Adventures in Serious and Organised Crime
June 5th, 2007
A couple of weeks ago BBC Radio 4 broadcast a hilarious programme by Mark Thomas about His Life in Serious Organised Crime:
Welcome to the world of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act.
This is the law that requires you to get permission from the police to demonstrate in Parliament Square. However, what counts as a demonstration according to the police is one person with a banner or one person with a badge standing in Parliament Square for just one minute.
Being arrested for wearing a badge or a T shirt seems a tad Kim Jong Il to me.
These are strange times and we have a strange law – its a mix of Kafkaesque absurdism and British bureaucratic prowess which has lead us to the state where a woman was threatened with arrest for having a picnic in Parliament Square. Her cake had the word PEACE iced upon it and the police insisted this counted as an unauthorised political protest. [...]
The show celebrates peoples protests against this law as well as trying to show the absurd lengths it has gone to.
The programme was quite possibly the funniest thirty minutes of radio I've heard this year, but it was also a fine illustration of both the idiocy of this particular piece of legislation and the infinite patience and good humour of certain members of the Metropolitan Police charged with implementing the law. Mark Thomas is precisely the sort of bloody-minded, awkward sod our modern politicians must loathe. More power to his elbow, I say.
The program has disappeared from the BBC's Listen Again service after the usual seven days, but some public-spirited citizen has put the audio up on YouTube in three parts. Do yourself a favour and listen to it before the BBC's lawyers send YouTube a stiff letter demanding it be taken down.
