Monday 26 October 2009

Rebranding in action

If you legally protest anything - no criminal damage, insulting language etc. - then you're a 'domestic extremist', according to the police, and you get your own page on a range of super databases. If you care about a lot of things (again, perfectly legally), then you're included in a new police card game: The Domestic Extremist Top Trumps Cards, in which the cops tick you off a list whenever they spot you.

I've always thought of my attendance at these events as tokenistic at best, a means of reminding our masters that they may achieve compliance, but they haven't engineered consent. It's rather flattering to be considered a 'domestic extremist' (which actually sounds like a heavily-armed housekeeper).
Vehicles associated with protesters are being tracked via a nationwide system of automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras. One man, who has no criminal record, was stopped more than 25 times in less than three years after a "protest" marker was placed against his car after he attended a small protest against duck and pheasant shooting.
Which is outrageous. That level of stops is usually reserved for black men in the British tradition of policing.

1 comment:

Lou said...

Wish we had such a cool name for protesters here. I fancy being a domestic extremist.