The Revolution will be Televised

Those Student Riots (in full)

The student protests in London on the 9^th December will be remembered for the magnificent job the police did. To take a relatively small, good-natured crowd of protesting school children, students, parents and lecturers and turn them into an angry, rioting mob takes real dedication. But having seen the London Met in action last Thursday I want to raise my hat to them for achieving this in the space of a few hours.

Obviously, the Lib-Con government should take some credit for sparking the first serious street violence since the poll tax riots of 1990. A Cabinet of millionaires, who enjoyed a high-quality, free education at tax payer’s expense, asking an impoverished generation to pay thirty thousand pounds for the right to study at a bunch of tarted-up polytechnics was outrageous enough, especially as these wealthy politicians have not offered to repay the tuition fees or generous living grants they once received (remember them?). But for the Liberals to accuse their opponents of ‘living in dreamland’ and expecting the public to consider the cuts ‘progressive’ (when Scotland can still afford free education) was obviously just a huge wind-up. Yet, replaying Clegg’s Broken Promises election video (still available on Youtube if you have the stomach for it) no one can find the point where he winks at the camera and says ‘Dream on suckers!’ And given that most Liberal M.Ps owed so much of their electoral success to students and parents who liked their written election pledge to vote against any increase in tuition fees it was going to take a particularly hard-nosed political huckster to sell this one. So take a bow Vince Cable – credit where credit is due.

Clearly then the crowd in front of Westminster on Thursday was mad about the sheer hypocrisy of the vote as much as the goading of the police, but without the police’s skilful intervention this protest would have remained a small, if noisy affairs. Instead, after hours of deliberately ‘kettling’ the crowd in freezing cold conditions, charging them with horses and beating them with batons the police eventually produced the furious response they, the government and most of the media were hoping for. Protestors against government cuts could now be shown to be unreasonable, violent and infiltrated by extremists who resembled Osama-bin-Laden’s East London, council-estate, devil children. Predictably, and no doubt as planned (although perhaps more than even the police chiefs bargained for), the frustrated crowd finally raged against the police lines. They trashed Parliament Square and broke into government buildings such as the Supreme Court and the Treasury amidst whoops of approval.

Eventually a section of the crowd swept like a badly dressed D-Day landing force through massed police barricades and vehicles and scattered across London: torching the Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square, smashing its way up to Oxford Street and poking the future king and his wife with a length of plywood along the way. ‘Off with their heads’ we heard on the unwatchable mobile phone footage (shot by a cretin at 90 degrees) replayed later in the news. This impromptu Mock the Week voiceover accompanied a still of a Bentley splattered with cheap, white house paint, alongside the iconic photograph of Duchess of Cornwall’s gasp of disbelief. These endlessly replayed ‘shocking images’ predictably, and conveniently, had the effect of consigning hours of footage of police provocation to the digital video bin. Only Newsnight (uncharacteristically) gave a glimpse of the context, interviewing some of the students sympathetically. Elsewhere, most of the news had aerial views of the crowd pushing against police lines or showed police riders falling off their horses rather than charging their horses at the trapped crowd. They also replayed an interview with a Police Chief barely able to contain his grin: ‘Any right minded person looking at the film of this demonstration will be sickened etc, etc.’

So, as far as the police operation went it was a brilliant success. Police Chiefs understand the essential truth of kettling – an illegal, forced detention of demonstrators who are all photographed for intelligence databases. Being penned in the street for hours like an animal is a humiliating, degrading experience and it enrages those who have to endure it. The kettling begins before any violence because governments and the police have grasped the simple, mathematical logic of how to stigmatise protests and protestors: kettle + water = boiling water. Trap a crowd - any crowd – (even school kids in their uniforms) for a few hours and charge them with horses until they explode in front of the TV cameras which are usually placed behind police lines. The trapped crowd will eventually fight to get out, at which point they are filmed and photographed by the national media (and for police files) and can be shown to be unreasonable and subject to whatever collective punishment the officer in charge sees fit. In some cases this results in a heavy baton across a teenager’s head that ends in the likelihood of permanent brain damage for the unfortunate individual. In one case a man with cerebral palsy was dragged from his wheelchair (interviewed here by a squirming BBC presenter uncomfortable at monstering a handicapped man).

We were lucky not be kettled last Thursday. I went to London with Tom (now fourteen and already put off university by the new £30,000 price tag). We had decided not to march into the trap we saw being laid as we walked through Parliament Square at noon. The little park which used to have a reassuring cluster of tents and protestors against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was sealed off completely. Solid steel cordons, police vans parked back-to-back and hundreds of warmly dressed cops with riot helmets were pouring into the square. I didn’t fancy hours of cold, thirst and hunger, a weak bladder, the prospect of missing our train home or a wigging from Sarah for putting Tom at risk. She had been on an anti-fascist march in East London in the early 1990s and knew how dangerous it could get. Then we had got stuck at the head of a much larger demonstration that was deliberately blocked by police lines along its agreed route. Lines of riot police blocked our path and tens of thousands of demonstrators behind us pushed forward. It resulted, inevitably, in a huge fight in which pushing and kicking became batons and bottles and eventually fires and ripped up park railings. The police lines finally gave way and the protestors continued peacefully to the park to hear speeches. But only after two hours of mayhem that only started because the police barred all exits for the head of the demonstration. It was frightening and stupid, but has become a pattern for policing marches and has intensified so that the police now surround protestors and don't let them leave, rather than just blocking their route.

This never happened on the truly huge CND marches of the 1980s or even in the million strong march against the Iraq War – perhaps because they were so big. They had always passed along the Embankment, through Parliament Square, Whitehall and on to Hyde Park with no violent disorder. No kettling, no anger, no violence. I now wish they had tried to kettle a million marchers in 2003 – the violent disorder might just have stopped our involvement in that enormous war crime. But ....tarry a while, that sounds like incitement and I’m not even sure it’s true. It might just have given an excuse for the media to demonise the Stop the War Coalition, rather than just ignore them which is what happened.

The CND marches of the 1980s were a politicising event for me. Until I was sixteen I had never really doubted the news until the day I came home from a gigantic demonstration in London and saw it regulated in the news to a minute of coverage, fourth or fifth place behind some royal tittle-tattle and saw police estimates of the crowd put the number at a quarter of the real number. In fact the only demonstration where I have seen that the police have got the numbers right is the tuition fee march last Thursday. They may even have overestimated it, because if twenty thousand people can cause that much damage and can be beyond the control of the police, what could 100,000 people or more do?

For Tom it was an eye-opening day. The police presence in Parliament Square reminded him of the computer game Half Life, which is set in a kind of 1984ish dystopia. He was frustrated that I wanted to talk to an old school friend we met nearby and let the demo head off from Trafalgar Square, but he was relieved when we stood outside the ring of steel by Westminster Bridge and saw how the marches were being stopped from leaving Parliament Square.

The police were preventing anyone from going onto where the march organisers had dozens of speakers lined up to talk to a tiny crowd of stragglers and latecomers lucky enough not to be kettled. They were still there hours later when we had to leave, tired and cold.

When we got home he was amazed at the coverage in the news – and I saw his innocent trust in the media and police melting away as the evening wore on. But at least on Thursday in between the crap about the Royal Family there was the odd live interview on BBC News 24 with outraged students who described the unprovoked beatings they had received from the police. The next day it was a uniform condemnation of the student protests across the media. Radio 4’s Today interviewed spokespersons from the government t and the police, but no students. So much for breadth of coverage or a range of perspectives. But it is hardly a surprise that the media would act as an echo chamber for a ruling class determined to push through these vicious cuts and dismantle the last shreds of the welfare state at all cost.

But all is not lost. Thursday’s historic riot has provided us with amazing television footage and a feast of headlines above pictures of a screeching Duchess of Cornwall, such as ‘Anarchy in the UK’ (Metro, Friday 10th). Bravo boys and girls in blue – our taxes for your overtime have never been so well spent. They will be primed for the next demonstration of opposition by a government now calling for a ‘more robust approach’ to policing demonstrations. This means it is more people will be seriously injured or even killed next time. So screw civil liberties – the Lib Dems holy grail until they got into power. The police are currently in talks to move two of the six water cannon currently in N. Ireland to the mainland Britain. This has only just started.

Reviewing those Predictions for 2010

Looking back - pretty accurate. I need to think carefully about what I wish for for 2011 - I might just get it. These were the predictions for this year:

1) I will get a full time job. YES! And only have to commute five hours a day to it.
2) The Israelis will not attack Iran YES, at least not yet.
3) Dubai will use all those empty glass buildings to generate enough solar power for the Middle East NO.
4) There will be a hung Parliament in Britain and the Greens will win Brighton and Hove. YES
5) Obama will lose patience with the Israelis and threaten to cut off their aid lifeline. NO, sadly not. Obama has turned out to be a bit like a Benetton advert - great campaign, but no teeth. If he'd put America back to work with a Green New Deal (Roosevelt style) he could have whupped the Republicans.
6)They will discover a cure for baldness and find a pill for fat men that means they can eat like hogs, but not look like hogs. No, more's the pity.
7) There will be good music. YES, Late Junction still brilliant.
8) There will be great films. YES.
9) There will be massive industrial unrest throughout Europe as the unions fight against massive public service cuts. Yes, it has started.
10) The bankers will hang from lampposts. Not yet, but they came close to it in Ireland.