Water Cannons

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

Wednesday 12th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Policing and as an adviser to technology companies that, as far as I know, have no interest in providing water cannon to the policing service in this country. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, on securing this debate and giving us an opportunity to discuss what I consider to be potentially an extremely important issue.

First, though, we have to ask ourselves why we are discussing this at all. I am normally someone who is regarded as being supportive—some would say oversupportive—of the police service in this country, but I have to say that I have the gravest reservations as to why we are even talking about this. The Daily Telegraph, a newspaper that I know many noble Lords will believe is the fount of all possible wisdom on many matters, told us on 23 January that it is because senior police officers now believe that the risks of future protests against the Government are so great, and those protests will be so large and difficult to control, that only the deployment of water cannon on the streets of mainland Britain will enable public order to be maintained. Indeed, according to the Telegraph,

“Police warn they expect water cannon will be required because ‘the ongoing and potential future austerity measures are likely to lead to continued protest’”.

The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, has said that the police have no specific intelligence on this. Maybe the Minister can tell us that he has intelligence about some future plan of the Government which will be so awesome in terms of the austerity measures introduced, or so offensive to the public, that this sort of response will be triggered. I do not doubt that there will be public protest about the Government. There will no doubt be public protest about the Government’s future austerity measures. But really? So large? So difficult to control? So far beyond anything that we have seen before? So much bigger? So much larger? More than the 250,000 or 500,000 who demonstrated against government cuts in public spending in March 2011? More than the 750,000 or 1 million who demonstrated against the Iraq war in February 2003? Water cannon were not needed then, so why do we envisage that they may be needed in the foreseeable future?

The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, has told us of the views of the noble Lord, Lord Blair of Boughton, who is not in his place today. He also spoke to me. He says that he does not believe that the case has been made. His successor as Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis, Sir Paul Stephenson, said in 2010, following the student tuition fee riots, that he was opposed to water cannon, saying that it would lead to an unsuitably paramilitary style of policing. Only two years ago, the present Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, warned of the limitations of water cannon in these sorts of situations.

Now we are told that the Metropolitan Police want this facility—but for what? It is actually quite difficult to work it out. Chief Constable David Shaw, who prepared a report on behalf of the Association of Chief Police Officers, concedes that the water cannon would not have been a useful tactic, would not have been effective, during the August 2011 riots. That makes sense. Water cannon are effective at dispersing a large crowd, or at keeping two large crowds apart. That is the experience in Northern Ireland. However, the disturbances in August 2011 were not like that. Rioters were already dispersed. They were highly mobile. That was the problem. The police could not be in a sufficient number of locations quickly enough. They could not be everywhere all of the time. They could not respond to a rapidly moving situation, where crowds and individuals were moving from one place to another very quickly. Why would you want a water cannon to disperse a crowd that was already dispersed? Indeed, if anything, it would make your problem in policing that situation even worse. It would therefore have been no use in the August 2011 disturbances.

The ACPO report cites three occasions in the past decade on which water cannon might have been used: the Countryside Alliance demonstration in Parliament Square in 2004; the Gaza demonstrations against the Israeli embassy in 2008-09; and, potentially—it says “potentially”—the student protests of 2010. On the other hand, the Metropolitan Police are saying that water cannon would be rarely used and rarely seen. In fact, Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley has given a pledge that the Met would never use them against protests, which would seem to rule out any of the three occasions suggested by the Association of Chief Police Officers. I am not suggesting for one moment that the Association of Chief Police Officers does not speak as with one voice with the senior leadership of the Metropolitan Police on all matters, but it seems that on this particular issue they were not entirely in accord.

What would have been the implications had water cannon been deployed on those occasions cited by ACPO? Let us consider the Countryside Alliance demonstration; a number of your Lordships may recall what that was like. During that, there was a point when the police were concerned that the demonstrators might break through their ranks and storm Parliament. That was a serious situation, which was eventually resolved by conventional policing—slightly messily, but it was resolved. However, the only way that water cannon might have assisted in those circumstances would have been if they had already been deployed, in advance of the police knowing that potentially they might lose control of the situation and that it was deteriorating. Who could have predicted in advance that the welly-clad, middle-class, pro-hunting brigade would be so violent on that particular day? The only way that the water cannon could have been deployed would have been to park them inside the precincts of Parliament, inside the Palace of Westminster, facing outwards. Does anyone really believe that that would have been sanctioned —in advance and on the basis of no intelligence that anything was going to happen—by Mr Speaker or the Lord Speaker? What sort of message would we have put out to the rest of the world? Imagine the images of the mother of Parliaments with water cannon firing jets of water out from New Palace Yard.

What about the student protests of 2010? The problem there was that an unexpected—I stress that—splinter group chose to attack Conservative Central Office. That was a break-away group which acted unpredictably. That there would be a break-away group may have been predictable, but what they would do and when they would do it was unpredictable. Therefore water cannon would not have been in the right place at the right time. Had their activities been foreseen, normal policing could have controlled the situation—enough police would have been surrounding Conservative Central Office. What if such activities are not foreseen? The break-away faction is a risk in all otherwise peaceful demonstrations, as it is mixed in with all sorts of ordinary demonstrators who are not planning to be as objectionable. Break-away factions are by their nature unpredictable—it is not possible to foresee when they will break away—so you will not have the water cannon deployed and in the right place at the right time.

What is this all about? Is it another mayoral vanity project? Maybe I am being too kind. What psychology is involved with a mayor who wants to have a large hose to douse the lower orders? I suspect that the timeline began with one of the Taliban-tendency Tory Back-Benchers, who said after the 2011 riots: “The Met needs water cannon”. The Home Secretary, who wishes to be the next Tory leader and therefore never says to a Tory Back-Bencher, “You are out of your tiny mind”, replied, “If the police think they will need them, we will consider it”. The mayor, who also wants to be the next Tory leader—possibly even more than the Home Secretary—but who certainly does not want to be out-righted by her and certainly also wants to curry favour with the same Taliban tendency, said to the Met: “Are you sure you might not need them?”. The Met said, “Okay—we’ll think about it”, and so the process starts. Before you know it we are in the process of buying three clapped-out German water cannon no one else wants, which no one knows when they might need to use, and we run the risk of them being deployed, which would make a difficult situation worse and further alienate those with a grievance.

British policing has a worldwide, proud record of managing public order events. Why are we trying to throw that away?