Whitechapel anarchists were a fearsome bunch a century ago. They thought nothing of having gun battles with Winston Churchill, bombing kings and bumping off police spies. A century later their political heirs still have a strong presence in the area with a bookshop and a community centre. On a Sunday they are sometimes in Brick Lane handing out a free paper. If they were selling it they might have a case against the local cops for restraint of trade because plod deploys a team to supervise them which is accompanied by a photographer who snaps not just the anarchists but people with the temerity to take their paper. Last Sunday a one man anti-fur protest outside a shop was squashed by a bunch of cops just in case it got out of hand. Setting aside the civil liberties aspect of all this what is really annoying to every cyclist in a ten mile radius is that two hundred yards away there is a massive open trade in stolen bikes which the cops let flourish. Report a bicycle stolen in this part of the world and you are advised by the police to go looking for it in Brick Lane.

Labour seems committed to limiting every public opportunity for dissent and policing of demonstrations has become increasingly illiberal. Stella Rimington, former head of MI5 interviewed in The Daily Telegraph even argues “that we live in fear and under a police state”. We are not quite there yet but Home Office plans to monitor all email, plus telephone and internet activity make the Stasi seem quaint and old fashioned.

Yesterday’s protest by photographers outside Scotland Yard was one of the few public counter responses to what Labour is trying to do. Photojournalist Marc Vallee cites Jacqui Smith as saying to NUJ President Jeremy Dear “decisions may be made locally to restrict or monitor photography in reasonable circumstances. That it is an operational decision for the officers involved based on the individual circumstances of each situation”. Without the benefit of a legal training my reading of that is “if a copper doesn’t want you to record them doing something they are not supposed to then they can arrest you”. That would certainly be the way that big of guidance would be applied in say, Colombia. From that point of view the only real difference between a British cop who want to hide something a colleague in a more explicitly repressive state is that the level of social conflict is not that high in Britain at the moment.

Rimington stuck the boot into Labour’s £5.6 billion plan to give everyone a biometric identity card by 2017 saying that they were “absolutely useless”. From the point of view of stopping people blowing things up she is right. But they are more about intimidation and social control than safety.

Making the obvious political point that torturing people provides an ideological justification for what they do Rimington was ever so slightly disingenuous about what MI5 gets up to, claiming that it neither kills nor tortures. If you are sitting a couple of rooms away when someone is being tortured and you know what’s happening you can’t claim to be completely clean. As for the murdering MI5 were up to their necks in getting people killed in the north of Ireland in the 70s and 80s, even if they were not pulling the trigger. Still one has to accept her point that Milliband and the rest of the Labour government were perfectly willing to tolerate torture.

It’s not just that technology is making surveillance easier that we are getting lots more of it. Labour is providing the political muscle to allow a creeping authoritarianism into the policing, monitoring and criminalisation of dissent. The arrest of the Viva Palestina convoy members or the deployment of police with horses and batons along with powers that allow the confiscation of pen knives against climate change protestors are all indicators that the police feel that under Labour they are free to do what they want in terms of restricting meaningful dissent.

We can predict that as the recession gets worse and people get poorer and angrier that the policing is going to get heavier. Before too long we’ll be hankering for decent old fashioned spies like Stella Rimington and the Securitate.