Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere (7 page)

On 24 November at 11 a.m., school walkouts began in towns and cities all across the UK. ‘They're taking away our future. They're rich, they don't care about us' was the theme of the vox pops as the twenty-four-hour news channels televised it all. Rough kids from Newham in London; polite kids from Dundee; Asian kids from Birmingham; white kids from Truro, Cornwall. In Morecambe, Lancashire, 200 students blocked the traffic and beat drums. In Liverpool they blockaded Lime Street station. ‘The police are outnumbered, they don't know what to do,' one participant texted.

Instead of Guy Debord, the under-eighteens opted for Anglo-Saxon literalism. They swarmed into Trafalgar Square, off buses from London's poorest neighbourhoods, clambered over the lion statues and chanted: ‘David Cameron, fuck off back to Eton!'

Then they surged down Whitehall, trashed an abandoned police van, covered it in graffiti, smoke-bombed it, attacked the police and danced. The iconic image of the day is the police van being protected by a cordon of schoolgirls who thought the violence had gone too far.

The police, in response, repeatedly ‘kettled' the protesters, and at one point charged at them on horseback. The experience of getting kettled would be central to the process of radicalization. It was not a new tactic: it had been deployed against protesters on various anti-globalization demos, and at the G20 Summit in April 2009. But for most of the students it was new and shocking: you can tell this from the vividness of the language, the way first-person accounts spark into life when they describe it. Taught throughout their lives that their rights were primarily individual, not collective, but at the same time inalienable, kettling seemed to many like an offence against the person. Sophie Burge, aged seventeen:

We waited and waited. Kettling does work when you have no choice about where you move; you start to feel very desolate and very depressed. People were crying. It was horrible; it was freezing and there were no toilets … we all just had to wee in a specific corner.
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Activist Jonathan Moses spelled out the political conclusion many of them drew: ‘that property comes before people; the rights of the former supersede those of the latter'.
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With the momentum and the radicalism increasing, the school students staged a Day X-2 on 30 November, again clashing with police and attacking property in central London. Now the stage was set for Day X-3: the demo to coincide with the final parliamentary vote on the fee increase.

The Dubstep Rebellion

9 December 2010.
I start ‘Day X-3' in the occupation at UCL, where young men are fashioning makeshift armour for their arms and shins out of cardboard. Sleeping on the floor I find Chris, a school student from Norwich who has ‘just turned up' for the demonstration. He doesn't know anybody at UCL, but they have let him stay the night. ‘I'm from the lower middle class, you could say. Not poor enough to get a grant under the new system so, though I was hoping to go to university, I really might not go.'

Lingering at the entrance to the occupation are four young boys from a nearby Camden estate: three black, one white. They are still wearing school uniform trousers, though they have swapped blazers for hoodies and face masks. They avoid my gaze. They smoke. When I catch the eye of one, he snickers wildly, staring into the distance. Though there are hours to go, they're twitching in anticipation of the violence to come.

At 2 p.m. about 40,000 people set out peacefully in the biting cold, marching from the University of London's Senate House to Parliament Square. At the Square they deviate from the agreed route, break through a line of cops who try half-heartedly to baton them, and tear down the six-foot metal fences protecting the grassy centre.

Then they dance. The hippy in charge of the sound system is from an eco-farm and has, he tells me, been trying to play ‘politically right-on reggae'. However, a new crowd—in which the oldest person is maybe seventeen—takes over the crucial jack plug. A young black girl inserts this plug into her Blackberry (iPhones are out for this demographic) and pumps out the dubstep. Or what sounds to me like dubstep.

Young men, mainly black, grab each other around the head and form a circular dance to the digital beat—lit, as dusk gathers, by the distinctly analog glow of a bench they have set on fire.

While a good half of the marchers are undergraduates from the most militant college occupations—UCL, SOAS, Leeds, Sussex—the key phenomenon, politically, is the presence of youth:
banlieue
-style youth from places like Croydon and Peckham, or the council estates of Camden, Islington and Hackney.

Meanwhile, the pushing and shoving at the police line has turned into fighting. There are of course the anarchist, Black Bloc types, there are the socialist left groups—but the main offensive actions taken to break through police lines are by small groups of young men dressed in the hip-hop fashions of working-class estates.

Some of them will appear a few days later in the
News of the World,
their mugshots released by the Met: a black kid in a Russian fur hat; other young black boys in hoodies. Exhilarated eyes, very few bothering to mask up.

As it gets dark, there are just two lines of riot police and about thirty yards between the students and the parliament building. The Met has adopted a first-ditch-equals-last-ditch defence: Britain's only full-time riot squad, the Territorial Support Group, is all that's preventing the youth from clambering over the medieval walls of Westminster.

Inside parliament, MPs are debating the fee increase. Outside, getting nowhere with the TSG, the students change direction. They swarm up Victoria Street, which leads away from parliament, pushing back a line of mounted police and breaking through police attempts to form a cordon. But then, in successive charges, both the mounted police and the riot squads fight back. There is now toe-to-toe confrontation.

Heavy objects land among the police, amid a much larger volume of paint, fireworks and flash-bangs. At one point the horses are unable to cope, and a policeman falls off his mount, getting dragged away on a stretcher by colleagues.

A girl steps through a break in the police line and gets batoned. She crumples to the ground, where the police continue beating her. Afterwards she stays there, inert for a long, long time, so that the press photographers in their crash helmets stop shooting and cluster around her. She doesn't speak. Her face is screwed up, disbelief mingled with terror.

At the point of the wedge, alongside the estate youth, are the self-styled ‘Book Bloc'. They've gone into battle in green helmets with mattress-sized mockups of book covers:
Endgame,
by Samuel Beckett;
Negative Dialectics
by Theodore Adorno; Debord, of course; and—for levity—the tales of an unruly school-kid,
Just William
by Richmal Crompton. They've copied this tactic from a group of Italian students, who are at the same moment lobbing firebombs into the side-streets of Rome.

Soon the books-cum-shields are torn out of their hands, and it is metal and bone and Kevlar that is making that clunk-clunk sound. Together with the constant strobe of camera flashes and the throb of the dubstep —or what sounds like dubstep—it's become like a macabre outdoor nightclub.

For the police this is an ‘only just' moment: a couple of officers get knocked to the ground and the students break through. Reinforcements arrive: dismounted motorcycle cops, many without helmets but wielding long batons. One runs straight at me, face snarling. But he's aiming for someone else. Clunk.

I decide to get out. There's one of the Fleet Street photographers covered in green paint; his Nikon's covered in paint too: irreparable. He shows it off to the others. It's like shift work, because as we're pulling out others are going in. The journos are clad in black, like many of the protesters, and we smile at each other as if this is somehow funny.

On the east corner of Parliament Square, people climb up to smash the windows of the HM Revenue and Customs building. On the west side they scale the façade of the Supreme Court, smash the leaded windows and push lighted materials inside. On the wall, someone sprays Debord's aphorism: ‘Be Realistic—Demand the Impossible'.

Outside a pub there is a line of injured protesters being triaged by ambulance crews. Everybody has a head wound and a white bandage. And now the kettling's started. Some will end up trapped for hours in the freezing cold. Those who can escape go back to the student occupations to discuss where the campaign goes next.

By nightfall a student called Alfie Meadows is undergoing brain surgery after allegedly being batoned by police. Television footage shows another student—Jody Mclntyre, who has cerebral palsy—being dragged from his wheelchair by an irate policeman, who's being restrained by his own colleagues. Elsewhere, in the West End, a breakaway group has surrounded a vintage Rolls Royce carrying Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall to a function at the Palladium Theatre. As the protesters rock the car to and fro and throw paint bombs at it, somebody leans through the open window and prods Camilla with a stick. The royal protection squad, it emerges later, were on the point of drawing their guns.

A few hours later, after I've blogged all this under the headline ‘The Dubstep Rebellion', some protesters make vigorous representations to me via Twitter: they present a detailed playlist of the tracks blasted out in Parliament Square, which proves the music was not dubstep but grime.
⁴
It was the Grime Rebellion, doh.

Grime is music seen as so dangerous that it's effectively banned in the clubs teenagers frequent, and its performers shunned by all but pirate radio stations. Grime is hip-hop with a Cockney accent and a dirty bass-line; its most important instrument is the cracked-vowel voice of the London street kid. The same kind of voice that is now heard gabbling with rage on the evening news: ‘We're from the slums of London, yeah, and how do they expect us to pay uni fees—of nine thousand pounds? And the maintenance allowance: that's what's keeping us in college. What's stopping us from doing drug deals on the streets anymore? Nothing.'
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This, it turns out, is the most prescient statement made that day.

At six o'clock the next evening, with the Met police chief, Paul Stephenson, facing calls for his resignation over the breakdown of law and order, I return to the scene of the battle. Whitehall and Parliament Square are still strewn with rubble and missiles; boarded-up windows line the route and the atmosphere is tense, the police on edge.

Suddenly, out of the dark comes the sound of drumming and wailing. Seven or eight figures emerge, dressed in black and wearing elaborate crows'-head masks. They do a dance across three lanes of stalled traffic into the middle of Parliament Square and approach the statue of Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George. And they lay a black wreath.

‘We're here to mourn the death of the Liberal Party,' croaks the guy holding the drum, as he beats out a tocsin surrounded by the masked, mainly female, wailers. This goes on for about five minutes. At no point do they attempt to photograph, film or otherwise record the performance. It is purely gestural, vanishing into obscurity the moment it's over. Though the area is swarming with police, none interferes.

‘We're art students from Slade and Goldsmiths,' explains the drummer. Why are they doing this? ‘We felt we had to.' Did they, I ask, know about the teach-in at the National Gallery, at the height of last night's riot?

‘Yes, that was us: the
Hive Manifesto.
'

The
Hive Manifesto

A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of debt slaves refusing to pay. All the powers within Europe have entered into a holy alliance to regenerate a failing economy, to realise a lethal dream of returning to business as usual, and to level the education and culture, to transform the educational and cultural sectors into a consumer society success story.
⁶

At 4:45 p.m. on Day X-3, while clashes raged around parliament, art students and their professors had invaded the National Gallery and staged a sit-in beneath Manet's
Execution of Maximilian.
Earlier they had held an impromptu rave on Ai Weiwei's pebble sculpture at the Tate Modern. After a couple of lecturers gave speeches about the meaning of modern art, the students began scribbling. They produced
The Nomadic Hive Manifesto,
a parody of Marx and Engels which quickly becomes a bullet-point list of exhortations for protesters to remain non-hierarchical and fluid, to communicate ‘using dancing and pheromones'.

The point about the
Hive Manifesto
is not that it is in any way a special literary document but that it sums up the change that people were feeling globally by late 2010, especially youth:

If you listen carefully, all that moaning, the sound that can be heard just behind the drone of everyday life, cars and the slurping of lattes, has become a little more urgent: a humming of dissatisfaction becomes dissent. The Holy Alliance fears that this noise has become a song on the lips of all?
⁷

The art students had grasped that the fees protest would catalyze a far wider dissatisfaction with the effects of the economic crisis. The experience would show that refusal to cooperate with a system could be a more effective method of fighting it than an ordinary political campaign.

On the website Critical Legal Thinking, which published the Hive text, PhD student Rory Rowan surveyed the experience of kettling. Bearing in mind the tendency of kettling to provoke people into anger, and to provide a negative spectacle for the heliborne TV cameras, he suggested:

A form of protest is needed that places dispersal over concentration, mobility over stasis and perhaps even disruption over symbolism. If multiple smaller mobile groups were to simultaneously occupy key strategic sites and disrupt vital processes, the momentum of symbolical opposition could be maintained without the police being able to herd opposition toward spectacle.
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