Can coalition bring freedom?

Journalists held a rally during the election campaign protesting at the number of arrests while they were working, and carrying Press passes. The National Union of Journalists has set up a new branch for photographers because so many of them have been arrested. Writing journalists who have also been hammered by Labour's misuse of the anti-terrorist laws (so misused that they were even used against the Icelandic banks during the financial crisis.)
One of the founders of the new branch told how she had been arrested while taking pictures of police action against demonstrators, hauled off to the station, strip-searched and held in a cell.
"Hands up anyone who has been arrested under section 44?" she asked, and it looked as though half the audience of several hundred were putting up their hands. Mine also went up.
But it hadn't been an arrest under anti-terrorist law. It was at Greenham Common, back in the early 'eighties. A small group of women were preparing to climb through the perimeter fencing to protest inside the base, planned as the home for American Cruise nuclear missiles. One of them had an arm in plaster, broken during a similar protest in Italy. The police spotted the group and started to rough them up and drag them away. One got hold of the broken arm and started
pulling and hitting it. I was watching from about 30 yards and took a picture on my small hand camera. Two policemen raced up the hill, grabbed the camera, and arrested me and I was marched off with the demonstrators to a holding centre inside the base. Once you are arrested, there is not much you can do. The Greenham women laughed at what they thought was a police error. I didn't. I stood at the door and shouted until someone came and I demanded to be let out because I was a journalist carrying the official identity card. In the end, I was freed. I got my camera back, but not the film.
These days, presumably I would have been taken down to the police station and strip-searched.
In Moscow around this time, the KGB had attempted to haul me off a train and take me away to an unknown fate because I had been interviewing a Russian dissident author's wife while he was in prison. I was actually in the middle of covering a Scandinavian women's peace march across Russia, which President Brezhnev had said would be given freedom to travel (as long as they carried the right banners.) The Norwegians, though not the Swedes, made such a fuss about this that the KGB gave up and let me stay on, though they tried again later. It's not quite as bad as the Soviet Union here - yet.
Henry Porter, the writer who spoke at the NUJ rally, has given the most dramatic and powerful space in the Observer to what he describes as a Britain "less free, less equal, less private and less just."
The destruction of our civil liberties during the New Labour government has been a prime reason for voters saying they will desert that party. Yet how much time has been given to civil liberties by the leaders in the election campaign? It's pensions and taxes, nearly always, appeals to the pocket and to revenge on bankers' bonuses, not to ID cards or, the expensive renewal of Trident nuclear warheads, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the lack of housing and any serious attempt to increase it (compared with the huge building programmes of the 'sixties.)
The rally gave us a series of statistics about the way we have lost our freedom and these were given by Henry Porter in his article - 15,000 people wrongly identified as criminals by the Criminal Records Bureau; stop and search measures up by 182% last year; a rise of 66% in the use of the Section 44 terror law, weird use of Asbos for preventing eccentric behaviour. Over 3000 new criminal offences have been created by Labour and the prison population is the largest in Europe, bigger than it has ever been in living memory.
The cameras are watching us everywhere, our medical records are about to go on a public data base, and there are, as often in the past, plans to cut down on trial by jury, our greatest right through the ages. The cameras are watching you in the street.
The designer Vivienne Westwood was right when as a protest a few years ago she designed that T-shirt with its inscription "I'm not a terrorist, so please don't arrest me." I bought one as soon as they came out. But the truth is, I've never dared wear it.

ends