The New Democracy

What an amazing and sobering day. Spontaneous anti-war happenings were occurring all over London. I arrived by about 2.30pm to be blocked by police at Holborn. A group of about 250 (mostly) Bengali Kids were marching through London (from the East End), on the way to Parliament Square, but the police obviously didn’t expect people to start congregating so early, and so rushed the grunts (low ranking police) to try to stop people marching. The police were in quite a state of disarray, not least because they were having to fight against children! The Bengali kids were amazing, really full of their rights to march, and horror at what was happing. They started surging towards the police, to their obvious shock. They started fighting (imagine these tiny 8-14 year old’s attacking police), and within 1-2minutes they broke through police lines. The police were stupid and reckless to have stopped the march to express our disgust at the Government.

The police had to hastily close off all routes to Parliament Square apart from one, and there were school children everywhere. This was at about 4pm. The atmosphere was wonderful, music provided my 2 mobile sound systems (on bikes), and the (now common) broad spectrum of the young, the old,
families, feminists, radicals, mild-mannered English, well the works… Everyone was so energised, and the feeling so unified. The kids started clashing with the police as they (police) were denying entry to another group, and they had (apparently) hit a Bengali girl. That was tense, and the police had decided to treat the kids just as they would any other, violence to keep their line. Quite shameful really, and it only antagonised the crowd more. As usual the police were enacting quite pointless crowd control policies (of course the front-line police are just following orders - but the Commanding Officers are often wholly inflexible[1]). I would never personally fight with anyone, but I can sympathise wholly with my fellow demonstrators. I also know the police are just following orders, but there is still a subtle issue about personal ‘responsibility’. And it is the case that the police can get away with exceptional amounts of brutality without ever being accountable[2], because the police themselves investigate police brutality (hmmm, hardly impartial!)

Concerning the police, a couple of days ago when Parliament was voting to go to war, we were outside the Houses of Commons (and the police had tried to break up the group), and I was with my friends Gabriele, Cecilia and Yolanda. As the vote finished and politicians were making their way out, They would walk through the protesters, and one of them bumped into my friend Gabriele, a police officer immediately came to him and warned him of not obstructing (although the politician had bumped into many of us as it was a ‘crowd’. So we moved out of harms way not to provoke them any more, and a few minutes later, the same police came up and warned Gabriele again, and again he was doing nothing (well, chanting ‘peace not war’ or something). Then another 3 police officer stood behind him, while the other was standing some way in front but staring him out, obviously trying to work him up. At this point we just left, as it wasn’t worth that kind of interaction. This is probably what (some) police do when they’re bored in what was an otherwise wholly peaceful gathering…


[1]e.g. On the night of the Parliamentary vote, 25 police officers blocked 5 demonstrators entry to the demonstration for over 2 hours! What a waste of resources…
[2] See here for information on a documentary outlining such brutality.

Posted by Ian at March 20, 2003 11:33 PM | TrackBack §