Trainspotters and Terrorists

From time to time, I have waited for my connection at Newport railway station. Why Newport station in particular? Well, because some mild entertainment may be had watching the trainspotters who gather in the Lemon Tree coffee shop. There they sit with cameras and video equipment texting their fellows elsewhere in the country with the details of passing locomotives and rolling stock. When a train passes, they all rush outside to catch a glimpse, note the number and take photographs. It’s an innocent pastime, but one now viewed with suspicion by the authorities.

Photographers, artists, naturalists, trainspotters, journalists are being routinely harassed and persecuted up and down the country. Today, there are reports of a Tory MP, Andrew Pelling, who was arrested while taking photographs of a cycle path. People’s fundamental rights are being eroded and nobody seems to give a damn.

Henry Porter on fine form commenting again on the abuse of power that is taking place all too often under the banner of fighting terrorism.

Except Norman Baker, another Liberal Democrat MP, who has discovered that the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2004 has been used to stop a staggering 62,584 people at railway stations, while a further 87,000 were stopped by police under rules which allow them to ask people to account for themselves. (What nonsense it is for the government to continue to insist that ID cards will never be demanded on the street.)

If these figures don’t worry you, they damn well should. The reality is that the UK is subject to a threat that has been blown out of all proportion by people who would abuse it for their own political ends, for the purposes of exercising control where they have no right to do so. And trainspotting?

Among those most frequently stopped are trainspotters. A 15-year-old boy in school uniform was accosted last year and made to sign a form under Section 44 of the anti-terror act. (Plainly part of any New Labour’s modernised tyranny is form filling. We have form 27 of the Violent Crime Reduction Act which is being issued to football fans, form 696 required by the police for those staging live events in London, and this week we had first sight of the 53 questions to be issued to all people travelling abroad.

For crying out loud! Trainspotting is a harmless activity carried out by harmless people. I’ve watched them. They take photographs of trains and make notes of the numbers. That’s it.

I’m a bit puzzled by the reference to e-borders as the 53 questions link is to Daily Mail article published in November 2007…

However many examples one produces of the slow deterioration of our national life, the erosion of our freedoms and the loss of respect between authority and public, nice intelligent people shrug their shoulders and say the police are just trying to do their job, and we don’t live in a perfect world. This is the ultimate complacency, and it derives from a failure to understand that a system of rights can only work if it is universally applied. That is to say that we must are all feel outrage when someone is arrested unfairly and prevented from doing his or her job, even if it’s just a bloke taking pictures for his art.

Indeed so. Fortunately, these people are likely to find themselves on YouTube. But why, why, why, is there not a groundswell of outrage? Why are Britons so complacent?