Tower Hamlets mayor in talks with police to ban EDL after legal threat

Tower Hamlets’ police chief is in the middle of two days of talks with community leaders over whether the Met should apply to the Home Office to ban the planned English Defence League march in Whitechapel on September 3.

It follows threats by Tower Hamlets mayor Lutfur Rahman that he will take the Met Police to the High Court if they do not make the application.

Chief Insp Paul Rickett is due at the Town Hall today (Thursday) for a meeting of the Community Contingency Planning and Tension monitoring group. It follows a meeting yesterday with the Independent Police Advisory group held at his Bethnal Green office.

“The EDL tell us if they’re banned they’ll implement a series of unannounced, sporadic demonstrations,” he told the Advertiser. “A ban could mean an EDL demo in the East End that would be a massive challenge to the police – I don’t know if I have the resources to cope.”

The EDL applied weeks ago under the law to demonstrate and is currently negotiating the route and how the march will be managed.

“We can request the Home Office for a ban only if they refuse our conditions,” Mr Rickett warned. “The EDL say they’ll submit application after application to stage a march if we seek a ban – there could be a sustained challenge.”

But he warned a Home Office ban on an EDL march would be an “own goal” which would also stop United East End coalition’s counter march against the EDL planned for the same day.

The mayor of Tower Hamlets has been negotiating with Scotland Yard this week after he publicly warned the Metropolitan Commissioner on Friday that he will go to court unless an application is made by Monday.

Mr Rahman said: “I will instruct lawyers to go to the High Court and seek injunctive relief if the police fail to act. We will not let the EDL or any other bunch of extremists divide our community.”

He challenged Home Secretary Theresa May to use her powers to stop the EDL coming to Whitechapel on grounds of public safety. But no decision had been made by yesterday (Wednesday) by Scotland Yard’s Public Order Office on a ban – despite a 25,000-name petition to stop the EDL handed in last week.

The Town Hall yesterday said: “We are still negotiating with the police and our own lawyers.”

London 24

Thanks to Zaahid for the heads-up

The strange world of Lee John Barnes

This article was submitted by one of our readers, Wes. We welcome any contributions from our supporters (as long as those contributions conform to the law and are in reasonably good taste). Please send your articles to us via email.

Those of us who fancy a laugh in the anti-fascist movement tend to look no further than the blog of Mr Barnes, who holds a first degree in law. Here is a guy who likes to blog about conspiracy theories, some bizarre belief in a Norse God, and of course his beloved nationalist cause (he seems to have fallen out with the BNP recently – he has had his BNP email addy removed).

For some time the stuff he posts kept me amused at just how batty the guy actually was. His “logic” was so hard to follow at times it really did make you wonder if it came from a sane person or not. Recently after reading several posts I decided to check on the facts he presented. Around the time of the BNP website problems, which the party and others put down to some pinko-leftie denial of service attack Barnes blogged that he had:

“On sunday morning I contacted the Counter-Terrorism Unit, Scotland Yard and MI5 to inform them that one of the largest DOS attacks in British electronic warfare history was underway against the BNP”.

So I first emailed all concerned and waited and waited. I got replies from both stating that they couldn’t answer if that was true due to freedom of information rules. Mmmm, he wasn’t getting away that easily – so I decided to phone the press offices of those organisations. CTU wouldn’t entertain giving me any kind of answer, but I got interesting replies from both M15 and the Met/Scotland Yard (I treated Scotland Yard and the CTU separately phoning both switchboards in turn). The replies were as expected until a very nice lady in the Met mentioned that she couldn’t answer my questions unless I was phoning to support an earlier report. So I decided to do just that, support Mr Barnes concern about the BNP website being down, so she checked the computer – guess what? – computer said no – there had been no contact recorded on the subject. She assured me that it would appear on the system, and in her words “even the nuttier stuff is logged”. So armed with the new method I tried Scotland Yard who repeated the process – but this time the guy some information, “oh wait he said these are complaints 'about' the BNP, not by them”. He confirmed there were no reports, as did M15, but they took a while and asked me so many questions I think they may have started a file on me now.

A short time later Barnes alleged on his blog:

“Image - members of the same coalition as the UAF demonstrating for free speech and exercising their right of protest in order to kill a police horse and murder a policeman”.

With the following photo

So again this set my non LLB refined miss-speaking alarms off. So I first contacted Getty who confirmed that the photo was taken in London at a demo in early 2009. So I phoned the Met, who couldn’t answer the question there and then, but pointed me in the direction of the inquiry form and suggested I try that. So I did, after a while I received a request for more information from the Head of the Mets Mounted Division. After supplying the information requested the Chief Inspector replied that:

“As the Head of the Metropolitan Police Mounted Branch I can confirm the following:

The leaflet '21st Century British Nationalism' dated 9th June 2009 shows a picture of a police officers and horses at a demonstration. In the picture it is Metropolitan Police officers and horses; the photograph was taken at a demonstration in London very early in 2009. The leaflet reports an officer and police horse were killed; neither horse or officer were killed. The report that both were fatally injured is completely inaccurate”.

The Chief Inspector used the term leaflet because the screen shot I had sent did appear to be a leaflet in hindsight – I have also supplied him with the URL since for his info – at his request.

So to be fair I gave Barnes the chance to reply, I asked him where he got the info from, I had several posts in threads comments section asking him to reply – but he never did – I wonder why?

Now I have only checked on two subjects from the Barnes blog to date – but both of them have proved to be false – is he just miss-speaking, to borrow Hilary Clinton's excuse or is a symptom of something more? For that I will leave you to decide.