellow citizen first.

Firstly, it’s important to involve enforcement officers in the decisions – and I mean everyone, not just union reps and commissioners. This is an important new practice for society: universal consultation. Yes, it takes longer and may cost more (but elections are expensive too, and what about the money needed to put right and undo?) We do not roughshod over people in the name of efficiency. It actually takes longer in the long run.

I wonder if there’s three questions that enforcement will be asking:

1) Don’t you value us?

2) How will we survive financially?

3) What will we do instead?

I realise that some people in enforcement like their jobs and consider that they’re here to serve us. They, especially in the army, might consider that they’ve a kind of calling, and also that their department/deployment is their life. Something intrinsic in them is fulfilled and expressed through their work, and someone outside of that work who may not understand this and has a different personality and calling is wishing to take this away.

I hear all that, and I’ve had what I am and do undermined by the government and its practices.

But rather than turn the tables and say, the spiritual people and the artists run the world now (wouldn’t that be interesting? Watch this space) we must remember that all people are valuable; each personality type – if we must put into categories – is needed. Not as in a functionalist cog in the machine way.

I would like to invite those who are unhappy in their enforcement job to be able to leave and to do something else. Maybe you’ve dreamt of early retirement, or a different kind of life?

I would also like to extend that ‘invitation’ to those who get off on bullying and are robotic already: your services are no longer required. My concern is that these bullies might find new perhaps unofficial bullying roles. I am well aware that there is private security, in both senses, and these greatly concern me. I would like to erode this and to have strict codes for these – perhaps so strict, that like bailiffs, they can’t operate. Or, they should just be outlawed outright.

I wonder if one of the roles that the better end of police could do is to stop the inevitable unofficial and unorthodox security – the loan sharks and their private bully boy equivalent. In this way, they are still doing that job, but winding down the enforcement system and protecting.

For those police who genuinely want to serve, who are sensitive and discerning, calm and not aggressive, we would like to keep you for a while, if you’d like to stay. If you’d like to retrain your colleagues, thank you. Perhaps you’d like a new collective name and uniform, to show your new ethos in the world. The motto of Norfolk’s police will speak for you all: “Our priority is you”.

I would like to see arrivals lounges at ferries and airports filled with welcomers, not “Who are you and why are you here? Let me see that” officers. They could be able to deal with a violent attack, but attacks – genuine ones, not staged ones – are rare. In a new more enlightened world, this stance wouldn’t make you vulnerable, for such acts would no longer be part of human desire. Also, terrorism is politically motivated, and if the situations – such as occupation and suppression – were gone, they’d be no cause to create atrocities for.

Likewise, if we rethought our drugs policies, which are politically and fiscally motivated, we wouldn’t get much smuggling. Yes, there are violent drug dealers, and these need taking on, and this might be a specialised role. But it doesn’t excuse the seek and destroy teams we’ve got who swoop on innocent others whilst agreeing to turn a blind eye to lords of the non aristocratic kind.

I would like those whose skills are building things which are being used against humanity – surveillance, weaponry – to use their gifts on something worthwhile, starting with reversing and combatting what they helped create.

Robots and AI

We’re often told that changes in technology will mean changes to how we work, and that real people’s jobs can be replaced by synthetic ones. I am against this, for it’s creepy and dangerous.

I also think that the same argument regarding our controllers is true in reverse: if one is not fully human, killing you is no longer murder. Although it’s right to worry that if humans become machine hybrids (it’s claimed that anti covid treatment will facilitate this), that we can be killed without conscience, it also means that those in supposed authority who threaten can be destroyed without qualms or the charge of murder. Can we charge AI?

This is where we need to side with our police as humans, and say: do not let robots take your role. Do not allow them to turn soldiers into transhumans. We do not want bionic beings!

We also want human minds, not artificial ones.

This is dangerous for enforcement officers as well as humans generally. Do not allow AI to take your jobs! This push towards universal income (which I part support – more anon as to why) may help support enforcement officers to leave their work, but it must not be taken over by another.

Ascension

You knew that woo woo was coming, right? Because it is in love, prayer and raising our vibration that our hearts, our very cores will change. This is how police will reform ultimately. We need to campaign of course, but they also need to change from within. Yes, prayer and love are entirely appropriate, and it’s what’s missing – as it is from everything else so far. I know that there are Christians and other people of faith in the police, and I feel for you that you must often be asked to act in a way which clashes with your principles. Please carry on being salt and light, and may you become saltier.

A Christian police woman did a talk near me and asked us to pray when we see a siren.

I did already, but not the prayer that she was expecting.

Here it is:

Dear Lord, let those police not do more harm than good. Let them not be gotchas, causing fear and disturbance. Let them not falsely accuse and arrest and use unnecessary force [that last is a tautology]. Let them be calm and reasonable and not forget their oaths and what they’re really supposed to be here to do. Let them not enact pettiness or political manipulation. Let them not forget that they serve us, and You, and are like us, your children. Fill us all with love and higher vibrations until we no longer need them…. and let that day soon come.

Amen

Why we don’t need police

In my series about police, we’ve continued to see that enforcement is very central to society. Again, I state that this isn’t that strong enforcement sustains a well functioning one, but that the behaviour of enforcement officers is a reflection of the extent to which we are just and free.

When police are given more powers, when other kinds of people start to gain them – erroneously, both legally and morally – this is a cause for alarm and a sign of imbalance. It’s also a sign of panic in the leaders who realise that a watershed is coming. And it comes, even if it takes longer.

Suppression doesn’t work.

I realise that policing is essentially about disempowering the people, for one of the states they most fear is ‘taking the law into [our] own hands’ – much like health, which I’m going to discuss at length later. It contrasts with prison and school – oddly alike – where there is a code not to involve the authorities, and it’s recognised by them that standing up to bullies yourself is often what stops them. We cannot have our champions with us always, and we’re vulnerable without them. I am not sure that I could ever call our police champions, and watching us always isn’t the same as being with us and defending us. Surveillance records crimes – it doesn’t prevent them.

In fact, this watching culture is very godlike, except that the blue boys and girls aren’t very divine.

I take great exception to being watched and in an undemocratic unthinking force behaving in a godlike way, or assuming godlike powers, like those bestowed by the Tree of Knowledge.

I read a police website where the author claimed that police were like doctors, diagnosing, prescribing, making housecalls, making us well via strong but miraculous medicine. He saw crime-doers as sick people needing saving. There’s a massively religious aspect to that statement. Yet police don’t have that right qualities and training, and I critique of religious ministers as much as I do doctors and police. Thus, in another way, police are trying to be god to us, but don’t even understand the job description, which isn’t being advertised. If it were, police need not apply.

Also, this is quite an ignorant view, for it supposes that crime is equated with personal brokenness, that the act and the person are not to be differentiated – the sin makes an intrinsic and probably repeat sinner.

And that all crimes are wrong. But what is a crime? It is breaking a law. Law isn’t about morality or goodness. Law is about what you can do without being punished. Laws can protect corporate interest as much as ours.

Was a kilt wearer during the tartan ban a sick individual who needed the heavy pastoral hand of a state paid shepherd, or just someone who represented beliefs that upset the establishment? This was part of a regime for the English government to suppress its Celtic neighbours, especially those who supported different rulers to the controversial ones that had been imported. Kilts showed loyalty to your Scottish clan and royal line before the new Germanic-British rulers.

Is jaywalking – an offence in some countries, unheard of here – a sign of a wayward soul, or someone who can’t see how crossing a road – especially an empty one – is something that could be a matter for penal measures? This puts the car before the person, and says that we need automated traffic controls to tell us when to cross, over our own human judgement.

And is not wearing a mask a sign of sickness, when masks themselves make us sick and cause some – rightly exempt – groups distress? The whole of corona crisis lawmaking has been rushed through, ignoring scientific experts and common sense, causing more harm than the virus could.

Each of these – and those who don’t carry papers or car tax discs or wear helmets or who smoke dope – are actually nonconformists, people who are somehow counter culture, and free thinking. I am not especially a supporter of dope – it stinks for starters – but there is a mindset that the authorities assume of its users, and it’s the mindset which is being punished, and all of these are outward signs of that mindset. It’s a mindset that they wish to weed out and crush – but it is not a criminal mind, but an alternative one.

Does any of the above, and all the other petty laws in our countries, mean that it’s right for this tax-funded law force to bully us and cause distress and even death? Is shooting at us, breaking windows and doors to haul us out, knocking us off chairs, violating us, doing torture holds on us, electrocuting us, taking us by force to a place of confinement actions we should accept and that they should ever except to get away with?

Is this the hand of the good shepherd, the wise doctor?

Many things that police do are actually illegal. I found a British law about not parking your vehicle so as to cause obstruction and alarm and annoyance to others. How often do police NOT do that, especially at a scene of a so-called crime, or when they make road blocks? Yes, I think road blocks are illegal and contravene UDHR and Section 59 of the Police Reform Act 2002. Arrest and incarceration is a form of kidnapping. Searching, let alone undressing and inspecting us, testing us, vaccinating us – especially without consent – are grievous abuses.

Canadians report that police have arrested for collecting rainwater. Clearly, that’s not about wrong doing, but supporting us being reliant on lucrative water companies – making one of our most essential elements something that we are dependent for despite it being a natural free resource. Symbolically, that is massive.

Looking at their own oaths – in just 2 countries – I can see how often we can accuse police of breaking them:

UK: I do solemnly and sincerely declare and affirm that I will well and truly serve the Queen in the office of constable, with fairness, integrity, diligence and impartiality, upholding fundamental human rights and according equal respect to all people; and that I will, to the best of my power, cause the peace to be kept and preserved and prevent all offences against people and property; and that while I continue to hold the said office I will to the best of my skill and knowledge discharge all the duties thereof faithfully according to law

US: “On my honor, I will never betray my badge, my integrity, my character or the public trust. I will always have the courage to hold myself and others accountable for our actions. I will always uphold the Constitution, my community, and the agency I serve.”

It is time to do more than reform the police. They need to justify their existence. We need to look at their remit, their training, their mindset, their use. The belief that we’ll have a violent, dangerous society without them is spin. Perhaps we needed to be mature enough to let go, and we may not quite be there yet.

But lawlessness and being ungovernable have another meaning. I will write a piece on the law, theologically and philosophically. I’m already aware that it’s a form of enslavement.

We need to do differently, and we need to start now.

I have at least 2 more articles on police: what we could do instead, and what they could do

The Gene Jeanie – police (de)programming

I contine my police reform series: see the tag cloud to the right.

I want to share my police history: not my own record, but how they tried to do a Miss Jean Brodie on us as children.

“Give me a girl of an impressionable age, and she is mine for life.”

Police came into my primary (first) school to teach us about safety (Jean’s heidie would approve), using the stories of Minnie Mole and some more realistic videos to instil care in road crossing, avoiding pylons, and what I later realised was paedophilia. (The latter worked: I am proud to have told the Duke of Edinburgh that I don’t speak to strangers). We had a class visit to the police station where our fingerprints taken (I’m cynical enough to wonder if they were retained) and we were handcuffed and put in cells for ‘fun’ and were implicitly told, don’t have this done for real.

I had the excuse to watch British cult children’s television – not as much fun as I hoped. I found these cartoons and animations boring, but there was another kind of boring, of the drilling kind – the installation of values. The gentle paeans to idyllic English life taught us that police were part of the community; perhaps a little stiff and severe (and even thick), but that they were on our side.

Like the local constables who had came into school, these programmes (interesting word) taught us that our Bobby was an avuncular counterpart to Auntie Beeb, the national broadcasting corporation who made many of the shows we watched. (It also created Gene Hunt, contemporary bully cop).

American imports criticised the police more: Top Cat and the Dukes of Hazzard were constantly outwitting their cops, and that the latter set were corrupt. CHIPS tried to make these hard hated highway patrols into cool heroes both sides of the Atlantic. But I saw through the mirror glasses.

I think there’s literally been a game of good cop/bad cop between Britain’s police and America’s.

I grew up being encouraged to think that this country was just and safe and sane; and that our police were like my description of a city gate in my novel: a burly but friendly doorkeeper.

Recently, I posted my change of view on city walls. My police views altered some time ago.

In some shops here, there are lifesize cardboard cut outs of police officers. These really say: we haven’t got security staff here, but we want you to feel the presence of the law, should you be tempted to thieve. I was dismayed to see a child told: there’s a police officer, so you’d better be good. Even though he was as flat as Mavis Cruet under one of Evil Edna’s spells (in Will O’the Wisp, a cartoon about a fat fairy and a wicked witch in the shape of a walking television set).

Police are the inverse Santa.

Police didn’t come into my later schools, when we were capable of committing crimes, but I began to learn of police in other ways. I knew that to report assault could mean a second ordeal at the hands of law, where finding evidence was more important than thinking what it felt like to suffer.

I knew firsthand that police were given quotas of motorists to stop on their shifts.

The most shocking thing I learned was also direct, from the wife of the officer involved – here in provincial England. She boasted to colleagues about how her aspirant husband had publicly decrutched a woman on suspicion of drugs.

Whether he found them or not is irrelevant. This is abuse, rape, of the most despicable kind.

Drug users are still people; their human rights are not waived. This breaks several, and other rules.

I can recall the details of the persons concerned and when I was told.

Such a person should not be ‘serving’. If one abuses someone supposedly in your care then you should step back and make amends. Especially if this wasn’t an isolated incident, you should be considering whether you should still hold that job, or if even your pension at public expense is appropriate. The answer is no.

Throughout the following years, I have read so much about police brutality. I’ve had OK encounters with police, and even had them apologise to me. But I’ve also had angering encounters, and others I know have built up a resentful view of the police from their experience.

The pettiness, the unhelpfulness, the insensitivity, the overkill reactions, the got’cha mentality.

And this is not to violent crime, but minor misdemeanours.

This is a point I’d like to stress: much of policing isn’t about real safety and the crimes that we would unamimously consider obviously wrong.

I also query how helpful they are when violence does occur.

I am aware of course of those who have been brutalised and traumatised by the police, and that many have been actually killed by them.

So I’m wanting to ask: what are the police for, and what should they be for?

What good – in the moral sense – do they actually do?

If the police were more like the officers of Trumpton and Rupert the Bear – the community worker we could rely on for any problem and felt relieved to see – would police be worth keeping and even increasing (as opposed to the calls to defund if not abolish, which I support)?

This would be much preferable, although there is an intruding side to this sort of police too. Are they best placed to take on the matters which are given to them? There is an ever widening remit, and I especially worry about so-called mental health being entrusted to the police.

But we know that police are not really about safety, but conformity. Law and Order means: do what you’re told; comply.

On one level, I feel sorry that police are constantly being asked to enforce changing and perhaps obscure rules that they don’t make without having much freedom to question them. But I am concerned that police, who I think are encouraged not to be thinkers, and certainly not to publicly raise their views, are the method in which these undemographic rules are transacted. And they also expect the same military model of compliance from us that they receive in their own ranks.

Much of police life is about meeting targets, telling people off for whatever they’re told to tell us off for. So police are thinking: ‘is anything wrong here? Do I see the breaking of a rule?’ before: ‘can I help?’ and, moreover ‘is anyone in danger, and am I the right person to handle this?’

Police talk into radios and begin procedures, perhaps without asking the ‘victims’ what they’d like to happen; we’re encouraged that all emergency services are systems to be complied with and to enter without choice or question. Of course we do have a choice, and should question.

The mindset that’s comfortable to burst into a violent situation is perhaps not the same person who can comfort a victim. Police often come in larger groups and use more force than is necessary, which causes more distress – and advertising. It’s tempting to wonder if a show of strength is more important to them than the problem. I am always concerned by solving and fixing mentality. Their blazing sirens – now that dreadful wail – their aggressive door knocks, their outfits (notice the change in uniform) all say: we’re tough, fear us. This is not discretion!

Whereas it’s tempting to believe that Britain’s police have worsened with their changing dress, I note that the old Bobby tall hats, smart buttons were worn by those who force fed Suffragettes and broke up pickets and rioters in the last century – whilst Chigley’s whistle called the stop motion factory workers to dance and gentle steam engines onto the tracks. I had to wait almost three more decades before I understood the truth of how our police and army had behaved in contemporary political situations that I was only dimly aware of from school.

Policing involves them having power over us. Their asking our name and address gives them knowledge which they will not reciprocate. I’ve known them to hide the identifying number on their epaulettes when they misbehave. They (wrongly) believe they have the power to make us stop our walk, our vehicle, ask for proof of who we are, ask what we’re doing, to look at our belongings, even bodies, and take them (or us). I’ve already commented on the ironic disparity of this, but I again say

NO TO STOP AND SEARCH

Why do they ever need to do this, except to instil in us that we, the citizens who pay for them, are under their control, and that they are the visible arm of those in power – and we don’t have any.

In a book called Londoners by Craig Taylor, a Metropolitan police officer said of arresting and searching: take away someone’s liberty for a few moments and they’ll soon see who’s boss. What needs taking away is that officer’s badge. Clearly, he has no business in policing and this quote should be an embarrassment to the Met. It proves searching isn’t about safety, but status.

I don’t look to stats to see if crime rates lower because of stop and search, because I believe in qualitative first and I know that stats are malleable. It’s because of our broken systems that we require proof, and perhaps police forces feel that by doing something proactive that they can count and we might see that they may have a measurable way in reducing crime.

I note the assertion that these powers are in fact a legal fiction – ie something presented to be true, but which is not. I’ll write more about this anon, but we do have the right to stand up to this fallacy.

I hate the notices: plain clothes police operate here…. we are watching you…

Is that meant to scare the would-be vehicle thief, the pimp and kerb crawler, or are those eyes next to the black and white chequer really meant to scare us all?

Eyes worry me as they are not necessarily under helmets (or the newly favoured bully boy caps).

Nor even under unidentified unhatted fringes – I am not sure that plain clothes police are ethical – for surely it clashes with their ethos of being recognisable and transparent?

The watching eyes could be far away, from the many cameras – I’ve noted a new literally all-seeing sort appear since lockdown. In Jersey during that period, police said: no need to report on your neighbour (amen) – we’ve a pretty good idea of what’s going on.

Is this meant to comfort us?!

A friend suggested that the civil liberties abuses come from the firms who make security technology as much as the police. I’m deeply concerned about what they try to sell as desirable ‘solutions’ – what is the real problem?

Inequality. Fearful controlling governance that thinks that they must know what we’re all doing to feel any security of its own. That is a weak and immature way of ruling; such stifling leads to eruptions and to loss of relationship, and ultimately, to loss of power – theirs.

Recent months have exemplified the auntie-authoritarian gamut of our rulers.

This lockdown has been: get in your room so that you’re safe. (And we’ll make some changes to the house whilst your door is closed). Now you may step out, carefully, on the markers provided. Wash your hands and cover your face. Let us know who you’re with and where you are.

And this says so much about how we’re treated generally. We’re expected to look away whilst the experts work out what to do, and to trust them, even though we know we’re stifling in our rooms. Note that confining to rooms is the way that much of the world has historically dealt with people that it doesn’t want on the loose, people they want to ‘exclude from society’ and have most rights taken from them.

And note how many so called offences are politically motivated, and that we wouldn’t consider many people who’ve been caught and convicted by police as wrong or dangerous. If they are, we might wonder how shutting them up and bullying them at public expense ameliorates at all.

As this is a thesis length issue I’ll need to return to, I end by asking these questions:

• Is safety something to bully us over?
• Is stopping us and punishing us over arbitrary and changing rules something we want to pay our police for? Is this a worthwhile use of public funds?
• Does anyone have the right to random shows of strength in the name of something nebulous and arcane – namely terrorism, and now health?
• Do the police have the moral right to violently hold us against our will, to throw us down, bind us, humilate us, take off anything and go into anything?
• Is it right that this group is given wider powers and remits, when often their mindset and training is inappropriate to the task?
• Should law keeping be done by those who have little understanding of those laws?
• Should we allow enforcement to be done by those whose profiles often include people who enjoy having power and authority, enjoy chase and catching, and who have aggressive and even psychopathic tendencies? (Note how many enneagram type 8s are in policing)
• Why do we support a group infamous for prejudice and which often isn’t very effective?
• Should we accept that a group of society can break the very rules they’re here to enforce and have greater liberty than the rest of us?

Clearly, these are rhetorical: the answer in each case is a clear NO, NON, NU.

In a future post, I’ll think about what we could do instead… and then, what they could do instead.

In the meantime, let’s be aware that current policing is ultimately about giving our power away, and they should not and cannot take it. You do not have power over those whom you serve.

I remind that the police are here to serve us, the people – not the other way round.

Robert Potato Peel Pie

Remember the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie society?

Here’s a recipe involving the peel of a certain 19^th C British baronet, with a little Hartley’s jam…

Cooking (reading) time: about 20 mins

I was intrigued that He Who Set Up England’s Police has just been in the news. Statues in Robert Peel’s honour are now an endangered species, for they may be destined to go the way of Edward Colston’s last Sunday (7^th). I confess I laughed when I heard that the likeness of this unpopular 17^th C Bristol magnate ended up in the Frome, in daylight and in front of a crowd.

His removal was long overdue. In 2007, at the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery in Britain, residents questioned why this man from 300 years ago whose wealth came from the slave trade, whose contributions (except the almshouses named after him) to the city are no longer tangible, should still be sitting in the middle of it. The nearby concert hall was being renovated, and much of the populace asked why this venue and its street bore his name. Bristol – the city of Princess Caraboo, Hannah Moore and Dorothy Hazzard – has a rich history of memorable people and a recent heritage of musicians. So why – if the largest music venue in the city needed to be named after anyone – did they pick someone who lived long before this hall, and who has no connection to music, but plenty to an abhorrent and obsolete trade? I was surprised that the statue and the hall – now with a ridiculous gold extension – had survived thus far.

I am pleased that we are asking about who we give honour to and if it is right to still give them honour. I note that like Colston’s displaced effigy, much statuary in Britain is 19^th century, sometimes several after the person’s life; and that as one person put it, it’s public veneration. I like Christopher Wren’s epitaph – that on principle, we should be able to look round and see what they did. Not that I necessarily esteem the bewigged polymath and possible Illuminati member, just the notion that I shouldn’t need an eerie graven image to remind of what you’ve done.

I realise how many of Britain’s statues are of war heroes and states people: those whom we perceive made us great. I also note that many of our historic townhouses are named after historic rich men who were also public figures. Each time, this wealthy ‘successful’ businessman was also a statesman – MP, sheriff or mayor, often repeatedly. This ancient correlation continues.

So as I meld back to Robert Peel, I want to have in mind who were revere and remember, and that today, wealthy business people still steer our cities and countries (as well as get the best properties).

Robert too was from a wealthy business family, made from cotton, in the north west of England before moving to the West Midlands. Bury and Tamworth, who have statues to him, are now asking if they want to keep them.

Conservative media point out that activists may have confused his father – also Robert Peel – who opposed the abolition of slavery act in Britain because of the loss of revenue it would cause. Presumably he saw himself in that category, since cotton manufacture involved slave plantations. It’s said that we don’t know whether son was like father, and that Bobby jnr was too junior to have made much input to his father’s late 18^th C decisions. Fair… but I thought that it wasn’t due to slave support that Sir Peel II was now on the not/wanted list: it was his police record.

It’s well known in Britain that Robert Peel set up our police, although I didn’t know the story. I thought that literally he was the first superintendent of the force, or perhaps even took on the role himself as a lone officer. Robert Peel didn’t do policing though: he created it. He was an MP and later prime minister in Britain, dying in 1850; and he was titled – 2nd baronet. He went to what we might call privileged educational establishments and lived in a hall. He founded the Conservative Party.

That doesn’t make him the enemy, although I confess that I baulked at reading this about him.

Peel is called the father of modern policing (note the paternalistic term), because by setting up the Metropolitan Police in London, he paved the way not only for the rest of England to have its own forces (Scotland already had one) but his example was followed in America.

So what did our example inspire or unleash on the world?

Bobby left us with 9 principles of policing which I’ve seen adopted in America as well as here – a sort of 10-1 commandments for law enforcement. Pro-police writers remind that Robert’s reforms cut hangable offences by 100 – so how many were left, I ask? – and working hours and child labour. So he did do some things right, or at least, better than his forebears. He also saved the country from its existing state of martial law enforcement; his ‘Peelers’ only had truncheons (wooden batons), not swords and guns, and their uniform was deliberately different from the red coats of the hussars, so that it was clear that a Peeler was not a soldier.

Can I stamp on this notion put about that we in Britain still call police ‘Peelers’. The only time I’ve heard that term used is when it is prefixed by Potato.

I’ll comment briefly on just four of those nine principles.

Note that police around the world are not keeping to these.

1) proportion, and persuasion first; never use more force than necessary

– so no brutalities then, such as the ones that sparked all the riots recently or the abuse I read of today by an officer to another woman, allegedly seeking drugs

I agree to the first clause, but I wonder about the second ever being so; it is widely misused

2) police cannot usurp the judiciary – so no killing suspects and dispensing with trials

But the judiciary is not sovereign and untouchable, nor incorruptible; it too needs reform

3) Impartial upholding of the law – so no prejudice; but impartial can also lead to blind pernickityness; and the law itself needs much scrutiny (and will get it from me in another piece)

4) police are the people, and vice versa: that citizens are assumed to uphold the law and enforce it where they see it being broken

This makes assumptions about citizenry. We can’t opt in or out and we rarely have much say about the laws created, nor do we always agree with them. So whereas Bobby was expecting high standards of his namesakes, and society, I find that a bind which actually goes wrong…

Firstly, there is what kind of person joins the police – which is a topic to come back to…

This principle also gives support to the prevalent push that we can handle our problems without police – fodder for another article…

I want to focus on what was happening in England during the time of modern police forces’ inception. I remind that many US writers have commented that slave and immigration control were connected. I heard that London – England’s first force – was about custody of cargo.

So, I wondered, did England’s other contemporary great dock city – Liverpool – follow suit?

The banner photo on this blog is of Liverpool.

I recalled a snippet from a book on Liverpool’s docks by Ron Jones that made me want to investigate.

The official police in Liverpool seems formed by an act of parliament in 1835; although, as elsewhere, they existed in some form previously. This means, they were 6 years after London’s.

I wondered why it needed a central government act to create them as well as the docks I’ll soon get to…

In August 1819, the Peterloo massacre occurred in Manchester, a rival town in the same county which produced much of the goods that Liverpool got rich on shipping. A large (size unverified) crowd met to discuss equality and universal suffrage – for not even all men could vote yet. Their banners even included the word ‘love’. But over 2000 soldiers on horseback set upon what’s normally described as a peaceful crowd, and hacked at these unarmed civilians with swords. They wanted to charge the speakers, such as Henry Hunt, with treason (which was dropped), they set on journalists, and rushed through an inquiry. I watched Timeline dramatised TV based on the transcript of the inquest of one man, Lees. The trial was held, not in a proper court or a public space, but a pub in the next town. The witnesses – cotton workers, the mainstay of the town – were terrified as the magistrates were also their employers and landlords; some had even been part of the yeoman who attacked. As London lawyer, Mr Harmer, acting for the deceased’s father, made progress in showing the corruption and violent intent of the soldiers and town leaders, the coroner shut down the case.

However, it is often seen that this event was key in bringing about change, although not the revolutionary ones which were hoped for and feared, and not all immediately.

It did lead to the setting up of the [Manchester] Guardian newspaper, Britain’s most left wing daily broadsheet, and an important voice of supposed free and thorough journalism.

In 1831, riots occurred, notably in Bristol and Nottingham. Some of the fuel to the literal fires – the custom house, mayoral and bishop’s residences in the former, and ducal castle in the latter were burned – was the refusal to pass the Reform Bill. This Act is behind George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch, which describes the ‘rotten boroughs’, meaning that Members of Parliament were not representative of the population, by any means; it was a bribable boy’s club with easy to keep seats. The bill took up some of the issues that those Lancastrians of 12 years before had met about. But also, the city corporations also were seen as corrupt and self serving, as was especially felt in Bristol, Nottingham, and in Liverpool. The rioters’ quarry were people who had helped block this important bill for greater fairness. It was enacted the following year, and ‘rotten boroughs’ were no more.

Sadly, many of us feel that our government is still mainly self serving and not representative, and are effectively bribed by the wealthy elite.

Several accounts of these riots – such as you might read in a guidebook – don’t tell you that the soldiers again set upon their people. They’ll instead tell you how much property was damaged.

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The Police and Albert Docks

Many readers, perhaps those not from Britain too, will recognise that place. It’s famous – the Merseyside Metropolis has made it so. They are the synecdoche for the whole of a huge system, mostly designed by one man, Jesse R R Hartley Hare*. I wonder if his statues and plaques are on the Unpopular List? (*Hartley Hare is from kid’s TV; and J R R Hartley wrote a book on fly fishing).

Much of Ron Jones’s book, like others, boasts about the wonders of Liverpool (yes, I am already a fan) and its docks, but I realised that my values have changed. I’ll write a report on my travel blog. In short, Liverpool was built on the wealth that its port gave it, but it was a very divided city. The story I recalled was that when Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, came to open the much vaunted groundbreaking dock in his name in July 1846, many of the half a million who came to greet him couldn’t afford shoes.

There were other significant visitors to Liverpool that year. Lots of them. They came from the West. Unlike the Prince, they weren’t guests of honour. They’d come in hordes, in desperation, due to a potato famine that they saw their neighbouring country as having contributed to.

These Irish families – already destitute, tired, stressed, displaced – were squeezed into tight ghettoes. 20,000 citizens – that’s about a tenth of Liverpool at the time – were sworn in as special constables (ie plain clothes police for a particular s/reason) to help control these asylum seekers.

Not to welcome or support them, but contain them.

Now I’m not assuming that there was no trouble from these immigrants, any more than I’m supporting the rioters of the previous decade; but I am questioning how they are portrayed and how much their treatment added to the ‘social problems’ that we conveniently and patronisingly file them under.

I’d like to point out that these immigrants were white, and the same ethnicity as the indigenous people of Liverpool.

In Ron Jones’s book, I noted a comment which wasn’t critical but which should have been, and is very timely. A local lecturer, Dr William H Duncan, spoke out against the diseases that he said were rife in these Irish cramped lodgings, and said that they endangered everyone else in the city, morally and physically. This man then went on to be the first chief health minister for the country.

I very much take issue with this, which used health of others to demonise these Irish and other poor people, and use ‘infection’ as an excuse to control them and knock down their homes. The book doesn’t say what happened to the residents.

I’d like to say – and remember, I am very fond of Liverpool – that a city which is very cultural today and famous for certain musicians especially – was actually slow to get culture. At Albert’s visit, it didn’t even have a theatre yet, a lifetime behind more provincial towns. Even its classy residents who lived in terraces or mansions far from the stinky water which gave them their wealth celebrated key events not long before with bear and bull baiting. So the rich too engaged in activities which were considered morally dubious. Yet here was one putting moral fibre next to illness and equating the two. Familiar?

What did those new docks really mean?

I wonder if Jesse Hartley will join the not-so-wanted list. Of his day, I can see that he could be a hero, and that the wealth he helped amass for Liverpool (not even his native town, he’s from Yorkshire) would make him celebrated. As an engineer, architectural books keep telling me that Jesse’s work was extraordinary. But I can see that actually his work was short sighted and he seemed a hard, driven man, although because he achieved things, we overlook that. I’ll analyse what he built on my other blog.

I want to ask WHY Jesse Harley created so many new docks, on top of the 18^th Century set which saw so much slave trade. A Liverpool superlative it should not be proud of is that it was Europe’s leading slave port; and it sent at least 10 times the human cargo ships that Bristol and London did. When Albert Dock opened, the slave trade had been outlawed in Britain for 40 years. Yet the port thrived on the produce it had made, and the produce of domestic slavery which continued in America till c1860. I was also surprised to learn that in Britain and its empire, slavery needed a second act, passed in 1834, to actually grind it to a halt, which wasn’t immediate.

Whilst we celebrate the names of those to whom we attribute slavery’s abolition, perhaps even they need scrutiny. William Wilberforce didn’t advocate immediate emancipation – he said slaves needed to be prepared for freedom. Resocialised, don’t you mean? Sometimes, they had to work for a generation first.

There is another very evil fact about slavery that I’ll end with. I had to walk round my home to take it in.

But my point for now is that Liverpool’s connection to slavery was around the time that policing began, and so did those new docks; and at a time of unbridled trading worldwide – two acts in the 1830s and 40s meant its ships could travel without restriction, and its profits were therefore unfettered.

What of the local workers – in factories and docks? Would they be considered working under modern slavery conditions?

I was also learned why these warehouses were built. London had a new kind of dock. Liverpool was encouraged to get some too. These enclosed docks where you could moor right by the secure warehouses meant that

1) the rich merchants lost far less of their goods to theft (or fire) 

2) the HM customs people could check and collect more easily.

Ah. Now we know why central government was involved.

And you’ll note that Jesse Harley’s designs included not only a huge wall (see why thoughts on walls here) to keep out, but police booths. Note their arrow slit motif and castle-like quality.

I don’t support looting, but I do wonder if some of the looters were those who couldn’t buy shoes.

Liverpool was also a port where people sailed for a new life to America. If you’ve seen The Golden Door, you’ll know it wasn’t such a land of the free and opportunity – more of a work force advert. Customs in New York were utterly brutal and degrading, in the name of health. But this also meant that further immigration occurred in Liverpool – mostly outgoing.

So yes, police were about keeping ‘rabble’ quiet and money in the right places.

I’ll also briefly touch on the fact that Catholic Emancipation happened at this time, and some further Church of England strangleholds on public office were released to non Anglicans.

Is it an accident then that policing was created in this era?

My shocking final fact: HMRC tweets that modern British tax payers helped end the African slave trade – we were paying for the compensation to the slave OWNERS til 2015!

Why I’m An Abolitionist

Not just of slavery – take that and being anti-racist as a given – but of the police and all enforcement, worldwide.

I’ve been thinking about police for some years. I began a piece about their reform three years ago in which I quickly saw that I needed to ask deep and fundamental questions about the whole of society. And by that, I meant globally. I realised that police are key to the kind of world we live in. And by that, I mean that how they treat us is how safe and free we are.

If you’re expecting me to say: good policing means an orderly, safe world – you’re wrong.

That wasn’t what I was going to say at all.

I may begin sharing my work from June 2017, for the time feels right. There is a worldwide hunger for police reform after the horrific death of George Floyd 2 weeks ago, but sadly he is one of so many that have been brutalised by the force we have to pay to supposedly look after us. Policing isn’t just an American issue, or an issue for those countries that we dismiss as being far away and undeveloped and run by despots. Those people matter too. And they might be your country. Even if you think your country’s police are safe and reasonable, I ask you to think again.

Here is a big point to make early on: that I will not use the country specific talk of so many. American friends and readers, you are especially bad at this, as if you are a synecdoche for the whole world. You aren’t, but right now, the infamous horror on your soil is opening a platform for all of us; and I hope that the strength of feeling against this disgraceful and horrific act is going to open the way for real action on something that has been mooted for a long time.

I am also going to make a point early on which has to be made carefully, for I do not wish to alienate readers at this stage, nor to ever sound as if I in any form tolerate racism or belittle that.

I do not.

However, I do clearly state that I ABHOR ALL FORMS OF INJUSTICE and that for me, there is a bigger bottom line here than racism. My friend said: the attention’s on that fire because that’s where it’s burning at present. And I see that the Black community wants us to look at the fire, because they want us to see what’s been done to them – again. And we witness that with you in anger and sorrow.

But I want to look at fire itself – at this flammable liquid and who’s pouring it.

I am concerned that in the understandable ire and strident voices against the many incidences of racism and the disproportionate amount of police related suffering among non-caucasian people, that there is a new imbalance and set of otherness.

When I began my piece, almost three years ago to the day, I knew that otherness – the concept of people or things being different to you – was the absolute fundament of all else. This basic decision about whether this other form is similar or not to me was quickly followed by, so how shall I relate to or treat them? And that for many, that equalled fear, resentment, treating as less than, abuse.

But there is also a subverted version of this which is being seen via the speaking out, as if those belonging to the other group are all corporately guilty and are ‘other’ to the victims.

Those of us who stand – and I hope that is all of us – against the brutalities of police abuse and against racism, but who are not black, can feel that our solidarity and care must be qualified and earned. What would I or you know about prejudice, brutality, and suffering?

Well, in my own case, more than you might be assuming. I realised that it was possible to stand so vociferously in my own groups’ pain that I wouldn’t let outsiders in, even those who wanted to join with us and stand with us. I could make them feel bad for not having it bad (enough). I could assume the happiness and ease of their lives as compared to me and mine.

I would also like to say – I am on a controversial roll now – that I note that ‘Black’ is often used as a synecdoche for all those ethnicities which aren’t ‘white’ – a description I don’t like. In Britain, we called non ‘white’ BME (Black and Minority Ethnicities), and there’s a new set of initials coined, again leading with B for black. But what about Asian (a wide and diverse group), native American, Australasian; Inuit, Latin… (another broad group who seem to have a new name), Romany, Jew…forgive me if I’ve missed a group, especially if it’s yours. We are many. We are one. We all matter.

I know that black and Asian people and others are disproportionally targeted for police searches and arrests.

But that oft-quoted fact seems to have the horrible logical upshot: that more of the rest of us should be subjected to arrest and search.

NONE OF US SHOULD BE.

I want to abolish stop and search. I want to abolish enforcement targets. I want to abolish spying, weapons, and customs.

I want to abolish the police. Why does only America seem to say this?

I did a little research – it sadly didn’t take much looking – to find negative police incidents in every country I could think of. I don’t know if the beating of a Romani in Romania in April got much international coverage. It should have. “Police brutality” searches get pages of internet search results, as does “police corruption”. Searching “police + bullying” seems to be designed to bring up how to handle bullies, and how to involve the police if you are being bullied. And yet, it was through US churches that I came across a call – and not a new one – to stop calling the cops.

How else might your issue be addressed?

I’ve long felt a discomfort with calling the police. I know that they can worsen a situation, and for some people, it can mean being taken into a system that harms you, or even kill you. There’s the phrase: suicide by police. I keep seeing the statistic that over 1000 people are killed each year by police in America alone. I did a little research and was sickened to learn that these deplorable figures in the US are not the world’s highest. I’m unsure how these deaths by law enforcement were classed – direct shootings or other violence, or did mistreatment in custody resulting in death also get counted? How many of these fatalties are reported and made public? I’m reluctant to quote Wikipedia, but according to its chart, Brazil had 6000, Venezuela 5000 deaths by enforcement each year; the Philippines 3000, Syria was similar to America; India and several African countries were in the hundreds – Nigeria had 800. China isn’t on there! Interestingly Canada is around 30 a year, unlike its neighbour. Much of the rest of the West – Australia, Malta, Scandanavia, Britain – claims less than 10 deaths each, perhaps a single incident, or none. But I know that in the last couple of years, police shot and killed a suspect at a busy London railway station, as happened at Amsterdam in 2018. Thus this high drama risked many people, and the supposed bedrock of democracy – the judical system.

I give you some examples of corruption and brutality, although it’s heart rending and stomach churning. The couple who called the police over their car being burgled as they changed a tyre and the moustache twiddling policeman who implied, give me the expected bribe and I might actually show some interest. The kettled protesters in many demonstrations and the violent clashes and cruel treatments, held for hours. The man who reached for his papers in his car’s glove compartment, and was shot dead because police assumed it was for a gun. The family watching video games at home – also shot. The young women who had sex with 2 officers in exchange for her freedom – who walked free from court. The immigrant told to give a handjob in return for her papers to remain. The organised chronic infiltration of environmental protesters, even entering sexual relationships and having children with them, only to dump their ‘partner’ once the operation was complete. The police who ran drug and child abuse rings, paid huge salaries tax free and given legal exemption whilst ‘peacekeeping’. I could go on… that was just a snippet of some cross-country examples which I could bear to type. None of those were hearsay. And all of those were in the West.

I note that some tabloid British newspapers sided with Trump and the mayor of Minneapolis against the strident calls to abolish the police. I was really interested in this call, which the council of Minneapolis have supported, and that another US place which was considered unsafe – Camden – stopped its police force, and instead created a community based safety system, and seems to be better for it.

But I want to go further than replacing one set of prefects with another. I don’t simply look at official crimes statistics to see if it’s worked.

Calls for the police’s removal seem to be followed by calls for other systems, and I am against systemic control. When we speak of decriminalising cannabis or prostitution (sorry, I won’t call the commodifying of physical love ‘street work’), it usually asks for regulation which means official licensing, and that the government financially benefits from these trades.

I’m asking about the very way that we organise ourselves and who has control.

I am very clear who should not have it.

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I’ve felt uncomfortable with the police for some years – at least 10. I consider it a good day if I don’t see any. I’ve always hated customs and border controls, which puts me off travelling, and I am concerned about internal travel. Why I am anxious about this journey, I ask myself. If I am anxious taking a walk, what am I worried about?

Ah. Doing something ‘wrong’. That some official, especially during the lockdown, will tell me that I have committed a misdemeanour and am liable to be punished. I have the wrong train ticket. I crossed the road in the wrong way. I didn’t touch my smart travel card on the right place. I’m eating or drinking something outside when I shouldn’t be. I’m wearing or not wearing something that I should be. I don’t have permission from the authorities for something, like holding a meeting or playing music, or having a stall or allowing my customers to drink outside my premises. And now, that I might be deemed to be ill or walking unnecessarily, and even barred from buying food that I need, or be forced to give my genetic material to the state, or be taken away and incarcerated, or worse, for not doing those things.

Or for refusing to comply (be meek) when told off for allegedly doing any of the above.

The year I really got uncomfy with the police was the year that I started this project. There were at least three incidents of terrorism in the world at that time, and I want to say that all of them mattered – not the ones in the West or in my country more. But in May 2017, a terrorist bomb was detonated at a pop concert held in an arena in central Manchester. Immediately following this, Manchester cathedral did bag searches! Canterbury cathedral already had armed police in the grounds – two hander rifles; and there were suddenly armed police at other places that I would never have expected them (police in Britain had hitherto usually been unarmed.) Everyone I knew reported having seen them. In provincial, safe towns and cities. Outside the zoo; the library; at the railway station. And everyone going to a concert at an arena in my city had to be searched. Well, with these terrible people about, it’s necessary, sighed one ticket holder. A large annual market in a small town now has a huge police presence.

My thought was: this spreads fear and compliance to the provinces. We’re not just to think that these abhorrent attacks happen in our capital or largest cities. I note that London, Berlin and Paris each had them in recent years. And as well as being the centres of political and economic power and greatest populace, these cities are the hub of creative ideas and free thinking. It was suggested to me that Berlin’s horrific incident sent a message to a chilled, liberal, egalitarian city: It can happen to you too. When it happened in Manchester, it says: it’s not just the capital that can suffer this. None of you are safe, so all of you will need to make sacrifices.

My fear after these atrocities was not Will This Terrorism Come Here but What Erosion Of Civil Liberties Will Happen Next? Of course I was sad for those who suffered – please take that as a given. Of course I would not like such an event near me, although I realised that one in my city, a mid sized historic low crime area, would serve the Population Control By Fear agenda well.

Happily, those armed guards didn’t seem to last, but the police got new powers and ‘toys’.

Because of this heightened discomfort, I read Norm Stamper’s Protect And Serve: How to Fix America’s Police. I was more interested in reforming police per se, but at that time, I couldn’t find other books. You can see my review on Amazon, but I generally disliked the book and was disappointed. The subtitle said alot [sic]: he, as a long serving ‘cop’, was pro-police and had a fix-it mentality. He praised the ‘tools’ – that’s those ‘toys’ – which are a disgrace, and I fear are very common among police internationally.

If both of us were stopped and asked to empty our pockets, who’d you want to let enter?

He had: spray, two guns, numchucks, a taser, two sticks, plus surveillance technology.

I have no weapons and no spying devices whatever.

So even when police stop people who are found with a weapon, is their one knife as bad as all this?! Sometimes people have knives for legitimate reasons, and are not planning to harm. Knives are widely used – in mediaeval times, even monks carried them. Now I’m not suggesting that we all do, but I’m making the point that knives have multiple and good uses. All the above list have only one – to harm, if not kill. And we know that these are (mis)used, and not seldom.

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In 2017, I wanted a new kind of police. I’d long queried army and security agencies.

But now I query them all. Or rather, I don’t query, I assert: NO.

I looked into why we have police.

The answer is that they were created – usually in the 19^th century – to protect government and their lobbyists’ interests. They were to stop rioters; to keep looters from cargo. At the moment, we’re especially being reminded that the American South’s forces grew around catching and returning slaves, and that many forces have a link to immigrant control, and controlling poorer people, who are often from non-white ethnicities.

I think we need to again go broader and deeper, and say: why do any of us need this force?

‘Disadvantaged’ covers a wide kind of person, and I know that poverty and mental illness aren’t situations that can always be easily spotted. I could add many more groups, such as the so called neurodiverse, who also can be picked on by the police, and with tragic results.

Injustice goes after whoever is different. We are back to ‘other’ again. And often other is misunderstood, and seen as a threat. And how you deal with threats is to control them.

I want us to back up a little and take in that police took over from the army and private watchmen, and that they are about controlling ‘rabble’ and protecting property. They are the servants of the ruling group. It is about council revenue acquisition under the guise of enforcing the law.

I have an essay about why the rule of law is unjust. I will just say here that for law to work, it uses fear. There’s the final punishment and that of going to court as a deterrent; and then there are the people who are our first contact, those on the streets, those who pull us into that system. Note that police groups are known as a FORCE. I’ve not heard fire brigades so deemed.

It really has struck me that police have come out of a fear and materialism based culture. They say that they keep us safe, but I wonder if they’re brainwashed into believing that, or just trot it out?

We don’t believe it.

What is truly being safe? We are told, during this pandemic, to keep safe, but I recall a card I loved.

Two butterflies; one in a net, one flying outside. The latter says:

You are safe, but I am free

I know which I’d rather be. The flying butterfly is in many ways safer as well.

When I walk about, am I scared of burglars or gangland war? For some, yes, that is a very realistic concern and it is not impossible that I could be attacked, or that my home could be.

We have a name for government licensed home attackers: bailiffs. (Sometimes they’re even attacking and pillaging on the behalf of the government)

And now, for some of us, we have home attacks in the name of health.

I am more concerned at being stopped, harangued – not by ‘criminals’, but by the very people who define what crime is. For I, like many of us, don’t fit, stand out, do or are something which the establishment doesn’t like. Let us find our unity, not demarcation, in that and go from there into an adventure of new possibilities and an equal, caring world.

————————

I’ve much more to say, which will include my thoughts on why I don’t admire Robert Potato Peel; how we can avoid using police and what a world without police could be like.

I end by reminding that we are all valuable, all deserving of going about freely and without fear or bullying. We’ve recently seen the extreme of police bullying in those murders, but bullying starts with the milder end – the right to stop, interrogate, search, take something from you, watch you.

I believe that we must burn this candle at both ends and stop both.

I remind again of our solidarity as beings, however we self describe and whatever groups we affiliate with. Let our anger at evil acts not cause division and tip the seesaw the other way.

Let us remember too – and I find this harder – that our enforcement workers are people too, and fellow citizens. If any are reading this, please ask how being a good, decent and loving being fits with the tasks you’re given and the very ethos of your work’s existence.

If it were my world, you’d all be having new employment with immediate effect.

It’s all of our world and I’m not trying to rule it (I believe in facilitation, not ruling anyway), but I’ll be sharing my thoughts – which I’ve actually worked on for many more years than three – on how I suggest and invite to build something better than what we’ve all endured for so long.

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What would Wonder Woman do?

About the terror attacks this week and what happened next

 

I’d like to emphasise that’s Kabul, Baghdad and Coptic Christians as well as Manchester.

I predicted and worried about this – that more attacks bred more attacks and more armed police and less freedom; that the death penalty has got in though a side door and that the trial by jury at the heart of democracy is being eroded. It’s not just Canterbury and London now – they’re in all the county towns, at stations, zoos, outside libraries.

I don’t feel safer – I feel more wary. It puts me off doing things. I feel relieved if I’ve not seen armed police or been somewhere that expects me to be searched – a world sadly familiar to those in the Middle East and to Black and Asian men respectively.

Fighting suicide bombers with guns doesn’t make sense – they are planning to die and will detonate rather than let you kill them. Shooting them in the torso is just where their bomb is. So what are the guns really for?

Guns are bullying, cowardly weapons that give you power over others, often from a distance. They easily get misfired and when we live in a panicked environment, we can make paranoid mistakes.

Officers in Britain – who’ve been largely unarmed till now, like the population – were wary of stepping up to the arming call, afraid of investigations if they misuse the gun.

Good – but why only just investigations? If I carry a gun on the street, let alone use it, let alone kill someone, I’ll be in prison both sides of the trial; I may stay there.

So why should police expect to be above the law that they are (ugly word coming up) enforcing?

Now that children have been targeted, police are more willing it seems. “It’s the best way I can protect myself and the public,” one policewoman said. Note the order of that.

Many words have been poured out in sympathy already, and take mine as a given, but I will focus this post on something less said, which needs to be.

Before I say it, I’d like to return to an old friend of mine, one who featured early in this blog 6 years ago, and who’s getting her first big screen outing released today – yes I’m going! (‘Twas brilliant).

Yes I am wearing long boots with a heel in her honour, and guess which 3 colours?

Let us contrast her way of dealing with problems with the police:

(Note these are general WW principles and change between comic/screenwriters)

 

1) Wonder Woman doesn’t fire bullets, she deflects them

-significant morally as well as operationally

Wonder Woman is only armed with her truth lasso

(Ms Gadot has a sword but she thought guns dishonourable)

Her plane is purely for transport – it doesn’t drop bombs

She befriends animals, she doesn’t use them as weapons

 

2) Wonder Woman works with the authorities and is respected by them, but she is independent and she is not part of a huge force

Unless you count the Justice League, but they tend to be outnumbered by rather than outnumber their opponents. Unlike police who overkill, literally; a whole squad after one person (even not dangerous ones) which wastes resources – and police claim they don’t have enough

(Don’t start me on police using foodbanks on ‘only’ £20k… try living off £30 a week!)

 

3) Wonder Woman is approachable Unlike po faced armed officers who we’re afraid to say even good morning. Wonder Woman retains her humour. She doesn’t yell, especially not at the general public

 

4) Wonder Woman is compassionate A quality not in the police and army much; it’s why their personalities and training mean that they’re not the right people to handle many situations entrusted to them. Wonder Woman’s someone you’d cry on. Not most PCs

And she knows the difference between being tough and strong

 

5) Wonder Woman is not dressed to kill or intimidate

Her face isn’t covered; no mirror glasses, no bully boy armour

 

6) Wonder Woman has a global view, inside (since she’s living among us) but outside (since she’s alien). She can point out our follies and since she’s so old, she has great wisdom, watching nations repeat mistakes for millennia

She’d also see what’s really happening, the even more despicable terror

 

7) Wonder Woman doesn’t kill or use unnecessary force

She does her own undercover work; she doesn’t use assets

 

8) Wonder Woman knows when to talk instead of fight and can transform would-be crime doers. Wonder Woman believes in redemption and forgiveness

 

9) Wonder Woman thinks for herself. Hannah Arendt would approve – for she knows the peril of taking and giving orders without question

 

10) Wonder Woman

makes a hawk a dove

stops the war with love

changes minds (and hearts)

and changes the world.

 

It’s the far more effective way – not retribution, not meeting violence and fear with more.

Not weak, fluffy, unreal.

 

No wonder Ms magazine cover emblazoned: “Wonder Woman for president”.

I’d like to her preside over a lot more.

 

Finally….

I was reminded this week of James Alison’s book On Being Liked and his first essay in it Contemplation of a World of Violence, written in autumn 2001. He points out that such acts are given sacred meaning and that we are sucked in collectively, policed as to what we can say (a new heresy) and given specific behaviours in response.

He encourages us to not be drawn into that, but to One who can show us a new way to see, one who subverted violence by seemingly giving into it and then overcoming it to say I’m nothing to do with this system; there is another way to live.

The One is not Wonder Woman this time.

 

 

Is the poppy our most sacred symbol?

Reading about previous year arrests for acts that seemed to denigrate the emblem, I am wondering if the same would be true of a key religious symbol, or a national flag. I know that Christians have had various attacks – such as Francis Bacon’s crucifix in a pot of piss, or an episode of Jonathan Creek, or even you could say, Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Did they spark off arrests and complaints in the way that teenager from Canterbury experienced last year, or a Muslim the year before?

The end of the first story seems to be that the Kentish offender was let off as he agreed to meet war veterans to apologise. It seems a resocialisation went on – is that what restorative justice is? It recalled an episode in prison drama Bad Girls where a character who had accidently killed through an angry practical joke was made to face her victim’s family. Is a poppy burning photo on social media with an alleged crude comment on a par with that act of irresponsible manslaughter?

It felt like this young man had to also face his elders (and betters) and be turned into the kind of citizen that’s appropriate, or desired. Orwell had another word for that.

Whether offence can be an offence is interesting to debate and a hard line to draw, but for any of us with a faith or who support for anything that’s unfashionable and unpalatable to those around, we might feel it unfair that our deeply held beliefs are not a police matter, and yet ones that are a political tool are. It reminds of what I wrote in the summer about the homophobic comments of a pastor about the local Rainbow Pride parade – horrid, hurtful (I’d argue more than poppy burning as some gay people carry an almost suicidal guilt burden and fear of persecution, but our soldiers are venerated) – but rightly a police affair?

Along with the Holocaust, the poppy is a matter to tread carefully on. I note that it’s an offense to trivialise or deny the Holocaust in Germany now. Yet I feel the reasons behind this German rule are different to our poppy ones; one is a kind of rehabilitation programme, a keen (in the sharply felt sense) appropriation of past guilt in an attempt to atone, but it’s also the reverse of whitewashing or glorifying the horrors of war. The Poppy is something else…

I’ve read several online comments about the poppy as well as attended services yesterday.
I agree with the well penned words of Harry Leslie Smith in the Guardian, a man who was born shortly after the first world war and fought in the second. He explains why this is the last year he’ll go to the cenotaph and wear a poppy, although he will continue to remember the war and his friends and colleagues privately. I was surprised by how many younger people disagreed with him and will continue to wear the red flower, using phrases like “gave their lives” and “honour”, saying the Poppy shouldn’t be commandeered by the politicians as a tool to steer our thinking about today’s wars and ourselves as a nation, or shunned because of it; its meaning and the donation go to better things.

But I looked at the British Legion website and I find it hard for anyone to claim that they aren’t part of the jingoism, that the political meaning of a poppy is nothing to do with an organisation who has changed its strapline to “Shoulder to Shoulder with those who Serve”. The people chosen to say “Why I wear a poppy” all had loved ones in wars, describing in emotive language the loss, bravery and sacrifice, and the use of debt and respect for their part in freedom preserving battles.

Reading the White poppy people (Peace Pledge Union) website is quite a different experience. The fact I recall most is that their annual budget is the same as the chief of British Legion’s salary. The white poppy, as its centre says, is about peace and ending wars. The red poppy isn’t now the encapsulation of 60s protest song “Where have all the flowers gone”: it’s more Rupert Brooke than Siegfried Sassoon.

I suppose the Christian cross is a symbol that can mean many things, as can the St George’s Cross. The stars and stripes might mean the worst or best of what America stands for. But if the exclusive people who made my national flag had a particular slant and my donation to buy one went to them, I might think about whether I wanted to adopt that symbol, whatever its genesis. I’ve heard feminists reclaim the cross, but they don’t pay a patent to wear one round their neck. If all cross necklaces came from a specific denomination with a particular mission, expressed in particular words…

I reluctantly agree that as Big Brother Watch says, freedom of expression means the right to offend and do crass and unkind things. BBW fought against the arrest of the Canterbury young man, though I am also not saying what he did was a good thing. But I note I would be afraid to say so if I did, and that is wrong. There are no holy wars or crusades. Much of war is coercion, money making and power wielding (or returning power) and it is an exercise in encouraging one’s citizens to overlook other issues by telling us there is a greater enemy than our own establishment, and that we must unite and be obedient, even unto death, and to speak against it becomes not just offence, but civic and secular blasphemy.

Pride and Prejudice: Minister accused of gay hate crimes

It’s ironic that on the day I finish editing my novel about synthesising being gay and Christian, there’s a news story on just that in the city in which my story is set. The front page of the local rag has a picture of a pastor set against the recent gay Pride parade. His email to the organisers has earned him a hate crime allegation with the police.

I felt many things as I read that story.

First was the irony that this same newspaper published the faces and names of men at a homosexual gathering which got raided to shame them. It was mentioned at a Pride event – local gay people have not forgotten how their paper treated them.  Perhaps fearing hate crimes allegations directed at itself, the paper now covers the Pride celebration like any other local event. Its tone in this article seemed to be firmly with the LGBT community and against this local evangelical minister.

My second feeling is that this paper’s article is very biased and poor. We do not know what the email of “homophobic language” contained. We are only told that the minister, Alan Clifford,  went up to a stall at Pride and offered an exchange of leaflets. His were called “Good news for Gays” and “Jesus – Saviour of us All”. Too true, I thought; for God loves gay people and is here for us as much as anyone else. Further research confirms the tenor of the minster’s views – that ‘gays’ are perverts who need curing – which has become international news. His views are upsetting, angering – and make me sad.

My next thought was regret that the Pride organisers made this email into a police affair. If I had received an email of the sort I am assuming was sent from Dr C, I would have written back, explaining my views and challenging his. I’d have directed him to George Hopper’s pamphlet “The Reluctant Journey” about a Methodist who, on exploring the Biblical teaching on being gay and actually meeting some, had a complete change of heart. He is celebrated as a supporter of gay Christian people, whilst retaining his more evangelical and Bible based faith. I hope my own book might assist with this too.

I believe that challenge and heart changing is far more productive than crime making. What the latter does is reverse the oppression, so that traditional Christians and other faiths feel they’re persecuted ones, and wonder how equality and anti discrimination works when they are being silenced. You give prejudiced people more reason to feel it, and more reason to band together – Dr Clifford is already hailed as being persecuted for witnessing. Two papers copying each other ended that the minster is anti Muslim too. But saying that Jesus is greater than Mohammed is not Islamophobic  – for Christians, Jesus as God is higher than any prophet, and banning or deriding that statement is not allowing freedom of belief. There is far more genuine Islamophobia in the media and from politicians, which I abhor.

I also note the irony that complaints about Dr Clifford being offensive to lead to investigation; but he cannot call the other side offensive and register a complaint.

I would like to see an end to all such offensives.

I’ve now read Dr Clifford’s response. He makes two other valid points – that the intention was compassionate campaigning, not to harass; and that ‘homophobia’ is a misnomer, for prejudice is not fear. Perhaps there is a little fear in anti gay sentiment, of the notion that they are set to break up the order of your society, and what being open to them might mean for your faith journey. It’s something I can relate to, but I am glad of where that journey took me and to whom I now embrace, not decry.

The other concern is – we have too much police control, and that police were experienced as aggressive at this event. Like the local paper, they have turned from breaking up gay meetings to supporting gay people. This is admirable in principle.

It seems we are now in a minefield where freedom of speech as ever is being eroded – even on matters where one sympathises. Sentiments which hurt and insult others who have perhaps already been through stress should not go unchecked – they should be challenged.  But not be afraid to broadcast a view lest it leads to a police record.

I am deeply saddened when people use their freedom of speech to curtail the freedoms of others. I cannot understand why those whose central message ought to be about love see a legitimate expression of it as an aberration, something abhorrent to be campaigned against rather than celebrated. When a faith should be about a better world – more free, more loving, more understanding – I am despondent that some preach hatred and separation instead of inclusion. I refer them to the Easter sermon that was preached in the film version of Chocolat.

It’s PR like this that harms evangelical Christianity especially – you are not serving, you are doing a disservice.

But I am sad at the other team too. Subverting and reversing freedom and anger is no way to be better understood and accepted by those not yet able and willing to do so. It’ll keep those Christians with feeling they’re misunderstood victims who must stick together and fight for the cause. It means the circle might go round again, spinning between bashing gay people or Bible bashers, depending on who has the most sway on leadership.

We don’t want any bashing. We want a world where such differences are no longer divisions, and people don’t not say or do something for fear of reprisal, but because they no longer feel it.

It also seems my novel’s message is still much needed, for both sides.