I
This is Actually Happening
âHope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul |
And sings the tune without the words, and never stops â at all.â |
Emily Dickinson |
INSIDE THE MILLBANK TOWER RIOTS
Itâs 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 governmentâs 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 didnât stop him. The police didnât stop him. Even the walls didnât stop him. His twisted expression is one I recognise in my own face, reflected in the screen as I type. Itâs the terrified exhilaration of a generation thatâs 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. âItâs scary, isnât it?â I ask. The boy shrugs. âYeah,â he says, âI suppose it is scary. But frankly...â He lights up, cradling the contraband fag, âfrankly, itâs not half as scary as whatâs happening to our futureâ.
There are three things to note about this riot, the first of its kind in Britain for decades, that arenât 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: âWeâre young! Weâre poor! We wonât pay any more!â
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 Democratsâ 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: âIâve always wanted to be a bin man.â
The third and most salient point is that the violence kicking off around Tory HQ â and make no mistake, there is violence, most of it directed at government property â is not down to a âsmall group of anarchists ruining it for the restâ. Not only are Her Majestyâs finest clearly giving as good as theyâre getting, the vandalism is being committed largely by consensus â 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, letâs 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 canât 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 âThe Liberty Bellâ while excited students yammer and dance and snap pictures on their phones. âItâs a party out here!â one excited posh girl tells her mobile, tottering on Vivienne Westwood boots, while a bunch of Manchester anarchists run past with a banner saying âFuck Capitalismâ.
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. Itâs 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 Europeâs 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 thatâs what it takes to be heard.
âLook, we all saw what happened at the big anti-war protest back in 2003,â says Tom, a postgraduate student from London. âBugger all, thatâs what happened. Everyone turned up, listened to some speeches and then went home. Itâs sad that itâs come to this, but...â, he gestures behind him to the bonfires burning in front of the shattered windows of Tory HQ. âWhat else can we do?â
Weâre back at Millbank and bonfires are burning; a sign reading âFund our Future!â goes up in flames. Nobody quite expected this. Whatever weâd whispered among ourselves, we didnât 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 didnât expect it to be so easy, nor to meet so little resistance. We didnât expect suddenly to feel ourselves so powerful, and now â now we donât 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 âTory Scum!â and âNo ifs, no buts, no education cuts!â mingle with anguished cries of âDonât throw shit!â 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, thereâs always one, has already thrown a fire extinguisher. A boy with a scraggly ginger beard rushes in front of the riot lines. He hollers, âStop throwing stuff, you twats! Youâre making us look bad!â A girl stumbles out of the building with a streaming head wound; itâs about to turn ugly. âI just wanted to get in and they were pushing from the back,â she says. âA policeman just lifted up his baton and smacked me.â
âWe voted for people who promised to change things for the better, and they broke all their promises,â Tom tells me. âThereâs nothing left for us but direct action. Iâm 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.â
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. âCome on, sit down,â he says. âIf weâre going to be kettled, we may as well get comfy.â
Suddenly thereâs 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 theyâre 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 itâs beautiful, we are beautiful, we can do anything.
Then behind the crowd, I hear another sound, coming closer. Itâs the sound of an ambulance.
TALKING ABOUT A REVOLUTION
Outside Downing Street, in front of a line of riot police, I am sitting beside a makeshift campfire.1 Itâs cold, and the schoolchildren who have skipped classes gather around as a student with a three-string guitar strikes up the chords to Tracy Chapmanâs âTalkinâ âBout a Revolutionâ. The kids start to sing, sweet and off-key, an apocalyptic choir knotted around a small bright circle of warmth and energy. âFinally the tables are starting to turn,â they sing, the sound of their voices drowning out the drone of helicopters and the screams from the edge of the kettle. âFinally the tables are starting to turn.â
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 weâre 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.
âWe followed the crowd,â 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 governmentâs 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 doesnât mean there is no purpose. These kids â 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 â want to be heard. âOur votes donât count,â 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 âBurn Etonâ.
âWe canât even vote yet,â says Leyla, 14. âSo 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 canât even afford A-levels now without EMAâ.
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 âshame on youâ and throwing themselves under the police batons. âUs,â he says.
This is a leaderless protest with no agenda but justice: it is a new childrenâs 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 âDumbledore would not stand for this shit!â 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. âDonât throw anything!â implores a young, bearded protester with a megaphone. âProtect your friends â donât give them the excuse!â But no one is listening. Sticks are being thrown: the mood is enraged as people see their friends struck back or struck down. âTory scum!â they yell. âI wish they werenât breaking things,â says Leyla, âbut this is what happens when they ruin peopleâs futures.â
INSIDE THE WHITEHALL KETTLE
Itâs the coldest day of the year, and Iâve just spent seven hours being kettled in Westminster. That sounds jolly, doesnât 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, letâs remind ourselves precisely what kettling is, and what itâs for.
Take a protest, one whose premise is uncomfortable for the administration â say, yesterdayâs 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 doesnât sound like much, but itâs effective.
I didnât 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 âkettleâ 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 doesnât 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. âItâs ridiculous that they wonât let us march,â says Melissa, 15, who has never been in trouble before. âWe canât even vote yet, we should be allowed to have our say.â
The chant goes up: âWhat do we want? The right to protest!â At first, the cops give curt answers to the kids demanding to know why they canât 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 â my scarf is ripped away from me and I can hear my friend Clare calling for her son â 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 theyâre 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 thatâs been abandoned in the middle of the road. âLet us out!â they chant. âLet us out!â 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 â 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. âJust because I wonât be affected by the EMA cuts doesnât mean I donât care about the government lying,â she says, âbut I want to go home now. I have to find my friend.â
As darkness falls and we realise weâre not going anywhere, the protesters start to light fires to keep warm. First, they burn their placards, the words âRich parents for all!â 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 â although one young man in an anarchist scarf steps in to stop me tossing an awful historical novel onto the pyre. âYou canât burn books,â he says. âWeâre not Nazis.â
As I look around at this burned-out childrenâs 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 arenât here because theyâve 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 whatâs 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 itâs all nonsense. They sat their school exams during the worst recession in living memory, and they arenât taken in by the promise of jobs, of education, of full lives and safe places t...