Something completely different

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It’s a Saturday morning so just for a change, something utterly unrelated to anything. A Rolf Harris cover of “I touch myself”, it’s deeply deeply wrong but rather amusing.

Your normal scheduled viewing will be resumed shortly.

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Brian Haw update

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Via Dizzy Thinks – a video of Brian Haws arrest and the minutes before:

Having seen this I must say the Police do seem to be being quite reasonable and friendly about things, and I’m not entirely sure what it matters if he’s part of the other protest or not. Also interesting that he refers to his tent as his home. Did he need to be arrested I’m not entirely sure, held out of the way certainly, arrested well other protesters probably would have been for the same behaviour from the video it doesn’t look that unreasonable. The more telling question will be if he’s allowed back or not, I suspect if this arrest results in him being absent from his protest for an extended period of time that the answer will be probably not, which would be a shame.

Of course if he’s not then I quite like the idea of a flash mob of people wearing Brian Haw masks, but that may be just me.

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Tidying Parliament Square

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Lots of other people have already commented on the arrest of Brian Haw during the “tidy up” of Parliament Square – as Iain Dale would have it.

From what details have been reported it seems he was arrested not for being there but for not allowing the police to search his camp before the state opening of parliament. Which of course may be a pretext and it’s not clear just how the police went about it, but it does make things slightly less clear cut… except. It was surely within the police’s capability to just hold him out of the way whilst they searched assuming the search was legitimate. What will be interesting to see is what happens to his protest and if he’ll be allowed to resume it, or will they claim his protest has ended so now he needs permission to protest like the rest of us?

Some people have suggested that it’s not a proper protest as that would involve just going down there now and again to shout a few slogans and be ignored and that as he’s been there so long it’s no longer a proper protest. This seems ludicrous given the situation he’s protesting about is still on going, and there are numerous precedents of protesters camping outside embassies for years to protest human rights abuses – which generally have been allowed to continue un-harassed.

One interesting point picked up by a friend of mine is that Councillor Colin Barrow, Leader of Westminster City Council, backed the legal action said:

“We felt that the hijacking of Parliament Square, one of London’s historic public spaces, needed to be brought to an end,”

But who is Brian Haw and the other protesters but members of the public. If as has been reported some of their actions did need to be dealt with (pissing against statues and the like) then there are already laws to deal with that, but they weren’t used and weren’t enforced prior to this raid. Which suggests that the protests themselves were the problem and not the behaviour of the protesters.

It has been suggested to me that there are bigger problems to worry about than the arrest of one man and the interruption of his protest. A point of view I really can’t agree with as the way the state gains it’s control and sells us all down the river is by getting us to ignore what happens to “just one” person due to bigger issues, and it’s just one person and there’s probably good reason and… How the state treats the individual sets the foundation for how it treats the rest of us, and what we suffer the state to do to the individual paves the way for the state to treat us all the same way.

I’ll leave the last word to The Appalling Strangeness who has written a far more erudite piece on the matter.

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