Penny Red

Notes from the New Age of Dissent

Laurie Penny

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781849646048
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Feminismo y teoría feminista

In the space of a year, Laurie Penny has become one of the most prominent voices of the new left. This book brings together her diverse writings, showing what it is to be young, angry and progressive in the face of an increasingly violent and oppressive UK government. Penny Red: Notes from the New Age of Dissent collects Penny's writings on youth politics, resistance, feminism and culture. Her journalism is a unique blend of persuasive analysis, captivating interviews and first-hand accounts of political direct action. She was involved in all the key protests of 2010/2011, including the anti-fees demos in 2010 and the anti-cuts protests of spring 2011, often tweeting live from the scene of kettles and baton charges. An introduction and extensive footnotes allow Penny to connect all the strands of her work, showing the links between political activism and wider social and cultural issues. This book is essential for understanding what motivates the new generation of activists, writers and thinkers that bring creativity, energy and urgency to the fight against capitalism and exploitation.

I

This is Actually Happening

‘Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul

And sings the tune without the words, and never stops – at all.’

Emily Dickinson

INSIDE THE MILLBANK TOWER RIOTS

11 November 2010

It’s a bright, cold November afternoon, and inside 30 Millbank, the headquarters of the Conservative Party, a line of riot police with shields and truncheons are facing down a groaning crowd of young people with sticks and smoke bombs.

Screams and the smash of trodden glass cram the foyer as the ceiling-high windows, entirely broken through, fill with some of the 52,000 angry students and schoolchildren who have marched through the heart of London today to voice their dissent to the government’s savage attack on public education and public services. Ministers are cowering on the third floor, and through the smoke and shouting a young man in a college hoodie crouches on top of the rubble that was once the front desk of the building, his red hair tumbling into his flushed, frightened face.

He meets my eyes, just for a second. The boy, clearly not a seasoned anarchist, has allowed rage and the crowd to carry him through the boundaries of what was once considered good behaviour, and found no one there to stop him. The grown-ups didn’t stop him. The police didn’t stop him. Even the walls didn’t stop him. His twisted expression is one I recognise in my own face, reflected in the screen as I type. It’s the terrified exhilaration of a generation that’s finally waking up to its own frantic power.

Glass is being thrown; I fling myself behind a barrier and scramble on to a ledge for safety. A nonplussed school pupil from south London has had the same idea. He grins, gives me a hand up and offers me a cigarette of which he is at least two years too young to be in possession. I find that my teeth are chattering and not just from cold. ‘It’s scary, isn’t it?’ I ask. The boy shrugs. ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘I suppose it is scary. But frankly...’ He lights up, cradling the contraband fag, ‘frankly, it’s not half as scary as what’s happening to our future’.

There are three things to note about this riot, the first of its kind in Britain for decades, that aren’t being covered by the press. The first is that not all of the young people who have come to London to protest are university students. Lots are school pupils, and many of the 15-, 16- and 17-year-olds present have been threatened with expulsion or withdrawal of their EMA (education maintenance allowance) benefits if they chose to protest today. They are here anyway, alongside teachers, young working people and unemployed graduates.

What unites them? A chant strikes up: ‘We’re young! We’re poor! We won’t pay any more!’

The second is that this is not, as the right-wing news would have you believe, just a bunch of selfish college kids not wanting to pay their fees (many of the students here will not even be directly affected by the fee changes). This is about far more than university fees, far more even than the coming massacre of public education.

This is about a political settlement that has broken its promises not once but repeatedly, and proven that it exists to represent the best interests of the business community, rather than to be accountable to the people. The students I speak to are not just angry about fees, although the Liberal Democrats’ U-turn on that issue is manifestly an occasion of indignation: quite simply, they feel betrayed. They feel that their futures have been sold in order to pay for the financial failings of the rich, and they are correct in their suspicions. One tiny girl in animal-print leggings carries a sign that reads: ‘I’ve always wanted to be a bin man.’

The third and most salient point is that the violence kicking off around Tory HQ – and make no mistake, there is violence, most of it directed at government property – is not down to a ‘small group of anarchists ruining it for the rest’. Not only are Her Majesty’s finest clearly giving as good as they’re getting, the vandalism is being committed largely by consensus – those at the front are being carried through by a groundswell of movement from the crowd.

Not all of those smashing through the foyer are in any way kitted out like your standard anarchist black-mask gang. These are kids making it up as they go along. A shy looking girl in a nice tweed coat and bobble hat ducks out of the way of some flying glass, squeaks in fright, but sets her lips determinedly and walks forward, not back, towards the line of riot cops. I see her pull up the neck of her pink polo-neck to hide her face, aping those who have improvised bandanas. She gives the glass under her feet a tentative stomp, and then a firmer one. Crunch, it goes. Crunch.

As more riot vans roll up and the military police move in, let’s whisk back three hours and 300 metres up the road, to Parliament Square. The cold winter sun beats down on 52,000 young people pouring down Whitehall to the Commons. There are twice as many people here as anyone anticipated, and the barriers erected by the stewards can’t contain them all: the demonstration shivers between the thump of techno sound systems and the stamp of samba drums, is a living, panting beast, taking a full hour to slough past Big Ben in all its honking glory. A brass band plays ‘The Liberty Bell’ while excited students yammer and dance and snap pictures on their phones. ‘It’s a party out here!’ one excited posh girl tells her mobile, tottering on Vivienne Westwood boots, while a bunch of Manchester anarchists run past with a banner saying ‘Fuck Capitalism’.

One can often take the temperature of a demonstration by the tone of the chanting. The cry that goes up most often at this protest is a thunderous, wordless roar, starting from the back of the crowd and reverberating up and down Whitehall. There are no words. It’s a shout of sorrow and celebration and solidarity and it slices through the chill winter air like a knife to the stomach of a trauma patient. Somehow, the pressure has been released and the rage of Europe’s young people is flowing free after a year, two years, ten years of poisonous capitulation.

They spent their childhoods working hard and doing what they were told with the promise that one day, far in the future, if they wished very hard and followed their star, their dreams might come true. They spent their young lives being polite and articulate whilst the government lied and lied and lied to them again. They are not prepared to be polite and articulate any more. They just want to scream until something changes. Perhaps that’s what it takes to be heard.

‘Look, we all saw what happened at the big anti-war protest back in 2003,’ says Tom, a postgraduate student from London. ‘Bugger all, that’s what happened. Everyone turned up, listened to some speeches and then went home. It’s sad that it’s come to this, but...’, he gestures behind him to the bonfires burning in front of the shattered windows of Tory HQ. ‘What else can we do?’

We’re back at Millbank and bonfires are burning; a sign reading ‘Fund our Future!’ goes up in flames. Nobody quite expected this. Whatever we’d whispered among ourselves, we didn’t expect that so many of us would share the same strength of feeling, the same anger, enough to carry 2,000 young people over the border of legality. We didn’t expect it to be so easy, nor to meet so little resistance. We didn’t expect suddenly to feel ourselves so powerful, and now – now we don’t quite know what to do with it. I put my hands to my face and find it tight with tears. This is tragic, as well as exhilarating.

Yells of ‘Tory Scum!’ and ‘No ifs, no buts, no education cuts!’ mingle with anguished cries of ‘Don’t throw shit!’ over the panicked rhythm of drums as the thousand kids crowded into the atrium try to persuade those who have made it to the roof not to chuck anything that might actually hurt the police. But somebody, there’s always one, has already thrown a fire extinguisher. A boy with a scraggly ginger beard rushes in front of the riot lines. He hollers, ‘Stop throwing stuff, you twats! You’re making us look bad!’ A girl stumbles out of the building with a streaming head wound; it’s about to turn ugly. ‘I just wanted to get in and they were pushing from the back,’ she says. ‘A policeman just lifted up his baton and smacked me.’

‘We voted for people who promised to change things for the better, and they broke all their promises,’ Tom tells me. ‘There’s nothing left for us but direct action. I’m not one of those black-mask anarchists, by the way. I just think this is right. This is what needed to happen. We needed to make ourselves heard.’

Tom invites me to join him on the sofa. With a slight double-take, I realise that this is one of the executive sofas from inside Tory HQ, dragged out and plonked in the middle of the pavement with the burning signs and the litter. ‘Come on, sit down,’ he says. ‘If we’re going to be kettled, we may as well get comfy.’

Suddenly there’s a cheer. The boys and girls who have made it to the roof have dropped a banner to announce their presence. The sunshine glints off their faces; we squint as we peer up to where they’re punching the air, shouting in triumph, dropping more banners and leaflets fluttering like ticker-tape in the sharp winter light. A young couple lean over the edge and begin to kiss and cuddle each other, and for a moment it’s beautiful, we are beautiful, we can do anything.

Then behind the crowd, I hear another sound, coming closer. It’s the sound of an ambulance.

TALKING ABOUT A REVOLUTION

24 November 2010

Outside Downing Street, in front of a line of riot police, I am sitting beside a makeshift campfire.¹ It’s cold, and the schoolchildren who have skipped classes gather around as a student with a three-string guitar strikes up the chords to Tracy Chapman’s ‘Talkin’ ‘Bout a Revolution’. The kids start to sing, sweet and off-key, an apocalyptic choir knotted around a small bright circle of warmth and energy. ‘Finally the tables are starting to turn,’ they sing, the sound of their voices drowning out the drone of helicopters and the screams from the edge of the kettle. ‘Finally the tables are starting to turn.’

Then a cop smashes into the circle. The police shove us out of the way and the camp evaporates in a hiss of smoke, forcing us forward. Not all of us know how we got here, but we’re being crammed in with brutal efficiency: the press of bodies is vice-tight and still the cops are screaming at us to move forward. Beside me, a schoolgirl is crying. She is just 14.

‘We followed the crowd,’ she says. So did we all. There are no leaders here: the thousands of schoolchildren and young people who streamed into Whitehall three hours ago in protest at the government’s attacks on further and higher education were working completely off script. A wordless cry went up somewhere in the crowd and they were off, moving as one, with no instructions, towards parliament.

But just because there are no leaders here doesn’t mean there is no purpose. These kids – and most of them are just kids, with no experience of direct action, who walked simultaneously out of lessons across the country just before morning break – want to be heard. ‘Our votes don’t count,’ says one nice young man in a school tie. The diversity of the protest is extraordinary: white, black and Asian, rich and poor. Uniformed state-school girls in too-short skirts pose by a plundered police van as their friends take pictures, while behind them a boy in a mask holds a placard reading ‘Burn Eton’.

‘We can’t even vote yet,’ says Leyla, 14. ‘So what can we do? Are we meant to just sit back while they destroy our future and stop us going to university? I wanted to go to art school, I can’t even afford A-levels now without EMA’.

I ask her who she thinks is in charge. Her friend, a young boy in a hoodie, grins at me, gesturing to the front of the kettle, where children are screaming ‘shame on you’ and throwing themselves under the police batons. ‘Us,’ he says.

This is a leaderless protest with no agenda but justice: it is a new children’s crusade, epic and tragic. More fires are lit as the children try to keep warm: they are burning placards and pages from their school planners. A sign saying ‘Dumbledore would not stand for this shit!’ goes up in flames.

This is also an organic movement: unlike previous demos, there are no socialist organisers leading the way, no party flags to rally behind. The word spread through Twitter and Facebook; rumours passed around classrooms and meeting halls: get to Westminster, show them your anger.

Suddenly, there is a rush from the front and the sound of yelling police as hundreds of protesters run back from the lines, frightened. ‘Don’t throw anything!’ implores a young, bearded protester with a megaphone. ‘Protect your friends – don’t give them the excuse!’ But no one is listening. Sticks are being thrown: the mood is enraged as people see their friends struck back or struck down. ‘Tory scum!’ they yell. ‘I wish they weren’t breaking things,’ says Leyla, ‘but this is what happens when they ruin people’s futures.’

INSIDE THE WHITEHALL KETTLE

25 November 2010

It’s the coldest day of the year, and I’ve just spent seven hours being kettled in Westminster. That sounds jolly, doesn’t it? It sounds a bit like I went and had a lovely cup of tea with the Queen, rather than being trapped into a freezing pen of frightened teenagers and watching baton-wielding police kidney-punching children, six months into a government that ran an election campaign on a platform of fairness. So before we go any further, let’s remind ourselves precisely what kettling is, and what it’s for.

Take a protest, one whose premise is uncomfortable for the administration – say, yesterday’s protest, with thousands of teenagers from all over London walking out of lessons and marching spontaneously on Westminster to voice their anger at government cuts to education funding that will prevent thousands from attending college and university. Toss in hundreds of police officers with riot shields, batons, dogs, armoured horses and meat wagons, then block the protesters into an area of open space with no toilets, food or shelter, for hours. If anyone tries to leave, shout at them and hit them with sticks. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s effective.

I didn’t understand quite how bad things had become in this country until I saw armoured cops being deployed against schoolchildren in the middle of Whitehall. These young people joined the protest to defend their right to learn, but in the kettle they are quickly coming to realise that their civil liberties are of less consequence to this government than they had ever imagined. The term ‘kettle’ is rather apt, given that penning already-outraged people into a small space tends to make tempers boil and give the police an excuse to turn up the heat, and it doesn’t take long for that to happen. When they understand that are being prevented from marching to parliament by three lines of cops and a wall of riot vans, the kids at the front of the protest begin to moan. ‘It’s ridiculous that they won’t let us march,’ says Melissa, 15, who has never been in trouble before. ‘We can’t even vote yet, we should be allowed to have our say.’

The chant goes up: ‘What do we want? The right to protest!’ At first, the cops give curt answers to the kids demanding to know why they can’t get through. Then they all seem to get some sort of signal, because suddenly the polite copper in front of me is screaming in my face, shoving me hard in the back of the head, raising his baton, and the protesters around me are yelling and running back. Some of them have started to shake down a set of iron railings to get out, and the cops storm forward, pushing us right through those railings, leaving 20 of us sprawling in the rubble of road works with cracked knees. When they realised that they are trapped, the young protesters panic. The crush of bodies is suddenly painful – my scarf is ripped away from me and I can hear my friend Clare calling for her son – and as I watch the second line of police advance, with horses following behind them, as a surge of teenagers carry a rack of iron railings towards the riot guard and howl to be released, I realise they’re not going to stop and the monkey instinct kicks in. I scramble up a set of traffic lights, just in time to see a member of the Metropolitan Police grab a young protester by the neck and hurl him back into the crowd.

Behind me, some kids have started to smash up a conveniently empty old police van that’s been abandoned in the middle of the road. ‘Let us out!’ they chant. ‘Let us out!’ A 13-year old girl starts to hyperventilate, tears squeezing in raw trails over her frightened face, unable to tear her face away from the fight – I put a hand on her back and hurry her away from the police line. Her name is Alice and she is from a private school. ‘Just because I won’t be affected by the EMA cuts doesn’t mean I don’t care about the government lying,’ she says, ‘but I want to go home now. I have to find my friend.’

As darkness falls and we realise we’re not going anywhere, the protesters start to light fires to keep warm. First, they burn their placards, the words ‘Rich parents for all!’ going up in flames, with a speed and efficiency gleaned from recent CV-boosting outdoor camping activities. Then, as the temperature drops below freezing, they start looking for anything else to burn, notebooks and snack wrappers – although one young man in an anarchist scarf steps in to stop me tossing an awful historical novel onto the pyre. ‘You can’t burn books,’ he says. ‘We’re not Nazis.’

As I look around at this burned-out children’s crusade, I start to wonder where the hell the student activists are. Whatever the news says, this is emphatically not a rabble led by a gang of determined troublemakers out to smash things for fun. In fact, we could do with a few more seasoned radicals here, because they tend to know what to do at demonstrations when things get out of hand. I find myself disappointed in the principled anarchists and student activists I know, who aren’t here because they’ve decided that the best way to make their presence felt is by occupying their own lecture halls. I realise that these school pupils are the only ones who really understand what’s going on: even people my age, the students and graduates who got in just before the fee hike, are still clinging to the last scraps of that dream of a better future, still a little bit afraid to make a fuss. These teenagers, on the other hand, know that it’s all nonsense. They sat their school exams during the worst recession in living memory, and they aren’t taken in by the promise of jobs, of education, of full lives and safe places t...