G20 protest, 2009. Photo by Marc Vallée/marcvallee.co.uk

Article by NUJ Left member Marc Vallée – originally published in The Guardian on 23 July 2010.

What will be the future of policing of protests following the CPS decision not to bring criminal charges against a highly trained Metropolitan police territorial support group officer who struck Ian Tomlinson? Will the policing of political dissent be safer now? Or will the police feel they can act with impunity?

As a journalist, I covered the G20 protests from the ground and watched the unfolding mess of the police operation lead by Commander Bob Broadhurst. I saw the violence of the state first-hand and documented it. What I saw that day was not new to me. It was not new to many of my colleagues and for many of the protesters. Many of us have seen this confrontational and violent policing before and since.

What was different about the G20 protests was that a man died.

Importantly, the attack on Ian Tomlinson was captured on film and a major newspaper – the Guardian – put its full weight behind finding out the truth. Surely this time things would be different? Surely it would be different for the family of Ian Tomlinson than the family of Blair Peach? Surely the weight of evidence and public opinion would lead to truth and justice? Surely?

A new generation of young people will now doubt whether the police will be held accountable by the criminal justice system if a citizen dies in a public order situation. This new generation will also now be aware of how the state seemingly closes ranks to protect one of its own – and, more importantly for the political and economic class, to protect the authority and power of the state machine.

Bottom line: if you or I had behaved in the same way as this officer that day, we would be on trial, especially if our actions had been targeted at a police officer.

The important thing to remember is that the officer was trained to behave like this. From the state’s point of view, he was doing what he was trained to do. The intelligence squad that came across Ian Tomlinson dealt with him in the same way I have seen protesters dealt with before. I have watched the TSG in action time and again. This was normal behaviour for the TSG – and that’s why this police unit should be scrapped.

Senior police officers have said many times that the policing of protests is intelligence-lead. Last year, the Guardian published detailed captions alongside a large picture explaining the role and jobs of the formation of officers standing over Ian Tomlinson just seconds after he was pushed to the ground – including four strategically place forward intelligence team (FIT) officers. It revealed that the TSG was acting as the muscle and FIT as the brain – and that’s why the FIT units should be scrapped as well.

FIT officers also give tactical advice to senior police officers. One wonders what intelligence was leading the actions of officers to strike an innocent man.

The chilling thing is that for anyone who is thinking about protesting against the enforced transfer of billions of pounds from the public sector to the private sector due to the Con-Dem government’s austerity measures will encounter the same police units, training, leadership, methodology and intelligence-lead policing.

So watch your back, folks.

Weyman Bennett, joint secretary of Unite Against Fascism, will lead the debate on the subject brought again into focus following the BBC’s decision to invite BNP leader Nick Griffin onto Question Time.

The NUJ Left conference will debate our response to the far right and our industrial tactics

Lindsey German, convenor of the Stop the War Coalition, will also speak at the event in central London on Saturday 17 October, leading a session on media coverage of the war in Afghanistan.

The debates will be timely given Griffin is booked to appear just five days after we meet and StW is due to hold a national demonstration over Afghanistan the following Saturday.

The morning session of the conference will be devoted to a debate over industrial strategy and tactics, led by a panel of NUJ activists involved in recent disputes.

This will lead into a discussion on building NUJ Left through solidarity networks across workplaces and branches.

We will also be debating issues around the NUJ national executive council’s proposals about the frequency of delegates’ meetings.

NUJ Left convenor Alan Gibson said: “The NUJ faces massive challenges in which the left in the union can play an enormous role – but only if we not only gather our forces, but go all out to widen and strengthen them.”

The conference will be at St Aloysius social club, 20 Phoenix Road, London (five minutes from Euston Station), between 11am and 4.30pm.

For information email nuj.left@googlemail.com

Photo: Jonathan Warren

NUJ vice president Pete Murray says the Labour party has “lost its will to fight” and only united action from the unions and others can defend jobs and defeat the far right.

Speaking on behalf of the NUJ at the Jobs, Education, Peace rally in Brighton on Sunday, Pete contrasted the protesters out on the streets in the sunshine with those shut up inside the Labour party conference centre opposite.

To loud cheers, he said we were the ones making basic labour demands, with “an agenda for working class people”.

“There are some very simple and stark differences between us and them,” Pete added. “They are planning to cut jobs; we are talking about how to save them.

“They are talking about how to win the war in Afghanistan; we are saying stop the war. They are talking about debating with the BNP; we say destroy the BNP.”

He said the only war worth fighting is the war against poverty – and workers like those who took action at Visteon, Vestas and Prisme, and the student occupiers, have the ideas about how to win it.

“The NUJ is proud to be here joining those who are willing to fight, to challenge this whirlpool of despondency,” Pete said. “We’re the optimists - Labour has lost its will to fight.

“It spends more on buying bullets than building homes. More on bankers’ bonuses than unemployed workers. And it cares more about profit than justice.”

Pointing towards the conference centre, he added: “If they feel guilty being in there, they should come out here and find their hearts again and fight for a society based on peace not profit, need not greed.”

The rally was called by lecturers and teachers union UCU and organised with the the NUJ, NUT, PCS, RMT, the CWU, and the anti-war movement.

UCU Tower Hamlets college branch secretary Richard McEwan thanked fellow trade unionists for the support and solidarity they received during their four-week strike, which had ended in victory just days before. He said they had raised more than £20,000 for their hardship fund.

Labour MPs Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell both spoke out against the current government’s policies, including plans to slash public spending.

John said: “The lesson from Vestas, Visteon and Tower Hamlets is that we can win if we fight back.”

More than 100 trade unionists packed into the London Welsh Centre on Thursday night to hear the NUJ’s general secretary Jeremy Dear and a host of leading union activists call for a powerful protest in Brighton next weekend at Labour party conference.

Fresh from the TUC in Liverpool, Jeremy spoke about the government’s lack of political will – unemployment can be beaten, but it means a change of priorities from the banks to working people, he said.

Mark Flower from the Vestas occupation got a standing ovation before he even spoke. He went on to describe how he and 16 other workers had thrust climate change to the top of the agenda in the union movement, in the face of lies from his bosses, police aggression and government inaction.

Sasha Callaghan of the UCU said now was not the time to stay silent and not “rock the boat” as the election approached – we had to shout now for an alternative. Kevin Courtney from the NUT executive picked up this theme and made a passionate speech for unions to co-ordinate immediate action for jobs.

Lyndsey German for the Stop the War Coalition made the connection between the current crisis and the billions wasted on criminal wars and the Trident nuclear weapons system. The hall applauded the TUC’s historic decision to call for a boycott of Israeli goods.

LSE student Estelle Cooch from Right to Work talked about how her economics lecturers apologise to students every day that what they are about to learn is being proved totally wrong by the recession.

Finally Richard McEwan of the UCU at Tower Hamlets college brought the hall to its feet in solidarity with the all-out strike of teachers there, which is now into its fourth week.

I came away with leaflets, posters, stickers, papers and other material to distribute at work. As well as tickets for Brighton. Please email me on david.crouch10@btinternet.com if you need any.

Surviving NUJ members at the Express titles are currently going through yet another redundancy exercise.

Richard Desmond’s seemingly unquenchable thirst for journalistic blood demands the sacrifice of a further 96 London jobs from a total of 600 across the Daily Express, Daily Star, Sunday Express, Daily Star Sunday and their associated magazines.

The Glasgow office is to lose a quarter of its staff – that is 10 from just 40 serving four national titles.

Initial proposals, full of words like “eliminate” and “review”, indicate that no one is safe. Merging desks between titles and copy-sharing are strong possibilities.

A nine-day fortnight is to be brought in to replace the current four-day week. These are of course four-night weeks as these 10-hour shifts go on until the early hours of the following day.

District reporters look set to be consigned to the history books, replaced by agency copy. Management here have recently been successful in engaging outside suppliers of words and pictures in talks about renewed contracts – where they have agreed to cut their prices by as much as 16%.

The 1 January pay review for this year was postponed until 1 June. Then it was postponed completely. On the day we were due to commence pay negotiations for 2010, the company announced its latest cull.

Daily Express Editor Peter Hill told me in an email: “No one wants to see job cuts but survival is the issue now. Revenues from circulation and advertising are drastically down and there is no prospect of any improvement. The bills have to be paid. The company has to be viable.”

No mention there about the journalistic reputation and credibility of the titles having to survive. No thought of restoring the Daily Express to its former glories.

What has happened to Desmond’s plan to overtake the journalistic juggernaut that is the Daily Mail? He is not going to overtake anyone while he reduces the Daily Express to a title whose staff could easily fit inside a Smart car.

The NUJ chapel has warned management before that it views these constant cuts with anger. We believe they herald the demise of the Daily Express and Sunday Express as national titles. But still the redundancy exercises come – and they are getting closer together.

Redundancy exercises have become as regular as Daily Express splashes on the McCanns, or Jordan and Peter Andre front pages in the Daily Star.

When Desmond bought the Express titles in 2001 I think he thought he was buying Express Dairies as he has been milking us ever since. He has paid himself millions in both salary and pension and then says the company is fighting for survival. I wonder why.

You are demanding a new direction tonight. NUJ members at the Express and Daily Star are desperate for management to take a new direction too – away from badly-managed decline and towards meaningful investment in quality journalism and quality titles.

See you in Brighton.

Unite Against Fascism was quick to condemn the move and has launched a campaign, which it is hoping will gain traction among the unions, calling on BBC management to reverse their decision.

And coming just days after the NUJ launched a resolute defence of the licence fee – a campaign it will be seeking to build among trade unionists, particularly at the TUC annual conference next week – the timing is potentially disastrous.

The editorial independence of the BBC is crucial. But in citing impartiality rules that only apply during election times, BBC bosses are seeking to absolve themselves of their ability and responsibility to make robust editorial judgements.

Of course the BBC could, quite legally, refuse to include the BNP on Question Time and not have to answer for it, regardless of the party’s recent electoral success in Europe.

This decision has more to do with an obsession in some sections of the media to treat Nick Griffin as a freak celebrity whose presence inflames opinion and therefore attracts viewers, listeners or readers.

But this merely serves to provide a legitimacy to a party that operates a racist membership policy and has a history of, and close involvement with, violent neo-nazi politics.

No media organisation should be putting vulnerable communities at risk and cynically manipulating its audience in this way, and it is certainly not what the BBC is for.

The NUJ’s reporting guidelines are clear: the hateful, divisive and discriminatory policies of the BNP must be tackled and opposed. And no journalist should allow the fascists to spout their lies without exposing them as liars.

But the problem with Question Time – as Sunny Hundal points out in a well-argued rebuttal of some of the myths surrounding allowing the BNP airtime - is that it doesn’t offer this opportunity.

Aired just hours after recording, there is no real time to rigorously check the veracity of claims and counter-claims and inaccurate statements can go unedited and unchallenged.

With a format that fosters the trading of soundbites – exactly the kind of platform the BNP craves and has built its relative success on – it can not provide the analysis and debate that is required to defeat the BNP’s arguments.

We need the BBC to be truthful, rigourous and challenging in its dealings with the BNP. We need to see the party’s machinery and supporters lacerated by quality, in depth investigative journalism based on solid public service principles.

We will always defend the independence of the BBC and the licence fee, but as trade unionists and journalists we can not defend this decision.

[On 30 August] as my colleague Marc Vallée and I were leaving Climate Camp we found a group of people arguing around the SWP stall that was selling newspapers and leaflets outside the entrance to the camp.

As we went in to take photographs the group arguing with the SWP quickly turned their attention to us, shouting loudly that we had not asked their permission before photographing them. They were immediately aggressive and threatening, I managed to calm the ones around me and walk away, however, one young man was persistently threatening towards Marc.

They stood a few metres away from the camp, talking for several minutes as Marc explained that he was an independent freelance journalist and that as a matter of principle he would not delete any photographs. The young man insisted that he did not like his photograph being taken and that Marc delete any photographs he had of him. He repeatedly threatened to grab Marc’s camera and delete the pictures himself or smash the camera.

After a while we felt that the situation had calmed enough to walk away. Marc said that they should both shake hands and walk away and offered his hand. The man did not take it and as we turned to leave he tried to grab the camera off Marc’s shoulder.

I stepped in shouting ‘Oi’ and as I did the man took a step back and kicked me hard in the stomach. We backed away and then walked away from the camp, checking that they were not following us.

Read the rest on Jonathan’s blog…

Reporters know that in working for the Mail you hand over a little piece of your soul when you file your copy.

The deal acknowledges that any vaguely sentient newsgatherer knows it is odd, at best, to ignore the otherwise newsworthy ambitions and achievements of whole sections of society.

As Nick Davies discusses in Flat Earth News, the editorial line has a corrosive effect on the kind of journalism its journalists practise. But you take your poison, or you move on.

The same can not be said for the Guardian. Like the BBC, the desire to work there for many is cultural and political, as well as journalistic.

In recent years, however, GMG management has been chipping away at the group’s founding public service ethos that is not just important to journalists on the left, but also a vital part of a diverse and free press.

Journalists and readers in Manchester, for example, rightly wonder how “a sense of duty to the reader and the community” is best served by closing local offices and cutting jobs, while handing out massive executive bonuses.

It is also difficult to see how anyone could seriously contemplate closing down the country’s oldest Sunday newspaper or turning it into an irrelevant mid-week magazine.

The possibility that this is a softening-up exercise to push through further cuts in London is as disgraceful as it is worrying for the future of the Guardian and the Observer.

Amid all this controversy, management is busy attacking the creative rights of photographers by saying it will no longer pay to re-use images.

As photojournalist and NUJ Left member Jonathan Warren says on his blog – in a post linking the issue to the Guardian’s appeal for free Flickr images of the London Climate Camp – “photographers rely on reuse fees to earn a living”.

The timing of ‘Flickr-gate’ could not be better. Or worse. Photographers will be protesting against the rights grab outside the Guardian offices in York Way, London, at 9.30am on Tuesday 1 September.

Some freelance photographers have already said they will boycott the Guardian until it negotiates a new deal.

And if the bosses don’t get back to their roots with some “honesty, integrity and fairness” soon, other journalists and readers could well follow suit.

It is highly unlikely the Mail will benefit from this. But the Guardian, as a newspaper and a group, will certainly suffer.

The NUJ has been campaigning against this attack on press freedom alongside the International Federation of Journalists, the TUC and Amnesty International.

Branches, chapels and individual members are asked to contribute whatever they can to the legal defence fund set up by the union to support our colleagues in Gambia.

The journalists were first arrested in June after articles appeared criticising the country’s president Yahya Jammeh.

Activists met this evening to begin planning the NUJ’s involvement in what we hope will be a massive showing of union solidarity at the Labour party conference on 27 September.

So far four unions – NUJ, NUT, UCU and PCS – have come together nationally with the mass anti-war movement to organise a joint protest at the conference in Brighton.

To help build support for the event we hope to hold a Stand up for Journalism public meeting in London in mid-September. Further details will be published when available.

We need to ensure as many members as possible are involved in building for the protest and chapels and branches will be asked to discuss what they can do, and what support they can offer.

While we are working towards a big turnout at the protest, more importantly the event provides a focus to help us co-ordinate our fightback against the cuts in all sectors of our industry and the attacks on quality journalism and press freedom.

Recent militant actions across the country – including at Visteon, Lindsey and, more recently, Vestas on the Isle of Wight and Thomas Cook in Dublin – show what can be achieved when workers take the initiative.

Like everyone, NUJ members will be watching these disputes and it is our task as activists to use these opportunities to talk about how we can fight the employers who are using the recession as an excuse to execute devastating cuts.

We are keen to learn lessons from those who have taken part in occupations and other forms of action, and hope to build more of these links as this campaign progresses.

We need a united strategy, not just within the NUJ but beyond, drawing in other unions, campaigners and supporters.