Comment: Back on the street with student protestors
London goes post-apocalyptic as gangs of protestors and police chase each other in the snow.
By Ian Dunt
It looked like a Daily Mail nightmare come true. A gang of roving hoodies, trawling through the snowy darkness of London, chanting: “Whose streets? Our streets.” On the corner a group of German schoolchildren, about the same age as the demonstrators, watched with abject fascination. They looked horrified and excited in equal measure.
I spotted the group – no more than 40 of them – walking up from Parliament Square, where I had expected to find the latest protest against a rise in tuition fees. There was no-one there, just a ridiculously overpopulated line of police, and some worried-looking tourists, whose trip to London was coming rather unstuck amongst the snow and street politics. The weather meant it went dark well before nightfall, and the lack of traffic gave everything an eerie quality. It felt a little like Children of Men.
Demonstrators said the police tried to kettle them in Parliament Square, part of a calculated tactic to deprive them of their democratic rights. Police said the march took off earlier than planned. Their presence was to direct the protestors towards the planned route, not “contain” them.
Who’s right? I think the police are, but they deserve no credit for it. This is the consequence of their use of kettling last week, when they decided to ‘contain’ a bunch of school children participating in what was, in many cases, their first ever protest. Stunned by media attacks on their impotence during the first student demo, when Millbank Tower was trashed, the police went too far in the other direction and essentially criminalised a peaceful protest.
That has three major effects – long, medium and short term. In the long-term, it creates resentment and fear in politically interested young people, early in their adulthood. They know now that the police are not always nice, and are most certainly not to be trusted. That’s a valuable and important lesson to learn, but it’s a shame they have to learn it.
The short term effect is favourable to the police. Kettles suck the enthusiasm from protestors. Trapped for hours in the freezing cold – hungry, knackered and powerless – their gusto fizzles away until nothing remains but a desire to go home. It’s an effective way to stifle demonstrations that could potentially go out of control. That is not, by the way, what it was used for last week. Last week it was a clinical response to the humiliation the police received at the first student protest. It was a message to the young people who felt themselves becoming part of a movement: stop it or we’ll stamp on you.
But it’s the medium term effect which mattered today. Kettling is profoundly disadvantageous to the police in the medium term. It works on the day, but afterwards it creates a sense of anarchy in demonstrations which would otherwise have been orderly. Today’s demo is a case in point. If the kids I watched today did not feel they were about to be kettled they would have remained in Parliament Square, listening to speeches. As I spent the afternoon walking around the streets of central London, the fear of kettling was basically the only conversation being had. “Don’t go there, we’ll get kettled”, “quick run, before we get kettled”, “lets break away down here, or we’ll get kettled”. In the medium term, unnecessary kettling makes protests harder to predict and therefore more difficult to police.
That had a rather interesting effect today, as the disparate groups caused trouble for police around the West End. There was no authority at all, just a handful of various leader-type figures spontaneously encouraging the group to move or stay, go left or go right. It was basically an impossible event to police, and in Oxford Circus, they well and truly lost control for about ten minutes.
I saw the police punch and push several young demonstrators. I don’t particularly blame them. Bottles had been thrown and you could see they were nervous. Likewise, I didn’t particularly blame one angry young man for screaming at them, as that story of a free and open Britain became unconvincing before his eyes.
Apart from that, the policing on display in central London today was of a fairly high standard: moderate, controlled and not unduly authoritarian. But there was an ugly undercurrent on display. Police screamed and pushed demonstrators in response to minor provocations. There was a nervousness that comes with overwhelming media scrutiny of their actions. About a quarter of the media is ready to pounce if they become too harsh, and the other three quarters want them to get even more draconian.
The protestors are no less angry and unpredictable. They are very young – the average age looked about 16 to me. Perhaps I’m just getting older. They are angry, though. The way the police have behaved recently and the laughable coverage from the mainstream media has given them an ‘us vs them’ mentality. They have that distinct sense of momentum which protest movements cherish. They have a growing self-identity. They are not done here. Not by a long shot.
My guess, much as I wish it wasn’t true, is that we’ll see something truly brutal and ugly before this thing is done.
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