[Peace-discuss] “Police Stand By As Colleagues in Plain Clothes Break Windows”

[C. G. Estabrook]

[On the London demo last Saturday.]

On the March
Joanna Biggs 28 March 2011

‘Fortnum and Mason’s is surrounded by police as this is a crime scene. Persons 
responsible will be arrested’: a message sent out by the Metropolitan Police 
text service for protesters at 18.33, just as I was getting home from Saturday’s 
TUC march. The slogan was ‘March for the alternative!’ – ‘what sort of 
alternative?’ Evan Davis asked on the Today programme that morning – but UK 
Uncut’s flyers encouraged us to ‘occupy for the alternative’. Fortnum’s was 
targeted because its owners, Whittington Investments, ‘have dodged over £40 
million in tax’. Inside, ‘this has basically turned into a giant picnic,’ Laurie 
Penny tweeted, apart from the moment a display of chocolate bunnies was knocked 
over and had to be put painstakingly back together. Pictures and videos show 
protesters sitting on the floor, nestled between the glass cabinets and wooden 
counters or gathered behind brass railings, singing. The occupiers were 
arrested: of 149 charged by police on Saturday, 138 were done for ‘aggravated 
trespass’ or sitting on Fortnum’s carpet for a few hours. Even Fortnum’s have 
admitted that ‘the damage is minimal.’

UK Uncut’s actions – a school sports day in Topshop, read-ins at Barclay’s 
banks, sit-ins at Vodafone shops – have won a fair amount of attention as 
creative, non-violent civil disobedience. But in yesterday’s right-wing papers, 
UK Uncut was indistinguishable from the ‘black bloc’ who attacked some of UK 
Uncut’s targets (Topshop, the banks) as well as some of their own (the Ritz, De 
Beers) with paint, fireworks and makeshift battering rams. The black of their 
jeans and hoodies inspired jackboot headlines: ‘Ritzkrieg’ in the Mail, ‘Blitz 
on the Ritz’ in the News of the World. The pictures in the Mail showed ‘Tory 
Scum’ written on the red brick in spearmint spraypaint and a girl with red hair 
apparently taunting the crowd. The separate actions of UK Uncut and the black 
bloc have, perhaps conveniently for the government, overshadowed the main event. 
But in response they point to the ineffectiveness of the Stop the War march in 
2003, a peaceful and orderly protest by hundreds of thousands of people that 
achieved nothing.

The SWP had hung their banners by the time I got to Trafalgar Square and found a 
spot behind the NASUWT, the PCS and a homemade sign that asked: ‘Can I live in 
your duckhouse?’ There were babies in prams (pinned to one pushchair: ‘This 
government stinks worse than my nappies’); children with flags, tabards and 
horns, competing with the sound of the helicopters overhead; people in 
wheelchairs being filmed by journalists; dogs in blankets with union insignia; 
old couples; families with grown-up children; observers from Liberty in 
fluorescent green tabards, TUC stewards in pink, police in yellow. Everyone was 
taking photos.

As we moved on to Piccadilly there was more to take photos of than each other. 
Shops and cafés were splattered with coloured paint bombs, as if they were 
starring in one of those paint explosion adverts for Sony TVs, if you ignored 
the smashed windows. Pret was untouched – full of hungry marchers, it seemed – 
and so was The Wolseley, the uniformed doorman defiant. The Burlington Arcade’s 
guards, in gold braid, had shut themselves behind their gold-tipped gates.

When I got to Hyde Park the screens were showing a hairdressing student talking 
about how the loss of the EMA would affect her, and the alternative was 
announced: a Robin Hood tax and a clamp down on tax avoidance. There was a 
Brazilian carnival band, and dancers in feather headdresses and sequinned 
bikinis. A girl wore a very serious face to be photographed for the papers 
holding her homemade ‘I ♥ books’ sign, giggling once it was over.

Lots of the marchers went home along Oxford Street, getting more and more 
diluted with the shoppers until even someone in an NASUWT tabard was looking at 
shoes in the Camper shop. We’d become our old selves so much that it was almost 
a shock to see a bonfire in the centre of Oxford Circus and Topshop guarded by a 
thick cordon of riot police. It had been splattered with pastels: lilac, 
caramel, pink, mint, bluebell; an echo of the primary coloured spraypaint that 
had been used to mark future roadworks on the tarmac.

The fires continued until 2 a.m. in Trafalgar Square: police charged in to 
defend the faulty Olympic countdown clock and the last protesters retreated to 
Nelson’s Column. The next morning Vince Cable told BBC One’s Politics Show: 
‘We’re not going to change the basic economic strategy… No government – 
coalition, Labour or any other – would change its fundamental economic policy 
simply in response to a demonstration of that kind.’ And that, or so the 
government hopes, was that.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2011/03/28/joanna-biggs/on-the-march/

On 3/28/11 3:30 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> As we want to encourage demonstrations this spring against the 
> administration's war policy and its hijacking of the economy, we should be 
> aware of these quite usual police tactics; long ago, in anti-Vietnam War 
> actions, we learnt that the person urging "more militant actions" in 
> demonstrations was usually the police spy:
>
> http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/444-police-stand-by-as-colleagues-in-plain-clothes-break-windows 
>
>
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