‘The revolution is in the mind.’ Those words were scrawled in wobbly spray-paint on Nelson’s Column on March 26, at the end of a day that saw half a million union members and outraged citizens march against government spending cuts in central London. The plan, cooked up by students and activist groups and advertised benignly on Facebook, was to have a picnic party and ‘Turn Trafalgar Square into Tahrir Square,’ as if some sympathetic magic could summon the regime-toppling energy of the Egyptian uprising to these soggy shores. What it turned into instead was a bloody mess.
As dusk fell, 200 police in full riot armor descended on the picnic without warning, cracking heads, breaking limbs and penning hundreds of young protesters in the biting cold for hours, with no water, no shelter and no way out. This is a form of collective punishment known colloquially as “kettling.” Its use at the London G-20 protests in 2009 was recently ruled illegal in a landmark decision by the high court.
The same dangerous police tactics were employed in London last winter at the student protests that saw hundreds of thousands gather in London to challenge a prohibitive rise in college fees and the privatization of the British university system. School children and students carried placards that asked, “Where’s my future?” Instead of getting an answer, they were subjected to a vengeful model of “public order” policing that has radicalized this generation with breathtaking speed.
Or take the royal wedding. On this day a quarter of a billion people watched Britain deliver what it does best: an exquisitely choreographed pageant of power, privilege and continuity. The wedding was a fantasy of faded imperial glory, a fairytale image of how we want the world to see the United Kingdom and how we would like to see ourselves. What far fewer people saw was how thoroughly and how violently that image was edited before its release to exclude all dissent, airbrushed to conceal anything beyond fawning, flag-waving deference.
The night before the wedding, activists were dragged out of their homes all over the country and arrested for unspecified crimes they had no intention of committing. Squats and community centers were raided and protesters were seized on the streets in an operation, foreshadowed in the tabloid press, to “preemptively arrest” radical elements using the wedding as an excuse. In central London, ten young people were cuffed and arrested outside a railway station simply for holding a placard saying “democracy now.”
A climate of fear has been drummed into being. Young protesters are now routinely the subject of public witch-hunts: 20-year-old student activist Alfie Meadows, who was beaten so badly by police on December 9 that he was left comatose and bleeding into his brain, has now been charged with violent disorder for his actions that day. This has become a propaganda war, as Parliament and the police attempt to wrest back control of the narrative by portraying every peaceful dissident as a violent hooligan.
The word “kettle” conjures the terribly English image of a nice, calming cup of tea. In fact, it’s a deeply traumatic form of collective punishment. Imagine: you came out with your friends to exercise your right to peaceful protest, but you find yourself trapped behind walls of armed police. The cops move forward in waves, bellowing in your face, raising their batons, crushing you into a smaller and smaller space with thousands of others. You can’t breathe or move; you start to panic. Young protesters, terrified and enraged, begin to throw themselves at the police, which is precisely what the police are waiting for.
They start to beat into the crowd with shields and sticks. You are surrounded by screaming, bloodied teenagers, and you try to protect yourself, but there’s nowhere to go. At first, you are incensed, appalled, but then the cold sets in, and you realize that until everyone calms down and shuts the fuck up, you’re not going to be allowed to escape. There’s a lesson about compliance that the police are extremely keen for you to learn.
After a few hours, you’re freezing and tired and hungry, and you’ve seen some frightening things. You need the toilet desperately. You’re prepared to say anything to get out, to get home. Your phone has run out of battery, so you’re cut off from the outside world, and you’re worried about your friends, your family. When you do eventually stumble through the police lines, your legs like blocks of cold wood, exhausted and seething with bitten-back rage, the policeman insists on taking your name and photograph before you can go. When you get home, you find the news reporting that the police took reasonable measures to control a violent riot.
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