Читать книгу Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere - Paul Mason - Страница 8
Оглавление‘Trust Is Explosive’: Britain’s Youth Rebel Against Austerity
London. She walks into Soho’s Bar Italia looking like a postmodern Sally Bowles: black top, black skirt, black tights; bobbed black hair. Black cowl modelled on an outfit worn by Lady Gaga. Outsize black sunglasses. Blue glitter beneath the eyes. She says,
I was at a dinner party the night before the occupation and they said to me if you don’t come with us you will have to stay in the flat on your own and you won’t like it. You can tweet as much as you want. They kind of tricked me because we were on this march, and I was tweeting, and then suddenly we were in a room and that was the occupation.
This was on ‘Day X’, 24 November 2010, and the venue was University College London: just the kind of place a privately educated, Lib-Dem-voting twenty-one-year-old might go to get an English degree, in between drinking large amounts of gin and attending Paris Fashion Week:
The people who sat down at the media table turned out to be a working group: I knew most of them on Twitter but had never met them in person before. I think they recognized me from my Twitter picture because it’s, er, quite distinctive. Then, once we started tweeting, we got loads of messages of support and I started replying with this hashtag: #solidarity. I had no idea of, like, its historical meaning. I just thought: that’s a great word.
Had she heard of the Polish trade union Solidarity? Shakes her head. Nothing at all: only three weeks later somebody told her. Had she heard of the song ‘Solidarity Forever’? Ditto, but she can sing it now.
I had no politics. I still don’t subscribe to any. I’d probably say I was quite far left now—although I am not radical. I don’t read newspapers. I bought the Guardian once because there was a picture of me. I read blog posts. The books I read, apart from coursework, are mainly chick-lit.
Guy Debord? Toni Negri? Any of the books traditionally found strewn on the floors of student occupations? ‘I haven’t and I wouldn’t,’ says @littlemisswilde, whose real-life name is Jessica Riches.
I would rather read new stuff: the old ideas are nice to know; they’re context. But I would rather know what’s happening now. I can’t believe there are still people who read articles. If everybody had a Twitter feed you could just see the news as it happens. You don’t need 100 words of background.
If the political elite had understood the power of the militantly unread socialite with a Twitter feed, they might have salvaged something out of the clash they provoked with Britain’s youth. But they had no idea.
Millbank gets deconstructed
‘Millbank’ is journalistic shorthand for the unofficial nexus of power in British politics. The street, right by the River Thames, houses the political studios of the main TV networks, the party HQs, the offices of lobby firms and think tanks and, at the end of it, parliament.
But on the cold, clear afternoon of 10 November 2010, as around 200 students broke away from a student march to gather outside Conservative Party HQ at Millbank Tower, the word ‘Millbank’ was about to acquire another meaning. Because Millbank was where they lost control. The Coalition lost control of the political agenda; the NUS leadership lost control of the student movement; the police lost control of the streets.
Millbank was staffed by that narrow group of graduates who’d bought into the whole story of mainstream politics: the bad suit, the neat hair, the drug-free lifestyle led in hopes of one day becoming an MP. Now they found themselves besieged by their alter egos: girls dressed like Lady Gaga, boys wearing pixie boots and ironic medallions.
By 2 p.m. the cackle of circling media helicopters alerted the whole of central London that something was going on. Students had pushed their way into the forecourt of Millbank Tower. Police, in pitifully small numbers, found themselves squashed against its plate-glass windows. Now the protesters surged into the building using side entrances, fire-doors and eventually—after smashing the glass—the actual windows. Soon, a crowd of students were milling about on the roof. Others had already made it to the floor where the Conservative apparatchiks, locked inside, were watching it all on television.
Edward Woollard, an eighteen-year-old further education student, recklessly threw a fire extinguisher off the roof towards the police lines.1 In the forecourt the chant went up: ‘Stop throwing shit.’ The police, outnumbered, looked helpless.
Then things petered out. The students hung around a bit, lit fires with placards, painted some graffiti and then went home. But on their flame-lit faces you saw the look of people who had discovered the power of mayhem.
Millbank was one of those unforeseeable events that catalyze everything. The Liberal Democrats under Nick Clegg had ridden a wave of centre-left support in the May 2010 general election. The party’s MPs had signed a pre-election pledge not to raise university tuition fees; after gaining power as part of the Conservative-led coalition, they promptly signed up to support the tripling of fees, to £9,000 a year, and to abolish a small weekly grant for low-income school students.
The reaction among working-class school students went beyond outrage: they panicked. It was an impossible sum to comprehend. One told me: ‘My mum only earns £9,000 a year.’
Both the political and media classes anticipated that opposition to the fee increase would be led by the usual ‘student leader’ types, eager to join the Millbank set themselves. They thought Nick Clegg’s residual popularity with students—who, like @littlemisswilde, had voted massively for the Lib Dems in May 2010—would hold things together. They assumed, above all, that the youth were too engrossed in their iPhones and their Twitter feeds, too in thrall to postmodernist insouciance, to notice the freight train of economic doom coming at them.
Millbank shattered all these certainties. The mainstream media decided that, even if this student movement came to nothing, they had better start covering it as if it were part of something bigger—though they did not yet know what that something would be.
Spontaneous horizontalists
29 November 2011. At the London School of Oriental and African Studies, they had occupied a room in the library, which they’d plastered in hand-crayoned manifestos. Their demands were modest, focused on the running of the school, the non-victimization of the protesters and, finally, a request for the college management to state its public opposition to the fee increase.
In the corner was a prayer area for Muslim students. On the floor lay those iconic books: Hardt and Negri’s Multitude; a Foucault primer; Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, Fanon’s collected works.
They’d called a mass meeting about 300 strong, a young guy with a beard officiating. To his right huddled a small group of hard leftists; at the back were some of the college staff, including a few veterans of 1968 with long grey hair and beards. The question was whether to continue the occupation—they had been going for a week—but very few people spoke to the issue. One man, a young Syrian, stood up to say: ‘What we’re doing is having a global impact. This French journalist came up to me and said, this is amazing, this never happened before. What are the Brits doing? I said—what, you think the French are the only ones who can riot?’
The method, as people speak, is to waggle your hands: upwards if you agree, downwards if not, more vigorously if you agree more, etc. I first saw it used in the late 1990s by the anti-globalization movement. But in the space of ten years the whole menu of ‘horizontalist’ practice —forms of protest, decision-making, world view—has become the norm for a generation.
And the meeting we are attending is not the only meeting: there is another one going on, in the form of tweets and texts that people are sending to their friends in other colleges. This is normal in the student movement: ‘virtual’ meetings that will never be minuted or recorded. As @littlemisswilde describes it: ‘We use Twitter to expand the room.’
It comes to the final vote. Shall they stay in occupation? One of the Sixty-Eighters pipes up with a last-minute call for a strike and occupation of the main admin block. He is applauded—almost as if it is okay to applaud somebody whose politics and hairstyle date from the epoch of applause instead of hand-waggling.
But this is a blip. Most of the meeting is conducted in an atmosphere of flat-faced calm. This is an obvious but unspoken cultural difference between modern youth protest movements and those of the past: anybody who sounds like a career politician, anybody who attempts rhetoric, espouses an ideology, or lets their emotions overtake them is greeted with a visceral distaste. The reasons are hard to fathom.
First, probably, it’s because there is no ideology driving this movement and no coherent vision of an alternative society. Second, the potential for damage arising from violence is larger than before: the demos, when they get violent, immediately expose the participants to getting jailed for serious offences, so they will go a long way to avoid getting angry. Third, and most important, it seems to me that this generation knows more than their predecessors about power. They have read (or read a Wikipedia summary of) political thinkers like Foucault, Deleuze, Dworkin. They realize, in a way previous generations of radicals did not, that emotion-fuelled action, loyalty, mesmeric oratory and hierarchy all come at an overhead cost.
At the end of the meeting, the consensus is to stay in occupation for another night. ‘That’s good,’ smiles the bearded guy announcing the result, ‘because my house is shit anyway.’
Day X: Kettled youth
After Millbank, in the occupations, squats and shared houses, the makeshift ideology of the students had veered rapidly towards a kind of makeshift anarchism. ‘Don’t underestimate this generation, Paul,’ one chided me. ‘Unlike you, they’ve had to do tests every month of their lives; some of them were working for the Lib Dems and Labour six months ago, but they are so angry now, some of them are heading in the direction of insurrectionary violence.’ As the mood changed, students started to talk about a ‘Day X’. The posters proclaiming this new demonstration, slated for 24 November, had begun to borrow the imagery of Paris 1968.
But since Marx is out of fashion, and Lenin and Mao have been branded left fascists, who else is there to study but the Frenchman whose musings have become required reading in the era of Lady Gaga: Guy Debord?
Many students were familiar with Debord and his Situationist movement, for the simple reason that he is taught on every art course, and the big London art schools—Slade and Goldsmiths—were centres of militancy. But also because, as we will see, some of the Situationist tactics that failed in May 1968—basically, spreading out to create chaos—do not look so ludicrous if you own a Blackberry.
While the undergraduate occupation movement grew, the sixteen-to eighteen-year-olds at further education colleges (the British equivalent to high school) were facing a double hit. If they got to university, they would be the first to pay the fee increases. But in the interim the government had decided to cut the Education Maintenance Allowance, a payment of up to £30 a week Labour had introduced in 2004 to combat—or conceal, depending on your viewpoint—structural youth unemployment. At the time of its abolition, 647,000 under-eighteens were receiving EMA. Though conceived as a kind of paternalistic ‘pocket money’, most of those I talked to were so poor that they were spending the money on essential groceries for their family.
On 24 November at 11 a.m., school walkouts began in towns and cities all across the UK. ‘They’re taking away our future. They’re rich, they don’t care about us’ was the theme of the vox pops as the twenty-four-hour news channels televised it all. Rough kids from Newham in London; polite kids from Dundee; Asian kids from Birmingham; white kids from Truro, Cornwall. In Morecambe, Lancashire, 200 students blocked the traffic and beat drums. In Liverpool they blockaded Lime Street station. ‘The police are outnumbered, they don’t know what to do,’ one participant texted.
Instead of Guy Debord, the under-eighteens opted for Anglo-Saxon literalism. They swarmed into Trafalgar Square, off buses from London’s poorest neighbourhoods, clambered over the lion statues and chanted: ‘David Cameron, fuck off back to Eton!’
Then they surged down Whitehall, trashed an abandoned police van, covered it in graffiti, smoke-bombed it, attacked the police and danced. The iconic image of the day is the police van being protected by a cordon of schoolgirls who thought the violence had gone too far.
The police, in response, repeatedly ‘kettled’ the protesters, and at one point charged at them on horseback. The experience of getting kettled would be central to the process of radicalization. It was not a new tactic: it had been deployed against protesters on various anti-globalization demos, and at the G20 Summit in April 2009. But for most of the students it was new and shocking: you can tell this from the vividness of the language, the way first-person accounts spark into life when they describe it. Taught throughout their lives that their rights were primarily individual, not collective, but at the same time inalienable, kettling seemed to many like an offence against the person. Sophie Burge, aged seventeen:
We waited and waited. Kettling does work when you have no choice about where you move; you start to feel very desolate and very depressed. People were crying. It was horrible; it was freezing and there were no toilets … we all just had to wee in a specific corner.2
Activist Jonathan Moses spelled out the political conclusion many of them drew: ‘that property comes before people; the rights of the former supersede those of the latter’.3
With the momentum and the radicalism increasing, the school students staged a Day X-2 on 30 November, again clashing with police and attacking property in central London. Now the stage was set for Day X-3: the demo to coincide with the final parliamentary vote on the fee increase.
The Dubstep Rebellion
9 December 2010. I start ‘Day X-3’ in the occupation at UCL, where young men are fashioning makeshift armour for their arms and shins out of cardboard. Sleeping on the floor I find Chris, a school student from Norwich who has ‘just turned up’ for the demonstration. He doesn’t know anybody at UCL, but they have let him stay the night. ‘I’m from the lower middle class, you could say. Not poor enough to get a grant under the new system so, though I was hoping to go to university, I really might not go.’
Lingering at the entrance to the occupation are four young boys from a nearby Camden estate: three black, one white. They are still wearing school uniform trousers, though they have swapped blazers for hoodies and face masks. They avoid my gaze. They smoke. When I catch the eye of one, he snickers wildly, staring into the distance. Though there are hours to go, they’re twitching in anticipation of the violence to come.
At 2 p.m. about 40,000 people set out peacefully in the biting cold, marching from the University of London’s Senate House to Parliament Square. At the Square they deviate from the agreed route, break through a line of cops who try half-heartedly to baton them, and tear down the six-foot metal fences protecting the grassy centre.
Then they dance. The hippy in charge of the sound system is from an eco-farm and has, he tells me, been trying to play ‘politically right-on reggae’. However, a new crowd—in which the oldest person is maybe seventeen—takes over the crucial jack plug. A young black girl inserts this plug into her Blackberry (iPhones are out for this demographic) and pumps out the dubstep. Or what sounds to me like dubstep.
Young men, mainly black, grab each other around the head and form a circular dance to the digital beat—lit, as dusk gathers, by the distinctly analog glow of a bench they have set on fire.
While a good half of the marchers are undergraduates from the most militant college occupations—UCL, SOAS, Leeds, Sussex—the key phenomenon, politically, is the presence of youth: banlieue-style youth from places like Croydon and Peckham, or the council estates of Camden, Islington and Hackney.
Meanwhile, the pushing and shoving at the police line has turned into fighting. There are of course the anarchist, Black Bloc types, there are the socialist left groups—but the main offensive actions taken to break through police lines are by small groups of young men dressed in the hip-hop fashions of working-class estates.
Some of them will appear a few days later in the News of the World, their mugshots released by the Met: a black kid in a Russian fur hat; other young black boys in hoodies. Exhilarated eyes, very few bothering to mask up.
As it gets dark, there are just two lines of riot police and about thirty yards between the students and the parliament building. The Met has adopted a first-ditch-equals-last-ditch defence: Britain’s only full-time riot squad, the Territorial Support Group, is all that’s preventing the youth from clambering over the medieval walls of Westminster.
Inside parliament, MPs are debating the fee increase. Outside, getting nowhere with the TSG, the students change direction. They swarm up Victoria Street, which leads away from parliament, pushing back a line of mounted police and breaking through police attempts to form a cordon. But then, in successive charges, both the mounted police and the riot squads fight back. There is now toe-to-toe confrontation.
Heavy objects land among the police, amid a much larger volume of paint, fireworks and flash-bangs. At one point the horses are unable to cope, and a policeman falls off his mount, getting dragged away on a stretcher by colleagues.
A girl steps through a break in the police line and gets batoned. She crumples to the ground, where the police continue beating her. Afterwards she stays there, inert for a long, long time, so that the press photographers in their crash helmets stop shooting and cluster around her. She doesn’t speak. Her face is screwed up, disbelief mingled with terror.
At the point of the wedge, alongside the estate youth, are the self-styled ‘Book Bloc’. They’ve gone into battle in green helmets with mattress-sized mockups of book covers: Endgame, by Samuel Beckett; Negative Dialectics by Theodore Adorno; Debord, of course; and—for levity—the tales of an unruly school-kid, Just William by Richmal Crompton. They’ve copied this tactic from a group of Italian students, who are at the same moment lobbing firebombs into the side-streets of Rome.
Soon the books-cum-shields are torn out of their hands, and it is metal and bone and Kevlar that is making that clunk-clunk sound. Together with the constant strobe of camera flashes and the throb of the dubstep —or what sounds like dubstep—it’s become like a macabre outdoor nightclub.
For the police this is an ‘only just’ moment: a couple of officers get knocked to the ground and the students break through. Reinforcements arrive: dismounted motorcycle cops, many without helmets but wielding long batons. One runs straight at me, face snarling. But he’s aiming for someone else. Clunk.
I decide to get out. There’s one of the Fleet Street photographers covered in green paint; his Nikon’s covered in paint too: irreparable. He shows it off to the others. It’s like shift work, because as we’re pulling out others are going in. The journos are clad in black, like many of the protesters, and we smile at each other as if this is somehow funny.
On the east corner of Parliament Square, people climb up to smash the windows of the HM Revenue and Customs building. On the west side they scale the façade of the Supreme Court, smash the leaded windows and push lighted materials inside. On the wall, someone sprays Debord’s aphorism: ‘Be Realistic—Demand the Impossible’.
Outside a pub there is a line of injured protesters being triaged by ambulance crews. Everybody has a head wound and a white bandage. And now the kettling’s started. Some will end up trapped for hours in the freezing cold. Those who can escape go back to the student occupations to discuss where the campaign goes next.
By nightfall a student called Alfie Meadows is undergoing brain surgery after allegedly being batoned by police. Television footage shows another student—Jody Mclntyre, who has cerebral palsy—being dragged from his wheelchair by an irate policeman, who’s being restrained by his own colleagues. Elsewhere, in the West End, a breakaway group has surrounded a vintage Rolls Royce carrying Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall to a function at the Palladium Theatre. As the protesters rock the car to and fro and throw paint bombs at it, somebody leans through the open window and prods Camilla with a stick. The royal protection squad, it emerges later, were on the point of drawing their guns.
A few hours later, after I’ve blogged all this under the headline ‘The Dubstep Rebellion’, some protesters make vigorous representations to me via Twitter: they present a detailed playlist of the tracks blasted out in Parliament Square, which proves the music was not dubstep but grime.4 It was the Grime Rebellion, doh.
Grime is music seen as so dangerous that it’s effectively banned in the clubs teenagers frequent, and its performers shunned by all but pirate radio stations. Grime is hip-hop with a Cockney accent and a dirty bass-line; its most important instrument is the cracked-vowel voice of the London street kid. The same kind of voice that is now heard gabbling with rage on the evening news: ‘We’re from the slums of London, yeah, and how do they expect us to pay uni fees—of nine thousand pounds? And the maintenance allowance: that’s what’s keeping us in college. What’s stopping us from doing drug deals on the streets anymore? Nothing.’5
This, it turns out, is the most prescient statement made that day.
At six o’clock the next evening, with the Met police chief, Paul Stephenson, facing calls for his resignation over the breakdown of law and order, I return to the scene of the battle. Whitehall and Parliament Square are still strewn with rubble and missiles; boarded-up windows line the route and the atmosphere is tense, the police on edge.
Suddenly, out of the dark comes the sound of drumming and wailing. Seven or eight figures emerge, dressed in black and wearing elaborate crows’-head masks. They do a dance across three lanes of stalled traffic into the middle of Parliament Square and approach the statue of Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George. And they lay a black wreath.
‘We’re here to mourn the death of the Liberal Party,’ croaks the guy holding the drum, as he beats out a tocsin surrounded by the masked, mainly female, wailers. This goes on for about five minutes. At no point do they attempt to photograph, film or otherwise record the performance. It is purely gestural, vanishing into obscurity the moment it’s over. Though the area is swarming with police, none interferes.
‘We’re art students from Slade and Goldsmiths,’ explains the drummer. Why are they doing this? ‘We felt we had to.’ Did they, I ask, know about the teach-in at the National Gallery, at the height of last night’s riot?
‘Yes, that was us: the Hive Manifesto.’
The Hive Manifesto
A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of debt slaves refusing to pay. All the powers within Europe have entered into a holy alliance to regenerate a failing economy, to realise a lethal dream of returning to business as usual, and to level the education and culture, to transform the educational and cultural sectors into a consumer society success story.6
At 4:45 p.m. on Day X-3, while clashes raged around parliament, art students and their professors had invaded the National Gallery and staged a sit-in beneath Manet’s Execution of Maximilian. Earlier they had held an impromptu rave on Ai Weiwei’s pebble sculpture at the Tate Modern. After a couple of lecturers gave speeches about the meaning of modern art, the students began scribbling. They produced The Nomadic Hive Manifesto, a parody of Marx and Engels which quickly becomes a bullet-point list of exhortations for protesters to remain non-hierarchical and fluid, to communicate ‘using dancing and pheromones’.
The point about the Hive Manifesto is not that it is in any way a special literary document but that it sums up the change that people were feeling globally by late 2010, especially youth:
If you listen carefully, all that moaning, the sound that can be heard just behind the drone of everyday life, cars and the slurping of lattes, has become a little more urgent: a humming of dissatisfaction becomes dissent. The Holy Alliance fears that this noise has become a song on the lips of all?7
The art students had grasped that the fees protest would catalyze a far wider dissatisfaction with the effects of the economic crisis. The experience would show that refusal to cooperate with a system could be a more effective method of fighting it than an ordinary political campaign.
On the website Critical Legal Thinking, which published the Hive text, PhD student Rory Rowan surveyed the experience of kettling. Bearing in mind the tendency of kettling to provoke people into anger, and to provide a negative spectacle for the heliborne TV cameras, he suggested:
A form of protest is needed that places dispersal over concentration, mobility over stasis and perhaps even disruption over symbolism. If multiple smaller mobile groups were to simultaneously occupy key strategic sites and disrupt vital processes, the momentum of symbolical opposition could be maintained without the police being able to herd opposition toward spectacle.8
Now, once the vote in parliament was over and the student movement had demobilized, sections of the discontented public seemed to sense that the moment for such protests had arrived.
Tactics of the powerless
The first UK Uncut action took place on Wednesday, 27 October 2010, when about forty protesters occupied and closed down a Vodafone store in London’s Oxford Street. A mixture of old and young, they crime-taped the entrance, holding up banners claiming that Vodafone’s unpaid tax bill—reported to be £6 billion—was just short of the £7 billion of public spending cuts now being made. Three days later, on Saturday, 30 October, there were similar actions in fifteen UK cities. By 18 December the movement reached a peak, with actions in over seventy UK towns and cities.
The core activists were committed horizontalists who had learned their methods in the Climate Camp movement. They would occupy a store, create a narrative there (for example, declaring it to be a ‘library’ and handing out books), and then get thrown out—displaying enough resistance to sabotage the business operation, but not usually enough to get arrested.
Though it coincided with the student unrest, the most remarkable thing about Uncut was its spontaneous replication by groups with no connection to the students nor to the anarchist protesters. The spectacle of grandmothers sitting down in the Boots pharmacy of quiet provincial towns, arm-in-arm with their teenage granddaughters, alarmed public-order specialists because there was little or no sanction they could bring against it.
The think tank Policy Exchange convened a panel of law-and-order specialists to ask: ‘Do these actions portend a dangerous new trend towards the use of physical force? If so, what can and should be done to prevent this phenomenon becoming a regular feature of the national landscape?’9
Actually, the answer is: very little. Ewa Jasiewicz, a thirty-something veteran of the anti-globalization movement, has been involved with UK Uncut from the start. An organizer for the Unite Union, she’s been jailed and deported twice from Israel, most recently during the Gaza Flotilla of May 2010, and helped to set up an oil workers’ union in Iraq after 2003. She is therefore used to being part of an activist minority, and interprets the recent adoption of radical tactics by large numbers of people as the result of a new feeling of powerlessness:
I feel like there is a lot of reaction to ‘the future’: there is a sense that the present is so bad, and conditions of austerity being imposed, pensions undermined, services undermined—that we can’t have any more of this. And if this is what the present is, what’s the future?
Social media, she believes, have been the key to turning what was once a niche, lifestyle form of protest into an accessible method for everybody else:
The anti-road movement of the late 1990s didn’t ask you to sign up to an ideology, just to put your body in the way of a JCB. The difference is that then, we didn’t have a media strategy. UK Uncut is the best example of social media carrying ideas into maximum participation on a localized, decentralized scale.
Horizontalism, she argues, provides the most useful methods for people with no power. If trade-union activists and grandmothers alike were drawn to dressing up and committing civil disobedience in the high streets of small towns, it was because they saw the old ways of trying to influence politics as closed off. Jasiewicz describes succinctly what this kind of protest is designed to achieve: ‘A lot of our resistance as unarmed and powerless people is based on creating moments where the state is forced to respond to a scenario we are putting forward that is problematic for them; that creates a crisis of legitimacy.’
UK Uncut actions were ‘fun, good-natured’, easy to join in with—but they also allowed people to ‘see the repression in their lives’, says Jasiewicz.
Once you can take the struggle out of the corridors of power and distil it—so that you can see capitalism, personified, in your high street—it becomes more tangible. It becomes easier to respond to an oppression you could not name. Now you can. And social media says to people who are alienated and disparate: you are like me; these things are everywhere.
I ask Jasiewicz the same questions I asked Riches: what she reads, and what has influenced the way she thinks and acts. It turns out that, like many fellow activists, she has a deep hostility to theory. ‘I don’t like talking about what I think; it’s bullshit. It’s this action, this protest, Iraq, Palestine, Deptford’—where she organized a post-riot cleanup and solidarity demo in August 2011. ‘And even social media is not the central thing. The things that are central are off the radar: social interaction, relationship building, trust. Talk to people. Trust is explosive.’
In the space of six months, the impact of austerity in Britain had created a mass constituency for these ideas, above all among school students and undergraduates. But the old, hierarchical forms of protest had not gone away. Slowly, the trade unions moved from lobbying to action. On 26 March 2011 they called what would become the biggest trade-union demo in post-war history.
However, just as the events in Tahrir Square had demonstrated the potential for synthesis between students, workers and urban poor, 26 March would be a case study in the lack of synthesis. It would throw the horizontalist movement in Britain into a crisis of direction that it is still struggling to recover from.
Three tribes go to war
London, 26 March 2011. It’s clear early on it’s going to be massive. The leaders of Unison—which represents local government and health workers—have massively mobilized their people, bringing in whole trains and hundreds of coachloads of workers, printing t-shirts and professional-looking banners. On the south bank of the Thames, a group called ‘Croydon Filipino Nurses’ is lining up for a photo call. Further on, under a banner saying ‘Nurses Uncut’, a group of women—longtime workmates from various hospitals—meet up, ready to march. They’ve organized it on Facebook: 450 have signed up, some not even in a union. They’ve spent the past few days reassuring each other because of the lurid tabloid headlines about anarchists and violence. ‘There won’t be any trouble,’ they tell each other.
Getting across the river is hard: some bridges are closed, others crammed with people. Shoulder to shoulder are teachers from Devon, firefighters in red t-shirts, balloon-holding binmen from Glasgow, Norwich, Gloucester; home helps from Renfrewshire. They shuffle their way across Waterloo Bridge. The demonstration is already massing along the Thames and you can hear whistles, drums and vuvuzelas.
By the time the march sets off, with a clear half million on the streets, it has turned into the biggest trade-union demo for more than thirty years.
Among the marchers, you can see what the new mood created by the student movement and UK Uncut has achieved. ‘Where’s Ed Miliband?’ representatives from a special needs school—students and teachers linked arm-in-arm—ask me. ‘We don’t trust him! He needs to get his act together. It’s the bankers, the profit system. The big companies should stop evading tax!’ There’s a festive atmosphere. The schoolkids are singing a re-scripted version of ’I Will Survive’.
But at Piccadilly Circus, the edges of the demo are swarming with youths dressed like members of the anarchist Black Bloc. Really young kids: buzzing with the newness of it all, some change from their normal clothes into black hoodies and scarves right there in front of the police. The police begin to talk urgently into their walkie-talkies.
A veteran riot photographer texts me with the time and place where it will kick off: Regent Street, a vast curve of nineteenth-century architecture and luxury retail. When I get there, it’s deserted. In the distance I can make out a tight phalanx of black-clad protesters, about 400 strong, filling the width of the street. They tramp forward, masked, some carrying the red-and-black flags of anarcho-syndicalism. This, one of them tells me later, is the biggest Black Bloc ever assembled in the UK. And though there are certainly numerous anarchists from Europe here, it is the students and school students from December who have really swelled the numbers.
They veer off into a side-street and start lobbing paint, billiard balls and smoke flares at various boutique shops: Victorinox gets it, so does an art gallery. There are only about twenty police around, none in riot gear. In a futile gesture, they try to protect the Victorinox shop, receiving the full barrage of paint, bottles and—according to the Met’s later report—an acid-filled light bulb.
It’s mayhem. And it is clear the police tactic is not to deploy fully and fight the protesters. For the next few hours the Black Bloc will roam around the West End, attacking shops, breaking into groups, running away, re-forming—with a Genoa-style, ‘fluffy’ contingent of nonviolent direct action people trailing along behind.
I stop some of the latter: the women are dressed in multicoloured wigs, faces painted, tinsel in their hair, bare midriffs; the men are longhaired, thin, and non-aggressive. Why are they doing this?
Boy: ‘Because Top Shop’s owner hasn’t paid billions of pounds of tax.’
Girl (off her head): ‘We’re just dancing with flowers. We’re protesting in favour of beauty, against all this fucking shit in the window. We don’t want to spend all our money on clothes.’
Boy: ‘… and because capitalism is a damn lie. That’s why we’re throwing stuff at these fucking shop fronts.’
I buttonhole a second group, students; two young men and a woman. One of the guys, wearing a hipster low-neck t-shirt and a plaid duffle coat:
We’re sick with the government in general. For decades nobody legitimately can tell the truth; the nature of the hierarchy means only the imbeciles, the suck-ups, only the scumbags ever get to the top. So to truly be free is for everyone to take our part and decide for our freedom.
This is weird English but that’s exactly how he says it, and he is not drunk or foreign, just furious. ‘We need to all get together and create a community. All government is just an infrastructure, when we get government out of our vision we can start from the ground up, without corruption.’
At Oxford Circus a thirty-foot Trojan Horse made of wicker is wheeled in by protesters and goes up in flames. The police do nothing, because at this point there are none in attendance.
Along Oxford Street, all the stores targeted by UK Uncut in previous weeks—Topshop, Nike, HSBC—are closed in anticipation of the protests. In front of a branch of Boots, a peaceful picket of Uncutters (everybody dressed as doctors or patients) is busy sealing off the store with tape. Their symbolic message—the death of healthcare and Boots’ non-payment of tax. Nearby, police video them and take notes.
A few hundred yards away is Hyde Park, where hundreds of thousands who have stayed to listen to the speeches hear civil service union leader Mark Serwotka call for a general strike. Ed Miliband makes a speech. He is not so well received, and by now the networks are split-screening him with something more televisual.
Anarchists have gathered outside the Ritz Hotel on Piccadilly, pelting and daubing the famous landmark. A few doors down, hundreds of UK Uncut activists invade the upmarket grocer’s Fortnum & Mason. This moment—which unfolds across my Twitter feed, with people messaging from inside Fortnum’s and from within Ed Miliband’s press team—turns out to be the crest of the wave of protest that began at Millbank in November. After this climax comes the crisis.
The police kettled the Fortnum’s protesters and, as night fell, 145 of them were arrested one by one. Many were held for the full twenty-four hours allowed by law and then released, in paper jumpsuits like terror suspects, their clothes impounded.
No serious act of violence had been committed at Fortnum’s, though some protesters had chalked messages on the shop front. But there had been a mass outbreak of Black Bloc violence and destruction elsewhere. Virtually none of the Bloc had been arrested—but almost all of Fortnum’s invaders had.
This posed, point-blank, two problems for the core of activists who had launched UK Uncut. Did they condone or condemn the actions of the Black Bloc, and how would they now function, since most of them were on bail? Of the total of 201 protesters arrested over the entire day, 145 were at Fortnum & Mason. At time of writing, all but thirty have seen all charges dropped.
Meanwhile, in Hyde Park, half a million trade unionists began drifting away to their coaches, oblivious to—but later horrified to learn— what the Black Bloc had done. Half a million low-paid public servants had been eclipsed by the actions of four hundred people: the news bulletins were dominated by images of masked kids, broken windows and a smouldering wicker horse in Oxford Circus.
Towards the English Summer
In the period between Millbank and the trade-union demonstration of 26 March 2011, three social forces had been on the streets that we will meet time and again in the new global unrest: enraged students, youth from the urban underclass, and the big battalions of organized labour. In each phase, social media had helped the movement grow with dizzying rapidity.
The police, still smarting from the condemnation of their tactics at the G20 Summit in 2009, were in crisis. First, they had failed to anticipate Millbank, and their repeated use of kettling had radicalized large numbers of young people. Soon, the News of the World phone-hacking scandal would end the careers of London’s two top policemen, and the Met would stumble into the 2011 summer of riots seemingly directionless.
But the protest movement was also in crisis. Students got wrapped up in their exams; the trade unions began negotiations over pensions; the small group of activists behind UK Uncut went into a defensive huddle; and the anarchists engaged in mutual recrimination, the Black Bloc openly declaring their ‘right’ to be violent. The momentum had gone.
Meanwhile, a third demographic group had gone missing. The urban youth crept back to their estates where, as spring turned into summer, they cranked up the Grime. They pondered the meaning of all the Situationist slogans they had heard, and watched as the Met Police leadership self-destructed during the Murdoch scandal. Then, in August, as a shaken political class retreated to the Tuscan hills, the urban poor staged an insurrection of their own.
After police shot alleged gang member Mark Duggan, on 6 August 2011, riots erupted in thirty English towns and cities. Despite the relatively small-scale participation in the uprisings, they were concentrated and devastating, leading to widespread looting and arson. In the first two days, in most places, police lost control of the streets. In some areas, where the rioting overlapped with ethnic tension between black youths and Asian or Turkish small businessmen, the latter formed protection squads, which found themselves also in tension with law enforcement.
It became clear the rioters across Britain had organized through social media; above all the Blackberry instant messaging service.
Though occasionally led by organized crime, and often by the disorganized petty criminals who form the youth gang fraternity, the overwhelming social characteristic of those arrested was poverty. The events, whose precise significance is still being disputed by criminolo-gists and social theorists, formed a coda to the British winter of discontent.
Because—from Millbank to the summer riots—the scale of British discontent looks small beside the Arab Spring, it’s been possible to ignore its significance. But it was significant, both sociologically and politically. Not only did it demonstrate the almost total disconnect between official politics and large sections of young people; it was also the moment that protest methods once known to a committed few were adopted by the uncommitted mass. But it also showed how, in developed societies, organized labour is still capable of channelling and overwhelming the more chaotic, spontaneous protests.
And it was an advance preview of the problem which youthful, socially networked, horizontalist movements would have everywhere once things got serious: the absence of strategy, the absence of a line of communication through which to speak to the union-organized workers. The limits, in short, of ‘propaganda of the deed’.
Despite all this, what was obvious by late 2010 is that we were dealing with something new: something produced by bigger changes in society. But what?
