Taking Liberties

This is a collection of true stories, all products of the UK's New Labour government and the so-called War on Terror. It opens with the bus-full of peaceful demonstrators (friends of mine) on their way to Fairford to complain about it's being used for bombing expeditions to Iraq, stopped, brutally forced to remain on the (no-toilet) bus and escorted back to London by a horde of police vans and bikes.

The patch-work continues with Walter Wolfgang, the elderly and eminently respectable party member roughed up by ape-men for shouting 'Rubbish' at Jack Straw, Pinochetist Home Secretary. Rose and Ellen, two young sisters arrested on a peaceful demo at an airport, held in solitary for 36 hours, thrown out in the night, their money and mobiles stolen by the police, and warned that speaking to each other would violate their terms of bail. Mouloud Sihali, found innocent in court, but then imprisoned in his own home for two years. Omar Deghayes, a British resident who has been held in Guantanamo for five years and is being left at the mercy of the government that murdered his father.

Also the RAF war veteran arrested for wearing an anti-Bush and Blair T-shirt; an innocent man shot in a police raid based on a faked-up claim about a Ricin poison factory, and a major new change in the law to allow the government to stop one man from keeping his lonely anti-war vigil outside the Houses of Parliament.

Britain has a history of control freakery: in Malaysia after 1945 we separated off the ethnic Chinese population, putting them in reservations where they could be controlled while we maintained war with the Chinese insurgents outside. The UK today is looking ever more like a large reservation, with the sea for a wall. The government contends that we are threatened from outside, and just like anyone with a paranoia problem, makes that threat a reality by its pre-emptive wars. This allows it to behave as the 1939 government did, removing all our rights for our own good.

Right to Protest, Right to Freedom of Speech. Right to Privacy. Right not to be detained without charge, Innocent Until Proved Guilty. Prohibition from Torture. All listed on the screen, and one-by-one, ripped off. Taking Liberties portrays these real stories of liberty loss using up-dated interviews, citizen/journalist footage, newsreel, stunts, and comment from comedian Mark Thomas, Observer writer Henry Porter, Tony Benn, Amnesty, academics and lawyers. Narration from Ashley Jensen (Extras, Ugly Betty); a powerful soundtrack with tracks by, among others, Oasis, Radiohead, The Stranglers and Franz Ferdinand. It almost loses pace 80 minutes in, but the content carries it. By turns horrifying and good-humoured, it's being touted as the UK's equivalent of Fahrenheit 9/11, but it is without the former's flaws, and it's of much more immediate importance. A pity that the distribution deal limited it to out-of-town multiplexes in the UK, so much of its target audience were unaware of its very existence. CLIFF HANLEY

Let's start this with the facts of the matter. This director purports to make this film in the interests of the public, and yet I wonder if he's currently working on a similar film about removal of liberties under the Johnson government? No? Well, well, well. People's right to protest is now but removed.

And vital to this film is the fact that the director later was sentenced to five years in prison after facilitating a tax scam for wealthy people to make a £40,000 tax claim by only spending £20,000. One can only speculate which political party the wealthy tax cheats are affiliated to, but sadly it's likely true, and it goes to show how this director is actually a political shill. Dark money right-wing docs, there's tons of them out there, just another assault on your freedoms to find tour own facts and make your own mind up. Don't fall for this con.

Chris Atkins Documentary carrys some interesting accounts of the erosion of civil liberty's in great Britain, some of it I've seen before, such as the use of control orders on entirely innocent people and also the banning of protests outside the house of commons, though there is certainly a lot to focus on and even get you angry in certain parts. Taking a Michael Moore esquire approach with the use of archive footage, from silent films and also a cynical yet witty narration (provided by actors David Morrisey and Ashley Jensen), some have described the film as our version of Fahrenheit 9/11, which it is'nt as that film set out to show the incompetence of George W Bush, TAKING LIBERTIES exposes the fundamentally flawed and fear mongering policy of the British government led under Blair, to slowly erode civil liberty's and bring in new laws and change existing laws, that eventually let pensioners on peaceful protests become arrested under the terrorism act, putting them in the same league as Taliban extremists, destroying the right to protest outside of military basis', weapons factory's and the house of commons itself, and causing the police to swoop in vast numbers on anyone even thinking of waving a placard and most disturbingly of all putting control orders on Muslims who have been convicted in a court of law, as innocent and forcing them to remain in a designated area and effectively making them prisoners in there own home. The film approaches this in light hearted at times yet essentially serious manner, and my only criticism of it is that I would have liked to have more views on the other side of the coin, from the politicians who implement these laws, to at least argue there point, though in retrospect, probably no politician would want to appear in front of the camera for this film for fear of embarrassing themselves. Will civil liberty's change under Gordon Brown now that Blair has left, it's hard to tell and if your like me, i'm cynical and think, no, nothing will probably change, if you have a threat of terror, the best way to assure the public is to keep this threat up and then the public will be behind any change in law as long as it stops the extremists from blowing us up (see Adam Curtis' documentary series THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES to get a full picture on the use of terror and fear). Though one thing we can do, and in many respects the one prevailing factor in LIBERTIES is to keep a chin up and laugh at the absurdity of it all.

Well this is not about hiding, but about becoming cognescent of the draconian creep taking away personal privacy, and public freedoms and liberties. It is not about terrorism, but about the misuse of the terrorism act to surveille the population. It is about agenda, opaque to public perception and concern.

Non-professor Stahlman would have you believe it is all bunkum, even though it is unfolding right before his and your eyes. He would seek to curtail your curiosity in seeing this movie, with petty innuendo and obsfucation. You have your mind to decide what you see and don't see. It is for you to decide the importance of the film...whether the film is crap or not, it carries a very important message, and it is one you should at least be aware of.

Some reviewers have called the film entertaining and humorous, it is neither, Its subject matter is neither entertaining or humorous, it is serious and downright scary. Sometime in the future you will face the very thing this film discusses. No matter how hard you try to keep yourself and your family out of it (as if it is someone else's problem, someone else's fear), it will come calling. The question you need to ask is...What will you do when it does? How will you be able to deal with it, and what resources will there be at hand to help you? Well, if you do not prime yourself before hand, you will perceive there to be none.

I found myself getting extremely angry whilst watching the film, because it reminded me all too starkly that what was defeated with Hitler, is now winning with Blair and the current imbecilic incumbent of No 10. It is winning through a series of gradual unfoldments, incremental tightenings of the noose around each of our necks. You already feel it in your personal economy, the means by which you are enchained to repeatable patterns of behaviour, day in and day out.

Generally the media will not report it. When they do, they will sing the constriction of your liberty as beneficial to you. They will make it sound like a good idea; but like all good ideas, they are open to abuse sometime in the future. Freedom and liberty has to be constantly guarded and fought for. You cannot expect government to be benign, and for your good to safeguard your liberty. It will not do that, it will safeguard its own, and you being freedom and liberty-loving, are a threat to that.

If you've nothing to hide, and have nothing to fear, why then the systematic reduction in your freedom, liberty and personal privacy? Simply because, your government considers you to be a potential terrorist, and will misuse the terrorist act to defend, not you, but itself. Individually, you are expendable, collectively, you are a mob. See Naomi Wolf - From Freedom to Fascism ( A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot). This is not just happening in Britain, but around the world. See the movie and discern for yourself, it just might open your eyes.

Many films need to be made to inform a wider audience of a crucial issue that is being largely ignored. In the UK, one issue being deftly swept under the carpet by the authorities is that of identity registration and our rapidly eroding civil liberties.

If I was to deduct points from Chris Atkins for any aspect of this film, it would be one of timing. Where was this film when these draconian reductions in our powers to decide for ourselves were passed into law? The fact is, Atkins has used every last minute of news up until the film's release as source material. This issue is ongoing; it must have been difficult to know when to stop reporting and when to finish editing, so it is no wonder that this film took so long to arrive.

Politics, and in particular liberal politics, is never very easy to force down the throats of a nationwide audience. In a fairly successful move to sex up and illustrate certain points, the film gives way to more of Simon Robson's (of Knife Party fame) beautiful polemic motion graphics. These (although sometimes hard to read) add to the sense of revolution, that dissent and caring about politics could one day be considered 'cool'.

The serious journalism comes into play in several case studies involving several cases where anti-terrorism laws have been abused by police forces to indiscriminately break up peaceful protests. One shocking section reveals how a weapons guidance manufacturer on the South coast effectively 'hired' the local police force to arrest people attending the weekly protest outside the EDO factory.

The examples of police brutality, recording of the public, and general ignorance are not simply garnering antipathy for police officers. The film's makers clearly understand the need to blame not the police but those that equip them with unmitigated authority.

This film manages to weave between pretty much all of the concerns surrounding UK liberty, legal issues, our rights (as guaranteed by Churchill, apparently) without getting too heavy or legalese, or mentioning Orwell a million times like other idiot journalists who write about civil liberties.

It seems longer than it really is, because it, like many of its long-form docufeature bedfellows, it manages to cram in a lot of relevant and scary imagery and info without always resorting to the dreary voice-over-and-stock-footage formula that is tempting when writing a documentary.

Obviously Chami Chakrabarti was in the film - as director of Liberty, the charity trying to save us from pseudofascists, she acted, as always, as the voice of cool, calm reason.

The one line I was waiting to hear was a rebuttal to: "If I've done nothing wrong, I've got nothing to hide". Maybe I'll put that one in my film:

POLICE STORMTROOPER: Everyone get down on the floor! We can see you all and we have guns pointed at you!

TERRIFIED CIVILIANS: Leave us alone! Get out of my house!

POLICE STORMTROOPER: If you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide from us, no?

Edmund Brown

Postscript: Brian Haw, the only man in Britain allowed to legally protest outside Parliament, went to my screening tonight at the Ritzy Brixton and was sat in front of me. He got an ovation after the screening. What a guy. At several points, I guffawed out loud, right into Brian's left ear. Everyone else in the screening was being polite and quiet and reserved, and there, to the chagrin of the whole audience, I found myself unable to keep from laughing at little quips about our right-wing government.