Hit them harder. posted by Richard Seymour

As news reports show that 600 people were detained under the Terrorism Act during the Labour conference, George Monbiot notes an increasingly obvious historical trend:

All politicians who seek to justify repressive legislation claim that they are responding to an unprecedented threat to public order. And all politicians who cite such a threat draft measures in response which can just as easily be used against democratic protest. No act has been passed over the past 20 years with the aim of preventing antisocial behaviour, disorderly conduct, trespass, harassment and terrorism that has not also been deployed to criminalise a peaceful public engagement in politics.

The Criminal Justice Act, the Protection and Harrassment Act, section 125 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, the 1824 Vagrancy Act, the Terrorism Act 2000, the 1361 Justices of the Peace Act - there is no shortage of legislation which can be used to fuck with the street protester.

The French have the right idea, however: National strikes pose first big challenge for French prime minister. That's right: some months after the French left dealt a fatal blow to the EU Constitution, it is out on the streets in force, with an expected 1.5 million people to join the strike. You can't arrest 1.5 million people and you can't ignore a crippling mass withdrawal of labour. If, collectively, people refuse to cooperate with the system, no laws on the books will be sufficient to stop them. Of course, it is a 24-hour strike, whereas it would have been better to give no notice as to when work will resume. But if the British labour movement was working for something like this, instead of merely embarrassing the Labour leadership in conference, the government would find it much more difficult to ignore dissent, while picking off protesters with the surfeit of anti-democratic laws at their disposal.