Siân Berry, Green Mayor of London candidate has promised that Greens will use their position on the London Assembly and Metropolitan Police Authority to defend the civil liberties of Londoners against government intrusion and the growth of the surveillance society.
Siân is a long-time opponent of ID cards and set up the Census Alert campaign in 2007 to warn against US arms company Lockheed Martin being given the contract to run the 2011 Census – a decision that is due to be announced immimently.
Siân and the Greens on the London Assembly, Darren Johnson and Jenny Jones, believe that too many politicians are ready to roll over and accept demands from the police for more draconian powers and less scrutiny.
Siân joined Green Assembly candidate Noel Lynch and the two Green AMs at the new Banksy work in central London on 21st April to highlight these problems and the Greens’ plans.
She said, "The real cost of our war on terror is our failure to deal with every crime in London. The money spent on policing the Olympics would pay for all the Safer Neighbourhoods Teams in London for over 6 years. The Metropolitan Police are throwing resources into the protection of VIPs and high profile buildings, whilst not doing enough about knife and gun crime. The priorities of the Met reflect those of the Home Office,rather than Londoners."
"Londoners are also losing their privacy and freedom. We are the most watched set of citizens of any city on earth. More of us are on the DNA database and large numbers of us are stopped and searched under anti-terrorism powers.
"Our freedom to protest near Parliament has been curtailed and the Met Police have put corporate interests before liberty in their policing of the East London arms fair and the Heathrow climate action camp. All this has to change.
"On ID cards, the current Mayor support them, while I signed a pledge to resist registration as long ago as 2004. As Mayor, I would not allow any services for Londoners to depend on the ID card scheme, and would urge Londoners to resist the ID system individually as well.
"More Green Assembly Members would mean more Green Party members on the Metropolitan Police Authority, where we would defend civil liberties and make the police account for every penny of their expenditure on security, rather than crime fighting."
Key facts:
- Over 15,000 Londoners were stopped and searched by the police during 2004-5 – using Section 44 powers of the anti-terrorism act.
- Over 700,000 DNA samples have been added to the national database by the Metropolitan police since 2000. With 90,000 more citizens being sampled by the Met Police every year.
- Currently police make more than 3,000 requests a year for Oyster travel details and this is sharply increasing.
- London has 10,000 ‘crime-fighting’ CCTV cameras, with a further 8,374 cameras on the tube network. This is a fraction of the estimated 4.2m surveillance cameras which make the UK the most watched population on earth.
Yet this apparently isn’t enough. Tarique Ghaffur, the Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner in charge of the 60-day Games operation, told a security conference in Abu Dhabi that 500,000 CCTV cameras would be required to police the Olympics.
Every worker on the Olympic site – up to 10,000 at one time at the peak of construction in 2010 and 100,000 in total – will pass through a two-tier biometrics access system that includes palm-print reading and face recognition.
For the cost of over-policing last year’s Heathrow Climate Camp there could be 149 extra officers on the beat for a year. The Met spent£7.1m defending BAA from 1,500 people waiving leaflets. Compare this to the cost of policing Notting Hill Carnival – a mere £4.9m spent on2m people.