Déjà vu
Kill The Bill 1994/2021
In 1994, a group of teenagers (aged between 13 and 17) talked to Lib Ed about the Criminal Justice Bill (1994) and the demonstration against it that some of them had been on. Readers will recognise that nothing much has changed a quarter of a century later as we oppose the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill 2019-20.
A GROUP of teenagers (13 to 17 years old), some of whom had been on the Anti Criminal Justice Bill demonstration on 9th October 1994 in London, had a lot to tell us...
Lib Ed: What was this demonstration about? What is so bad about the CJB?
Various: Well, it’s the right to silence, freedom of assembly ...
Nicole: If more than TWO people get together for a rave they can be arrested.
Kate: They have made it into criminal trespass.
Alex and Kate: If a group of more than eleven people are together walking it can be declared illegal.
Nicole: What about a football match, or a birthday party?
Voice: We often have about twenty people hanging about when we meet up on the street.
Jake: Well, we'd all be arrested.
Paul: I think you are not allowed more than five people together.
Nicole: I think that there’s been a change in the House of Lords to the Bill. But it’s been passed and that some will be put into effect from next week and some waits until March.
Alex: Some of the police say that they cannot put it into effect.
Raggie: People will not be able to go Hunt sabbing
Alex: That’s what the stuff about Criminal Trespass in the Bill is about. They’re also going to introduce floating prisons.
Raggie: What if you’re seasick?
Kate: Well the idea is that you cannot escape.
Rachel: They will be able to even arrest you on your way to festivals. It is just a way to control people.
It is ironic that you cannot go to a peaceful demonstration at Stonehenge when there is an army base nearby.
Kate: The CJB is taking away our civil liberties.
Nicole: Some of its provisions are counter to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Rachel: Instead of building houses they are just using the new law to turn out people out of their homes.
Kate: I saw a poster that says that the Bill is targeting young people. One thing is certain. They won’t be charging people coming out of Covent Garden with being an illegal assembly, when they will if people have been to a rock concert. The whole thing is completely hypocritical.
Voice: This law is aimed at travellers.
Lib Ed: There are only reckoned to be 1500 travellers in the country.
Alex: My cousin is a traveller ...
Nicole: It takes away your right to be free, because the police have a right to arrest "on reasonable suspicion” that you are going to a Rave.
Kate: It is quite obvious that the police cannot handle the power that they have got already.
Voice: It just legalises what the police have being doing for years.
Raggie: They'll be introducing Death Camps next.
Alex: I don’t think we've got that far!
Kate and Rachel: We went to the demonstration last Wednesday at Westminster as well. We'd been told that we were allowed to lobby MPs about the CJB. But we were forced to walk a long way round by the police. There were 2,500 riot police. They sent us in a completely roundabout way. Then there were riot police and police on horseback. We had to walk in single file. The police were trapping us all into one small area, so a lot of people left. They had police dogs on one side and riot police on the other. Then they closed down the tube stations, so we had to walk over to Waterloo station (about a couple of miles away), and even there the police hassled us. We never got to see our MP. We went to hear Tony Benn and some travellers talking, then we just had to stand for a long time waiting.
Lib Ed: What did you see?
Jack: There was some fighting.
Nick: Some dudes got on top of a cop car ...The police did not like this; but the police discipline was really breaking down ... I asked a pig if we could go through and he said there were more police on the other side of the barricades.
Jack: There were two P.A. systems on the park and the police charged.
Rachel: Some police at first said that they were bored; they wanted the fight. I heard one policeman say, "I’m bored, it’s too peaceful.” When they went into action, I saw them dragging people along by the hair.
Voice: I saw someone being thrown over the barricades by the police. A photographer was being hit and he was not even taking photos.
Voice: They went for the photographers because they did not want to be seen.
Kate: Even the Independent reporter was battered by the police, so even the Independent came out against the police.
Nicole: Did you read the Telegraph? It made my blood boil with its headline saying that two thousand anarchist thugs had organised the demonstration.
Paul: My sister said that they all circled round ready to charge.
Nick: They were really stirring up everyone's feelings.
Kate: Yes. It was really good marching along with 100,000 people peacefully; but there in the side street, there they all were, the streets were full of police officers and vans.
I think that there were plants in the crowd to stir things up.
Nicole: I saw a bloke arrested – but when no-one took any interest, they let him go. I think he was a plant and that it was a mock arrest to stir people up.
Kate: They circled around the Public Address system so that it was impossible for people to disperse. Then they told people to disperse, which they could not do, then they charged.
Nick: There was a helicopter overhead and it was meant to be telling people to disperse; but nobody could hear any sort of announcement from it. Its presence just aggravated the whole situation.
Alex: I'd like to know who was in charge (Kate: Richard Cullen) and whether he knew what was happening.
Nicole: They were there to cause trouble. All you could see was huge numbers of police–with those new truncheons. It was very scary. Why were they doing this?
Paul: It sounds more like a war than enforcement.
Nick: Some people were smashing things. In some places it was just broken bottles and the glass in some bus shelters got smashed.
Nicole: I had to leave before the end - you could feel all the trouble in the air.
Kate: About this Richard Cullen–he said that the Police officers acted "with quiet restraint”. Jeremy Corbyn says that he needs disciplining.
Nicole: The political borders are shifting; the Tories are moving towards fascist and the Labour Party are moving to the Tory positions.
Lib Ed: How do you feel after this? Do you feel intimidated by these experiences so that you never want to go on a demonstration again?
General response: We feel so angry at the treatment. We are definitely going again.
And indeed, they were outside their City Council the following Thursday, lobbying councillors about the Criminal Justice Bill.
(interview published in Lib Ed #26)
Photo: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=85097827