Police to ban demonstrations: GOOD!
December 16th, 2010In today’s Telegraph they have a story about the Police planning to ban all demonstrations to prevent disorder:
Police may ban future marches to prevent disorder
Police may ban anti-Government marches through central London to prevent further disorder and strain on officer numbers.By Martin Beckford, Heidi Blake and Steven Swinford 7:00AM GMT 15 Dec 2010
The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, said that outlawing the demonstations was an option for the authorities but conceded it could anger protestors further.He admitted he was “very worried” about the effect on law and order in town centres and suburbs caused by large numbers of officers being sent to the centre of the capital.
Despite widespread criticism over the policing of the protests, and warnings that the Met’s tactics risk leading to the death of an innocent bystander, Sir Paul said he was proud of the professionalism of the 3,000 officers on duty last week.
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I’ve said it before; the police are in an impossible position. On one side, they have the socialist PC nanny state, making them enforce all sorts of insane and draconian laws that have nothing to do with protecting people and property, causing them to misallocate time and resources. On the other, they have the people who spit on them and hate them for doing what they are told. Then we have the protestors who are pushing on another side, with their irrational, violent and destructive behaviour, and for their troubles, they are paid next to nothing for the amount of personal danger they face.
All of that aside, we have already written about demonstrations, how they are entirely useless and how they are nothing more than a way to keep people inside an illusion that they are free.
Now this police ban on protesting is going to do exactly what we say demonstrations do, only it will be explicit and not implicit; banning demonstrations will cause all those unenlightened people who think that demonstrations are effective to spend their time fighting for the ‘right to demonstrate’ instead of working to solve real problems with strategies that achieve discreet and real goals.
Alex Jones says that Britain is de-facto going into martial law. This is very probably true, but the fact remains that there is nothing any state can do to stop people from spreading ideas and then acting on them, especially when those acts are essentially private. This is why it was impossible to completely eliminate alcohol sales during prohibition, for example.
Demonstrating in the streets does not solve problems, so what needs to be done to reverse the rot?
For a start, you have to understand that the state does not have enough staff to control everyone. Widespread control of the population can only be achieved with the consent and help of business.
For example, VAT is going to rise to 20% in January. The people who are going to collect this Tax are the businesses of the UK. The individual shoppers are not the ones who are forced to collect and hand in this money; if every business refused to collect VAT, then the system would be abolished by default. It could happen in a single week.
Just as we wrote in the ‘Zero TRust Society‘ essay and proposal, the key to stopping any predation of the state is to convince the businesses that do the work of the State to stop doing that work en masse.
ID Cards would have become useless if every business refused to interface with the NIR and the cards; business is the crucial interface that allows police states to function. The smoking ban could not have been implemented without the every publican acting as a locum policeman; indeed, in Germany, the smoking ban has failed precisely because the publicans are ignoring the ban:
Many methods of getting around the ban have been utilised; mobile smoking bars now drive around towns catering for smoking customers, one restaurant cut holes into the walls so that diners could pull open a curtain and lean outside to smoke and with Germany bordering a wealth of more democratic countries many people now pop across the borders into tolerant countries such as Poland and Czechoslovakia to enjoy an evening out. In many parts of Germany the anti smoking laws are simply ignored completely.
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Instead of demonstrating, people who want real change and an end to the police state have to convince every business owner not to cooperate with the apparatus on any level, they have to make it so that the businesses who choose the side of freedom rather than the side of the State, profit from doing so and are protected.
In the end, this act of banning demonstrations is going to push the population towards the conclusion that we have laid out here.
Already the French have woken up and understood that demonstrations do not work; this was the key insight that led the instigators of Bankrun 2010 to do what they did… and did you notice that there was nothing about it in the news? Have you also noticed that the incredible violence and disruption in Greece is also not being reported?
But I digress.
People are slowly waking up to the fact that they are not making any headway on any front, and the tools they are using are simply not working. Things are getting worse through no fault of their own, and everything that they have been trying is not making things better.
At long last, they are beginning to sense the truth.