CHANCING THEIR ARM*


Londoners pay twice for the services they receive from the Metropolitan police, once through general taxation and secondly through a proportion extracted from their Council Tax. In exchange for paying the salaries of Plod & Co you might think a certain degree of accountability could be demanded. On Sunday night the boyfriend of a whistle-blower was held and interrogated for 9 hours by the Met under legislation designed to combat acts of terrorism.  Enter the press in the form of Nick Cohen, who has a few pertinent questions to ask on behalf of the general public. The response was less than forthcoming:-

I phoned the Met press office. You will need to read our statement before we can answer your questions, a spokeswoman said. She emailed me the statement. True to form, it said nothing worth noting:

‘At 08:05 on Sunday 18 August 2013 a 28 year old man was detained at Heathrow Airport under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000.
He was not arrested.
He was subsequently released at 17:00.’

That was it. As I, like every other journalist on the story, had further questions, I phoned back.

‘We’re not saying anything else,’ a new flak-catcher said.

I pointed out that the Miranda detention was now an international incident, and that the Met looked as if it was turning into a political police force.

The flak-catcher bridled. ‘We are not politicised,’ he insisted. ‘  We are           operationally independent.’

‘       You can’t just say that,’ I replied. ‘You have to prove it. You have to show you are accountable.’

‘Ah,’ said the flak-catcher. ‘We are legally accountable. But we are not accountable to the media.’[1]

The actions of the Metropolitan police are, to say the least, interesting here. There is currently legislation going through Parliament enjoying a fair wind that will place some curbs, albeit limited, on the particular schedule used here, most importantly a reduction in the length of time a person can be held from 9 to 6 hours- Miranda was held for the maximum of 9 hours, this is exceptional. It is possible that the police in the knowledge that this might be their last opportunity to fully use/abuse these powers and consequently decide to go for the full Monty, under pressure from the Home Office themselves under pressure from the US administration. In short they might as well take a hit to get the US off their back.

As I write the this the Home Office has just put out a statement justifying Miranda with vague, indeed wild claims conflating Miranda’s detention with combating terrorism.

The Home Office and the Met must be fully held to account, and this time a slap on the wrist simply will not do. I hope, and it is possible, that the UK authorities have miscalculated the scale of the backlash.  Anyone concerned about civil liberties must now apply the maximum pressure, journalistic freedom is at stake.

The police must be forced to answer the following questions:-

The Terrorism Act of 2000, which the Met used against Miranda, states  that terrorism involves ‘serious violence against a person’ or ‘serious damage to property’. The police can also detain the alleged terrorist because he or she ‘endangers a person’s life’, ‘poses a serious risk to the health and safety of the public’ or threatens to interfere with ‘an electronic system’.

Which of these above offences did your officers suspect that Miranda might have been about to commit? What reasonable grounds did they have for thinking he could endanger lives or property? And, more to the point, which terrorist movement did you believe Miranda was associated with?[2] 


The Met are hoping this will soon all blow over, everyone concerned with individual liberty in this country, and this is not a left/right issue, must ensure that this is not the case.




*Slang for attempting to get away with something, usually something  disreputable .

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