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Charged
How the Police Try to Suppress Protest
Matt Foot, Morag Livingstone
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eBook - ePub
Charged
How the Police Try to Suppress Protest
Matt Foot, Morag Livingstone
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About This Book
Charged is an essential investigation into the role of policing protest in Britain today. As the UK government tries to suppress all forms of dissent, in their pursuit of more control, how do the police manage crowds, provoke violence and even break the law?Since the 1980s under successive governments the police have been allowed to suppress protests, using aggressive tactics - from batons to horse charges to kettling. The landscape of how police deal with protest changed following criticism of the police during the 1981 Brixton riots. New military-style tactics were sanctioned by the Thatcher government, in secret. Over the next forty years those protesting against racism, unfair job losses, draconian laws, or for environmental protection were subject to brutal tactics. In the aftermath, media attention denigrates protesters while the police are praised and continue to act with impunity.Looking through these moments of conflict widens our understanding of policing public order to reveal the true character of the state. Since the 1980s successive governments, from Thatcher to Johnson, covertly plot to suppress protests, using standardised aggressive tactics - from batons to horse charges to kettling. Through undisclosed documents and eyewitness accounts the authors reveal organised police violence against miners at Orgreave, print workers at Warrington, anti poll tax campaigners, student protestors and Black Lives Matter. The voices of protesters however have been undeterred.
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Part I.
Maggie Thatcher’s Boot Boys
Maggie Thatcher’s Boot Boys
1
The Guinea Pig
The Messenger Printers, Warrington, 1983
We started off with this little regional newspaper dispute and it’s turned into this monster.Alan Royston, one of the ‘Stockport Six’Undeterred, he has fought on alone.How much the establishment voices have steered clear of him … though the Institute of Directors officials have been in touch.Sunday Times on Eddy Shah, 4 December 1983
At 3:40 a.m. on 30 November 1983, the police shouted to television crews to ‘turn off the lights’. They complied immediately. No lights. No filming. No television record of events. The remaining journalists then left to go home.
The police charged and everyone ran. A woman was escorted by the police and thrown into a deep ditch at the side of the road. Colin Bourne, the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) northern organiser, recalls,
The riot police then charged at least three times … people were terrified … screaming, people were running away … at least a thousand people … Some of them then ran in the fields … the fields were in total darkness and there were large ditches … the ground was extremely wet … people were running away and falling over … police were running up to them and kicking them and hitting them with their batons, even though they were already on the ground.
Two police Range Rovers drove ‘at high speed into the pickets’.1
The ‘use of vehicles to disperse a riotous crowd’ was authorised by the Public Order Manual of Tactical Options and Related Matters.2 It includes fifteen different tactical uses of vehicles that could be deployed with support from police on foot to use ‘in close support situations or for dividing crowds there is a risk of serious injuries occurring. The option may also attract adverse criticism’.
Forty years on, Colin Bourne, now an employment barrister, recalls this event clearly: ‘They turned and started driving forwards, coming towards us over the rough terrain. Their engine noise was very high.’ To Bourne it felt like they were ‘driving very fast in low gear, driving at us, people were running … quite terrifying’.
Alan Royston worked at the Stockport Messenger as a paste-up artist/typesetter and senior shop steward. He was ‘pasting up’ the 11 June 1983 edition of the Messenger as he had done every week for years. ‘There was a gap in the paper. So I asked, “Where’s this advert?” I was handed it and stuck it in. I looked at it, “that’s an advert for our jobs!”’ He and fellow workers walked out in protest. They were promptly dismissed.
The Messenger was one of six free newspaper titles operated by the maverick entrepreneur Eddy Shah.3 Educated for a time at Gordonstoun, the boarding school attended by Prince Charles, he was suspended twice.4 He worked as a floor manager on Coronation Street, before he was allegedly sacked. After working on the Manchester Evening News, Shah identified an opportunity in the south-west of Manchester as being ripe for a new free sheet newspaper.5 He raised the finance by selling his house and with backing from a Manchester businessman.
Considered a friendly employer, he had negotiated agreements with the National Graphical Association (NGA) print union and in the past agreed on 100 per cent trade union membership (which was known as a closed shop, a common practice at the time).
Shah asked the NGA to help him establish his new business, including sourcing suitably qualified workers. Welcoming the expanding business, the union negotiated a good agreement. However, Shah opened another typesetting plant at Bury, Greater Manchester, using non-union labour to produce the pages. Tony Burke, then president of the Stockport NGA branch, recalls, ‘We went to negotiate and he flatly refused.’ Shah began moving work and copy between Stockport and Bury. In the second half of 1983, Alan’s life moved onto the picket line with five of his fellow workers who had all been sacked. They were dubbed the ‘Stockport Six’. For months they stood on a raised roundabout across from his former place of work, often with his wife Sue and kids in support. They looked directly into the third-floor office of owner Eddy Shah, who, Alan recalls, ‘used to sit in his big swivel chair and stick two fingers up and make another rude gesture’. Back at home, while Alan was on the picket line, Sue had to get up throughout the night to answer ‘vile’ telephone calls. As she recalls, ‘most were silent, but one person claimed to be Shah himself.’
At Shah’s new plant in Warrington the printing presses rolled two nights a week and the union would try and stop or delay delivery vans leaving the factory by blocking their exit with a mass of bodies. The union wanted to force Shah back to the negotiating table by disrupting his new business venture, to end the dispute and re-employ the Stockport Six. In response to the increase in numbers of pickets at Warrington, Shah sought injunctions against the NGA, and won.
Under the Conservative government’s newly introduced employment laws the picket at the Messenger offices in Stockport was legal because it was picketing at the place of work where the dispute arose, but picketing at Shah’s new plant in Warrington was not. By transferring work away from Stockport Shah effectively forced a secondary picket, which was illegal under the new employment laws.
At Warrington the numbers of pickets supporting the Stockport Six increased week on week. In mid-November, suspicious they were being spied upon by police informants, Colin Bourne briefed pickets in small groups, each of whom had to know each other. A purchase of forty lengths of rope was passed around. Pickets wrapped them over the arms, through their sleeves and round their backs to make an immovable force. That night the rope was slipped out to the pickets and Shah’s vans were stopped. The pickets were happy, the police less so.
Shah continued to exploit his options in court. In parallel, negotiations continued. The union thought they had reached agreement with Shah over the weekend of 26–7 November. However, on Monday, 28 November, Shah unexpectedly withdrew the agreement, introducing a more hard-line offer. He then refused to meet in person to discuss next steps. The NGA wondered if something had gone on behind the scenes, and responded by calling for a mass demonstration on 29 November 1983, at Warrington.
Numbers were expected to be high as, the week before, a court had sequestrated ‘everything of value belonging to the NGA’.6 The dispute thus became more than getting the six their jobs back, or having a closed shop; it was about resisting unfair trade union laws and the very future of the union. The application of these new laws galvanised trade union support and escalated a local dispute into a national concern for all unions, including an immediate response from trade unions based on Fleet Street and in Manchester to down tools. No national newspapers were produced over the weekend of 26–7 November 1983.
Shah held a press conference inside the Warrington factory in front of a bank of cameras. He and about a dozen staff, six private security guards and two dogs had sufficient food, video games and beds to hold out for ‘a week-long siege’.7 He described the union’s tactics as an example of ‘mob rule’ and said the union needed to apply the equivalent of military force to stop him distributing his papers.8
On Tuesday, 29 November, television and print media travelled to Warrington and stationed themselves across the road from the picket. Deputy Chief Constable Graham reported to the Home Office at 5 p.m., ‘40 pickets’ and ‘60 press and TV people’. The police were ready; over 1,400 police officers were to attend.9
One of the industrial units had been transformed into a temporary police operational command centre. The huge, well-organised facility included catering for 2,000 officers, caged cells capable of holding thirty to forty people, a control room with three video monitors connected to rooftop night cameras, and large photographs of the Stockport Six alongside key trade union officials with a sign saying ‘Do not arrest’. Two trade union stewards tried to investigate, only to be told by the police that it was a designated ‘no-go area’.10
At 5:30 p.m. Alan returned to spend the night at Warrington. He found a mass influx of police, as forty police vans and four coachloads arrived and a few thousand pickets were all trying to keep warm on a ‘bloody cold’ night.11 The NGA van, which the Economist described as resembling a ‘travelling grocer’s shop’, was parked, as it had been for the last few weeks, within the picketing area.12 Despite appearances the van was fitted with cutting-edge communications technology used for making announcements to direct pickets and coordinate with trade union officers on walkie-talkies. This was useful in an industrial estate of this kind where business units impeded the line of sight.
Reggae, Bob Dylan and other music played out of large speakers to keep up the spirits of the pickets until the distribution vans tried to leave at 5 a.m. NGA national officer George Jerrom, Colin Bourne and others stood on a makeshift stage in front of the van using a microphone, enabling running commentary mixed with humour. The pickets responded with cheers to announcements of new arrivals of trade unionists from around the country.
© Stefano Cagnoni/reportdigital.co.uk
Tony Dubbins speaking from the NGA van at the Warrington picket, 1983.
Meanwhile, lines of police, three deep, stood with their backs to Shah’s production works. As murmurs of conversation and singing echoed off the walls; rumours of a delivery to the factory changed the mood and pickets surged against the police. One picket, Richard Dixon-Payne, a teacher, said the ‘pressure was enormous … pressure mounted all the time as the police forced the picketers back and the picketers tried to stand firm’.13 Directed by those on the NGA microphone, they linked arms and successfully pushed the police back against the door of Shah’s factory.14 The door bent. People were banging on the side of the factory, adding to the noise inside.
The police re-formed their line and pushed pickets back towards the NGA van. In line with the new public order tactics manual, officers formed a wedge with two or three people at the front and increasing numbers behind. As Colin Bourne recalls, there was ‘an enormous noise as large columns of policemen were marched in. A disciplined force, so it was easy for them to push people out of the way using a wedge formation … we were never going to be as disciplined as they were.’ The police easily created a gap in the pickets, allowing other police to divide the pickets into even smaller groups over a number of hours. There were calls of ‘We shall not be moved’ and, likely for the first time, ‘Maggie Thatcher’s boot boys’.
BBC Newsnight reported live from the scene just after 11 p.m. that despite a ‘big crush of people’ there was
no particular violence … There is a huge number of police and there is a limit to what they (the pickets) can do … Someone in the crowd has just said they haven’t resorted to any violence whatsoever and I think that’s true. The problem is when you have 1,000 to 2,000 people pushing. Everyone is singing and it was like a New Year’s Eve party and then suddenly there were some of the ugliest scenes since Grunwick and at least two people were taken away by ambulance.15
The police did not let the ambulance through. They only moved to allow Shah’s armoured Land Rover carrying the printing plates into the factory. This was particularly galling as, the week before, the union leaders had ensured that the pickets stepped back to allow an ambulance through for a policeman who was injured when a wall collapsed, which was accepted as an accident.
On 29 November, due to the unexpected number of pickets, the union suggested to the police that Shah delay the paper until the crowds died down. Senior police promised to put this to Shah and report back in about half an hour, but never returned. The police did relay the offer to Shah, who rejected it.16 What the police did next was a shock to many.
They started clearing the slip road that connected the plant to the main road. NGA officials with walkie-talkies reported that police were running at the crowd, pushing people south into the area that the press had set up. Directions to stand fir...