I was at the g20 protests in London on Wednesday and, now that the mainstream media coverage has pretty much died out, I thought it would be a good idea to present the view from inside the police cordon. I went up to the protests along with my wife and my two daughters to support the view that another economic and political consensus is possible in society and to show solidarity with the many oppositional groups and excluded voices who were making up the main body of the protest. The fact that the protest was happening at the heart of one of the world’s financial centres added a direct action element to the protest that previous protests didn’t have and we hoped that this would ensure a higher profile for the event. I tweeted from the protest while we were there and continued to tweet news about it over the next day or so.
The standard media outlets have focused on the confrontational aspects of the protest and I’m going to look at that in this post. It was very clear to us, right from the start of the day, that the police presence was producing a pressure cooker within which confrontation was becoming inevitable. We left after near continuous physical and verbal pressure from police, fearing for the safety of our daughters if the police decided to escalate their tactics. This is despite staying at the back of the crowds and attempting to maintain a reasonable dialogue with the police from the moment that we joined the black horse procession outside Cannon Street station.
To begin with , the police didn’t want to let us join the protest at all. They shouted at us to get back away from the protesters and we had to convince them that they weren’t allowed to refuse us our right to protest. The police claimed that the protest was too violent for us to enter, even through at that point there were only around 50 people surrounding a papier-mache horse, completely surrounded by a police cordon and vastly outnumbered by journalists. Once we were inside this cordon, the police kept us stationary for about ten minutes then let us begin to march towards the Bank of England at a snail’s pace. About ten minutes into the march, a girl asked me for help. She was panicking: sweaty, terrified and shaking. She asked us to look after her because she had got caught up inside the cordon and wanted to get out. I asked a police officer to let her out and he refused. I asked why and were told that we had been “detained”. I asked what the legal meaning of this term was and if we had committed and offence. The officer repeated that we had been detained and that we were not allowed to cross the cordon. I said that if that was the case then they had a duty of care towards the girl and could they let her out as she was clearly in a state. This was refused and I was pushed repeatedly by officers to move forward, this is while I was steering a pushchair with one hand and had my other arm around a crying girl. I complained and was told that if I continued I would be in breach of the peace and would be arrested. I was told that if the girl crossed the line she would also be arrested, for being in breach of the peace. One officer told me that the girl was fine and to shut up. I asked the officer to say that to the girl, and to look her in the eye to reassure her. He could not, although he did shout “you’re fine” at the ground a few times. There was no violent behaviour of any kind coming from the protesters.
While this was happening, my wife was being told that she was “a disgusting mother” by an officer and that the should “be at home looking after her children” rather than bringing them to a political protest.
A few of the police we encountered at this stage were reasonable. One eventually stepped in and explained their reasons for what they were doing and the fact they had been ordered to act in a certain way. Another pulled funny faces at the girls and made them laugh. These friendly faces were outnumbered at least 10:1 by aggressive, confrontational men and women from the Metropolitan and City police forces who were insulting, physical and threatening towards everyone who tried to talk to them or to get out of the cordon.
When we go to the Bank of England (BoE), it became clear that our group of protesters commemorating the 360th anniversary of the Diggers was the smallest by far. Thousands of protesters were converging outside the BoE from all directions. Above these crowds you could see banners from socialist, environmental, human rights, anti-capitalist, anarchist and other groups. Samba music was being played by scores of drummers and bright plastic balls were being bounced around the crowd.
At this point, we started to experience the police tactic of ‘kettling’ for the first time. A line of police had extended behind us to block off a road and no-one was being allowed out. They did seem to be letting protesters in, and journalists were allowed to come and go as they pleased. The police line kept moving forward, slowly squeezing an increasing number of protesters into a smaller space. Initially we were standing with our pushchair in a nice open space, with journalists pestering us for interviews and taking photos all the while. I had my 2 1/2yr old on my shoulders and she was shaking her bells, enjoying the carnival atmosphere. My 1yr old was fast asleep! As the police kept moving in behind us, we became increasingly worried. The atmosphere was changing as the crowd started to feel itself being physically and psychologically compressed. I saw people crying and begging to be let out. Around this time, large groups of people started to move together towards the cordon, creating pressure points that made temporary exits. The police at this point were sending in snatch teams to remove individuals and the Forward Intelligence Teams were taking pictures of us and everyone around us. Eventually the police created an exit area and we decided to leave.
We walked away from the protest as van after van of riot police were arriving, making the ordinary police who had ‘detained’ us look almost as harmless as PC Plum. These police were coming into reinforce the existing police lines, despite the complete absence of any crowd violence at this stage. The police force began to escalate their presence and take a more confrontational stance as a planned strategy, decided in advance, rather than in response to crowd trouble. This is despite concerns about the legality of the ‘kettling’ tactic, which quite obviously works, like a kettle, to increase the pressure within a protesting crowd.
Later on that day, the riot police turned their attention to the Climate Camp happening down the road. They charged into peaceful crowds who were holding their hands in the air and chanting “this is not a riot”. There had been no violence from this protest, which had set up kitchens, hundreds of tents, organic toilet facilities and was running educational workshops. You can view a video of one police charge by clicking here.
So, the violence from the crowd? A few bank windows were smashed. Some graffiti. People pushed back against the kettling tactics, some of these people were very angry and responded to police aggression in kind. All of these things happened after the police had escalated their presence. The police response was not a response to the crowd, but to orders given in advance by senior police officers and politicians. Arrests? 110 at the latest count but arrests have to turn into charges to indicate a widespread problem. Charges against protesters? Only 5 people were charged with anything, from a crowd of thousands that is pretty good going. How does that compare to a football match, or to an English town centre on a Friday night?
The policing strategy for the g20 protests appears to have been reacting to 3 factors:
- The protest took place in the City of London itself and on a weekday. It interrupted business and thus carried an economic, rather than a purely symbolic cost. Symbolic impacts are less threatening than economic impacts, which must be eliminated, even at the cost of £7m to the taxpayer. Previous protests in the City have lead to financial institutions threatening to relocate unless they are ‘protected’ from protest.
- It involved groups calling for dramatic changes to the world political and economic system, rather than groups calling for reform. Reform can be co-opted into the system, whereas demands for change pose an existential threat and should be silenced.
- A tiny, tiny minority of groups involved appeared to be calling for a violent response to the economic crisis. If these groups – most of whom are known to police – break the law then they can expect to be arrested. This does not excuse the repression of a mass political protest.
The protest itself was made up of scores of groups, some of which could be loosely grouped together under the lazy media headlines of ‘anti-capitalist’ or ‘anarchist’, but including Quakers, pro-palestine groups, anti-war campaigners, charities, environmentalists, families, guerrilla gardeners and citizen journalists, to label just the people hovering around our pushchair! I went to this protest worried about the political response to the economic crisis and expecting to have my voice heard. I left the protest with a deep feeling of unease and menace about how political protest in general in this country is policed and reported and the extent to which governments will go to repress dissent.
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