Protest against anti-protest law, London, 21st April 2007
On the 21st April 2007, me and 2000 other people will be in London, doing 20 separate ten-minute demonstrations around Whitehall to protest about the SOCPA law, which says that to demonstrate in this area you need to beg permission from the police. I personally think that having to ask permission to exercise your democratic right to protest is bloody appalling, so let’s try and do something about it!
This is being organised by Mark Thomas. You can read more about the SOCPA protest at markthomasinfo.com. Basically, you have to write to Charing Cross police station to ask for permission to demonstrate in the “SOCPA area”, so Mark’s aiming for two thousand people (he’s up to 1200 already!) to each do twenty separate 10 minute one-person protests over the course of Saturday 21st April. There are lots of buildings in the SOCPA area; choose the ones you want to demonstrate about! Most government ministries are there, McDonalds are there, there are supermarkets and the Adam Smith Institute and the BBC’s Millbank studios. Show people that SOCPA is ridiculous. Thomas has produced an info pack to help you put together what you need. In particular, you have to send a real paper letter for each protest that you’re doing to Charing Cross police station, and they have to be in at the latest by the end of the week, so if you want to be part of it you’ll need to join in quickly. There’s a little “wizard” on Thomas’s site to help you easily produce the twenty letters you’ll need!
SOCPA is a stupid law. You should not have to beg permission to protest! One woman was arrested for ringing a bell and reading out the names of war dead, which is apparently a serious threat to the republic in this day and age. The law was basically brought in specifically to stop the protest by Brian Haw, who has been demonstrating in Parliament Square since 2001. The government have tried repeatedly to have him removed or deny him the right to demonstrate, and have failed; they passed SOCPA to try and ban him and everyone else from protesting anywhere near the government buildings, and then a court declared that the law didn’t apply to Brian because he was there before the law came into effect! One point to Brian Haw and the courts; minus nine million points to the government and trying to legislate away even more of our rights. The police have said that they get about 1300 SOCPA requests a year; we’re giving them twice that in one day. Get your placard and come with us!
Here’s the route that I’ll be taking. If you want to meet up while we’re there, drop me a line! Among the mini-protests that I’m doing are ones for enforcing anti-disability-discrimination laws against websites, as is supposed to happen, and use of open formats and open source software within the government, which two things probably cover a good proportion of the people reading this!
10:30 - 10:40 Parliament Square
10:50 - 11:00 DfES
11:10 - 11:20 Centre For European Reform
11:30 - 11:40 Channel 4
11:50 - 12:00 Home Office
12:10 - 12:20 DoT
12:30 - 12:40 MI5
12:50 - 13:00 DEFRA
13:10 - 13:20 Parliament Square
14:00 - 14:10 QE2 Conference Centre
14:20 - 14:30 Tescos
14:40 - 14:50 Boudica
15:00 - 15:10 MoD
15:20 - 15:30 McDonalds
15:40 - 15:50 Hungerford Bridge
16:00 - 16:10 Treasury
16:20 - 16:30 Cabinet Office
16:40 - 16:50 DWP
17:00 - 17:10 Downing Street
17:20 - 17:30 Parliament Sq
Damn, this would have been good to join in with but I need to be in Glasgow on the 21st! Good luck with it though.
37 minutes later
[...] Aq is going to London on the 21st April to protest against the SOCPA laws which attempt to restrict protests around government buildings in London by requiring permission from the police to protest no matter if its one person standing around in a slogan-tshirt or hundreds of folk marching. The idea is to submit requests for 20 ten minute, one person protests for the same day and time period and create the same number of requests for one day that would normally take a year. Unsurprisingly, given its slightly surreal execution, it is being organised by Mark Thomas who has already organised around 1,200 of the aimed 2,000 protests already. [...]
48 minutes later
Good luck! It’s a worthy multiple purpose protest.
9 hours later