Uncomfortable similarities to a police state

The latest revelation that the police have been trying to recruit informants about the political activities of university students produces an unpleasant and disturbing reaction that Britain is drifting into an authoritarian state where suppression of human rights and civil liberties is becoming commonplace. The Guardian reports that the police officer from a covert unit says it is necessary to to find informants to target ‘student-union type stuff’ because the police cannot infiltrate their own officers into universities. In other words, they would if they could.

But what for? If there was evidence that students were regularly indulging in violence or planning serious damage, that would be quite another matter. But students virtually never take part in violent demonstrations, at least in the UK, and political protest (often entirely justified) has always been part of student life as they as young adults confront the State they inherit. There is also the very real question, given that crime levels still remain far too high, whether this is a justified use of scarce police time as funded by the taxpayer.

So should the police be doing this at all? If this were an isolated incident, perhaps not too much attention would be given to it. But it isn’t. It is rather the latest revelation in a string of exposures of police activity which are deeply worrying and have seriously eroded the public’s confidence in the police.

• At Hillsborough the police extensively altered police records, impugned the reputations of the 96 dead, and fabricated information in order to avoid blame.
• The Macpherson report in 1997 found that investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence was ‘bedevilled’ by institutional racism in the Metropolitan police.
• Ian Tomlinson’s death at the G20 protest was put down by the police to a heart attack and the fact that he was violently pushed to the ground by a police officer was concealed, and only came to light when a visiting businessman happened to take pictures on his iPhone and gave the pictures to the police.
• The police gave extensive evidence to the phone-hacking News International about details of cases that might be of interest to a scandal-seeking media, in return for money which altogether has been estimated at £130,000.
• The police and MI5 assisted in providing information (whether true or false) to blacklist construction workers, without the victims knowing this or having any opportunity to refute the charge, which lost over 3,200 of them their jobs sometimes for decades.
• In police under-cover activity, involving at least 40 police officers, police spied on environmental activists, including in 11 cases engaging in sexual relationships with the targeted individuals whilst concealing the true motive and nature of the relationship.
• In the case of Andrew Mitchell it now seems clear that the police at 10 Downing Street framed him in order to vent their anger at certain government policies towards the police.
• And now we have evidence of the police seeking informants against student political protests, as well as mass surveillance of people’s private communications about which the public knew nothing till Snowden’s revelations.

So given all that, how would one best describe the British state in its current formation? It is not currently a police state, though exposing some uncomfortable resemblances, but it is certainly enough to require a full-scale Royal Commission into police integrity and the ethics and principles of policing.