"Show me the man and I'll show you the crime" - the authoritarian basis for speech and behaviour laws

We've rather lost sight of this in the UK with our ever expanding surveillance state, PSPOs, ASBOs and hate speech laws:

"History shows that governments sometimes seek to regulate our lives finely, acutely, thoroughly, and exhaustively. In our own time and place, criminal laws have grown so exuberantly and come to cover so much previously innocent conduct that almost anyone can be arrested for something. If the state could use these laws not for their intended purposes but to silence those who voice unpopular ideas, little would be left of our First Amendment liberties, and little would separate us from the tyrannies of the past or the malignant fiefdoms of our own age. The freedom to speak with-out risking arrest is "one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation." Houston v. Hill, 482 U. S. 451, 463 (1987).

 This is a dissenting opinion in the case - and here we're reminded of the chilling reality of these laws, a quote from Stalin's secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria:

  "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime."

 I've said for a while that we've set the police in a position where they can arrest anyone at any time on a host of pretexts - from covering your face through having a can of lager to singing a song.

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In which I agree with George Monbiot

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I promise this won't become a common occurrence but George is absolutely right about the Antisocial Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill:

The bill would permit injunctions against anyone of 10 or older who "has engaged or threatens to engage in conduct capable of causing nuisance or annoyance to any person". It would replace asbos with ipnas (injunctions to prevent nuisance and annoyance), which would not only forbid certain forms of behaviour, but also force the recipient to discharge positive obligations. In other words, they can impose a kind of community service order on people who have committed no crime, which could, the law proposes, remain in force for the rest of their lives.

I've written before about how the concept of "anti-social behaviour" makes criminals of people who have committed no crime:

I'm finding the term "anti-social behaviour" - or ASB - increasingly worrying. While the authorities deny that the purpose of the term (one of those mealy-mouthed, third way Blairite catch-all ideas) is to criminalise behaviour that is not actually criminal this is precisely what seems to happen.

This new Bill extends the arbitrary power of the police and councils to include "dispersal orders",  a "community trigger" essentially allowing people to gang up on a neighbour and get the police to support them, and the use of these new orders to speed up evictions. The result will be a further collection of bans, restrictions and controls all imposed to give the police powers to criminalise normal, peaceful behaviour such as you and I having a quiet drink and a chat sat on a wall in the park. The only criteria the authorities need is "nuisance or annoyance" - how subjective can that be?

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