Via BoingBoing:

It’s clear to me that kettling is punitive, not preventative. It isn’t intended to cool out a dangerous situation (if that were the case, police would release demonstrators in a small, steady dribble, defusing whatever chaos they’re trying to prevent). It’s intended to punish protestors for democratically assembling in public, and to frighten off potential supporters who would like to express their displeasure with government

A couple of days ago, I reported on the BBC’s interview with cerebal palsy sufferer Jody McIntryre, who’d been dumped out of his wheelchair during the student fees demonstration. Along with repeatedly asking McIntyre if he’d been throwing missiles (despite McIntyre saying he was incapable of doing so), Ben Brown offered the following gem, more than once:

There’s a suggestion you were rolling towards the police in your wheelchair.

The YouTube video going viral has resulted in the BBC’s Kevin Bakhurst responding on a BBC blog. Predictably (and sadly), Bakhurst defends the interview and offers no apology. In fact, he seems nonplussed regarding the fuss that’s been made about it.

I am aware that there is a web campaign encouraging people to complain to the BBC about the interview, the broad charge being that Ben Brown was too challenging in it.

In once sentence, Bakhurst manages to miss two points, which is some kind of record for anyone who’s not a politician. There’s no online campaign, just a viral video clip. And the broad charge has nothing to do with Brown being challenging—it’s to do with Brown repeatedly suggesting someone did something they are incapable of doing, showcasing either ignorance or extreme arrogance. Brown’s questioning was little different from repeatedly grilling a blind man on why he didn’t dodge something thrown at him. “You’re just making it up,” is a line one could almost have expected to hear next.

I have reviewed the interview a few times and I would suggest that we interviewed Mr McIntyre in the same way that we would have questioned any other interviewee in the same circumstances

This, at least, is pretty accurate. The BBC’s news output has been getting steadily worse for a number of years now. So, presumably, this is the way the BBC questions interviewees:

• Go into interview with clear agenda to ‘out’ interviewee in some way.
• Ask ‘challenging’ questions, hoping to get your story/agenda across.
• Ignore all responses, especially those counter to your agenda.
• Repeat until, hopefully, interviewee gets frustrated.
• End interview abruptly.
• Pull smug ‘I’ve won’ face.

BBC News should remember that it’s not Fox News. It should write it on its face using a Sharpie.

Bakhurst again:

Mr McIntyre was given several minutes of airtime to make a range of points, which he did forcefully

I’m not sure he did so ‘forcefully’; I’d say, given his condition, he did well in terms of clarity, and, given the nature of the repeated stupid questions, with a surprising amount of grace.

Mr McIntyre says during the interview that “personally he sees himself equal to anyone else” and we interviewed Mr McIntyre as we would interview anyone else in his position.

McIntyre isn’t equal to anyone else physically, though. He’s in a wheelchair, and is a cerebral palsy sufferer. This, Kevin Bakhurst, is the crux of people’s complaints, not that you were too rough in general on an activist or a disabled person. If Stephen Hawking was mugged, it would not be OK for Brown to say “did you punch your attacker in the face?” repeatedly, especially having already been told that the interviewee is incapable of such actions. But that’s more or less what Brown did, and what Bakhurst is now not fully understanding and yet is defending.

The BBC’s hardly covered itself in glory regarding the student demonstrations, disappointingly following the same pro-police, anti-protestor line as most of the right-wing press (as compared to The Guardian and The Independent, both of which have offered more balanced coverage), but this may well be the nadir. On YouTube is a clip of a BBC interview that includes cerebal palsy sufferer Jody McIntryre being dragged from his wheelchair. Of course, justification is required for such actions, so the BBC master interviewer comes up with:

There’s a suggestion you were rolling towards the police in your wheelchair.

What. The. Fuck? What next—“you were breathing air meant for the police, so they had to render you unconscious by smashing you with a baton”?

GAH.

The recent student protests haven’t covered the police nor demonstrators in glory. The former have in some cases, against regulations, covered IDs and turned into mini Judge Dredds, dishing out a particularly unsavoury and violent form of ‘justice’; a minority of demonstrators have been violent, stupid vandals, hijacking the news agenda and ruining the protest for the civil majority.

Although approximately 99.9 per cent of the recent news on the protests centred around OH MY GOD ROYAL CAR HIT A BIT (never asking exactly why the Royal car was driven straight through an area with thousands of angry protestors), but a few people have at least asked why the police response to children has been so brutal. It’s one thing to respond in kind to someone who’s attacking you; it’s another entirely to ‘kettle’ 13-year-olds for many hours in the most exposed parts of London, to hit a 20-year-old simply trying to leave a ‘kettle’ so hard he suffered bleeding to the brain (and then have hospital offers try to eject him from Chelsea and Westminster, despite his condition), and to throw a teenager to the floor and beat him until he’s throwing up blood, before casting him aside.

The reason behind these disgusting acts seems to be summed up by 17-year-old Rachel Bergan in the last of those linked articles. As someone concerned about the hike in student fees, she’d decided to protest. When the police kettled students on Westminster Bridge, things started to get ugly; Bergan contacted her mother, who on police advice told her daughter to move to the front line and asked to be released. Predictably, this was a bad idea, because she and friends were then sandwiched between violent protestors and violent, unsympathetic police. Bergan’s report notes that while the first line of police let her through, a second forced her into a ditch and beat her friends.

However, this had the effect the authorities were no doubt looking for. Bergan, keen to demonstrate her dissent now has the following to say about subsequent protests:

I don’t want to go through that again.

The actions of the police and government aren’t about stopping protests getting out of hand—they’re about stopping protests coming from a suddenly motivated younger generation.

The kind of quote you don’t want to see:

A baton strike came to the side of my face and then onto the top of my head. Directly onto the crown of my head. I felt a big whacking thud and I heard it reverberating inside my head.

I wasn’t sure whether I was bleeding or not. I moved off to the side and asked a police officer if I was bleeding. But he just said “Keep moving, keep moving”. Then I put my hand to the top of my head and looked at my palm and I could see there was blood everywhere.

I then asked another police officer, who was wearing a police medic badge, if he could help me. And he told me to move away as well and told me to go to another exit. By this point blood was streaming down the back of my head and back of my neck.

No, this isn’t a quote from some irate blogger, demonstrating in a hostile regime halfway around the world. This is the account of journalist Shiv Malik at the London student protests (see the 4:31pm entry).

If this kind of thing was happening in a non-Western country, our MPs would be all over the news, saying how disgraceful such actions by the authorities are. But because it’s the UK and the authorities are clearly trying to put a young generation off of protesting for good, MPs and the police alike are denouncing the protestors as hostile scum, ignoring police provocation and kettling.

That’s not to say every protestor is well-intentioned, because that’s clearly not the case. However, what we’re seeing here is a new kind of police presence, one where disorder, dissent and disobedience simply will not be tolerated; it’s a depressing thing from a country that supposedly prides itself on being democratic.