martin kettle: oppression isn't so bad if you remember to fill out the forms

Martin Kettle's dismissal of the film "Taking Liberties" makes this ingenious argument - that protestors arrested under an illiberal law wouldn't have had their freedoms impinged upon... if they had obeyed that law:

To see again how Maya Evans and Milan Rai were arrested for reading out the names of Iraq war victims opposite the Cenotaph war memorial in Whitehall (though if they had given the right notification they would not have been) [is] to witness an oppressive denial of the right to protest.

Well, gee. It takes a special mind to declare something an "oppressive denial of the right to protest" while recommending that it wouldn't be so bad if you'd only filled out your Notification of Oppression Forms.

Then, mere paragraphs later, he decides that the right to protest didn't exist after all:

To take a single example, of which the film and like-minded writers make much, it is untrue that Blair has taken away an ancient right to demonstrate near the House of Commons. There never was any such ancient right.

This should be the moment where your eyes swivel inwards in an attempt to escape from your head at the sheer feckless stupidity of what you're reading: the law taking away the right to demonstrate near the House of Commons is the very same law that led to the arrest of Maya Evans and Milan Rai for reading out the names of Iraq war victims opposite the Cenotaph war memorial in Whitehall. In other words, the very same law that Kettle decryed as an oppressive denial of the right that.. uh.. doesn't exist to protest. Or something.

The law is, of course, the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (2005), which describes an area around Parliament including Whitehall, Downing Street, Westminster Abbey, the Middlesex Guildhall, New Scotland Yard, and the Home Office.

Pardon my bloggers accent, but what a shabby fuckwit.