Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere (8 page)

Now, once the vote in parliament was over and the student movement had demobilized, sections of the discontented public seemed to sense that the moment for such protests had arrived.

Tactics of the powerless

The first UK Uncut action took place on Wednesday, 27 October 2010, when about forty protesters occupied and closed down a Vodafone store in London's Oxford Street. A mixture of old and young, they crime-taped the entrance, holding up banners claiming that Vodafone's unpaid tax bill—reported to be £6 billion—was just short of the £7 billion of public spending cuts now being made. Three days later, on Saturday, 30 October, there were similar actions in fifteen UK cities. By 18 December the movement reached a peak, with actions in over seventy UK towns and cities.

The core activists were committed horizontalists who had learned their methods in the Climate Camp movement. They would occupy a store, create a narrative there (for example, declaring it to be a ‘library' and handing out books), and then get thrown out—displaying enough resistance to sabotage the business operation, but not usually enough to get arrested.

Though it coincided with the student unrest, the most remarkable thing about Uncut was its spontaneous replication by groups with no connection to the students nor to the anarchist protesters. The spectacle of grandmothers sitting down in the Boots pharmacy of quiet provincial towns, arm-in-arm with their teenage granddaughters, alarmed public-order specialists because there was little or no sanction they could bring against it.

The think tank Policy Exchange convened a panel of law-and-order specialists to ask: ‘Do these actions portend a dangerous new trend towards the use of physical force? If so, what can and should be done to prevent this phenomenon becoming a regular feature of the national landscape?'
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Actually, the answer is: very little. Ewa Jasiewicz, a thirty-something veteran of the anti-globalization movement, has been involved with UK Uncut from the start. An organizer for the Unite Union, she's been jailed and deported twice from Israel, most recently during the Gaza Flotilla of May 2010, and helped to set up an oil workers' union in Iraq after 2003. She is therefore used to being part of an activist minority, and interprets the recent adoption of radical tactics by large numbers of people as the result of a new feeling of powerlessness:

I feel like there is a lot of reaction to ‘the future': there is a sense that the present is so bad, and conditions of austerity being imposed, pensions undermined, services undermined—that we can't have any more of this. And if this is what the present is, what's the future?

Social media, she believes, have been the key to turning what was once a niche, lifestyle form of protest into an accessible method for everybody else:

The anti-road movement of the late 1990s didn't ask you to sign up to an ideology, just to put your body in the way of a JCB. The difference is that then, we didn't have a media strategy. UK Uncut is the best example of social media carrying ideas into maximum participation on a localized, decentralized scale.

Horizontalism, she argues, provides the most useful methods for people with no power. If trade-union activists and grandmothers alike were drawn to dressing up and committing civil disobedience in the high streets of small towns, it was because they saw the old ways of trying to influence politics as closed off. Jasiewicz describes succinctly what this kind of protest is designed to achieve: ‘A lot of our resistance as unarmed and powerless people is based on creating moments where the state is forced to respond to a scenario we are putting forward that is problematic for them; that creates a crisis of legitimacy.'

UK Uncut actions were ‘fun, good-natured', easy to join in with—but they also allowed people to ‘see the repression in their lives', says Jasiewicz.

Once you can take the struggle out of the corridors of power and distil it—so that you can see capitalism, personified, in your high street—it becomes more tangible. It becomes easier to respond to an oppression you could not name. Now you can. And social media says to people who are alienated and disparate: you are like me; these things are everywhere.

I ask Jasiewicz the same questions I asked Riches: what she reads, and what has influenced the way she thinks and acts. It turns out that, like many fellow activists, she has a deep hostility to theory. ‘I don't like talking about what I think; it's bullshit. It's this action, this protest, Iraq, Palestine, Deptford'—where she organized a post-riot cleanup and solidarity demo in August 2011. ‘And even social media is not the central thing. The things that are central are off the radar: social interaction, relationship building, trust. Talk to people. Trust is explosive.'

In the space of six months, the impact of austerity in Britain had created a mass constituency for these ideas, above all among school students and undergraduates. But the old, hierarchical forms of protest had not gone away. Slowly, the trade unions moved from lobbying to action. On 26 March 2011 they called what would become the biggest trade-union demo in post-war history.

However, just as the events in Tahrir Square had demonstrated the potential for synthesis between students, workers and urban poor, 26 March would be a case study in the lack of synthesis. It would throw the horizontalist movement in Britain into a crisis of direction that it is still struggling to recover from.

Three tribes go to war

London, 26 March 2011.
It's clear early on it's going to be massive. The leaders of Unison—which represents local government and health workers—have massively mobilized their people, bringing in whole trains and hundreds of coachloads of workers, printing t-shirts and professional-looking banners. On the south bank of the Thames, a group called ‘Croydon Filipino Nurses' is lining up for a photo call. Further on, under a banner saying ‘Nurses Uncut', a group of women—longtime workmates from various hospitals—meet up, ready to march. They've organized it on Facebook: 450 have signed up, some not even in a union. They've spent the past few days reassuring each other because of the lurid tabloid headlines about anarchists and violence. ‘There won't be any trouble,' they tell each other.

Getting across the river is hard: some bridges are closed, others crammed with people. Shoulder to shoulder are teachers from Devon, firefighters in red t-shirts, balloon-holding binmen from Glasgow, Norwich, Gloucester; home helps from Renfrewshire. They shuffle their way across Waterloo Bridge. The demonstration is already massing along the Thames and you can hear whistles, drums and vuvuzelas.

By the time the march sets off, with a clear half million on the streets, it has turned into the biggest trade-union demo for more than thirty years.

Among the marchers, you can see what the new mood created by the student movement and UK Uncut has achieved. ‘Where's Ed Miliband?' representatives from a special needs school—students and teachers linked arm-in-arm—ask me. ‘We don't trust him! He needs to get his act together. It's the bankers, the profit system. The big companies should stop evading tax!' There's a festive atmosphere. The schoolkids are singing a re-scripted version of 'I Will Survive'.

But at Piccadilly Circus, the edges of the demo are swarming with youths dressed like members of the anarchist Black Bloc. Really young kids: buzzing with the newness of it all, some change from their normal clothes into black hoodies and scarves right there in front of the police. The police begin to talk urgently into their walkie-talkies.

A veteran riot photographer texts me with the time and place where it will kick off: Regent Street, a vast curve of nineteenth-century architecture and luxury retail. When I get there, it's deserted. In the distance I can make out a tight phalanx of black-clad protesters, about 400 strong, filling the width of the street. They tramp forward, masked, some carrying the red-and-black flags of anarcho-syndicalism. This, one of them tells me later, is the biggest Black Bloc ever assembled in the UK. And though there are certainly numerous anarchists from Europe here, it is the students and school students from December who have really swelled the numbers.

They veer off into a side-street and start lobbing paint, billiard balls and smoke flares at various boutique shops: Victorinox gets it, so does an art gallery. There are only about twenty police around, none in riot gear. In a futile gesture, they try to protect the Victorinox shop, receiving the full barrage of paint, bottles and—according to the Met's later report—an acid-filled light bulb.

It's mayhem. And it is clear the police tactic is not to deploy fully and fight the protesters. For the next few hours the Black Bloc will roam around the West End, attacking shops, breaking into groups, running away, re-forming—with a Genoa-style, ‘fluffy' contingent of nonviolent direct action people trailing along behind.

I stop some of the latter: the women are dressed in multicoloured wigs, faces painted, tinsel in their hair, bare midriffs; the men are longhaired, thin, and non-aggressive. Why are they doing this?

Boy: ‘Because Top Shop's owner hasn't paid billions of pounds of tax.'

Girl (off her head): ‘We're just dancing with flowers. We're protesting in favour of beauty, against all this fucking shit in the window. We don't want to spend all our money on clothes.'

Boy: ‘… and because capitalism is a damn lie. That's why we're throwing stuff at these fucking shop fronts.'

I buttonhole a second group, students; two young men and a woman. One of the guys, wearing a hipster low-neck t-shirt and a plaid duffle coat:

We're sick with the government in general. For decades nobody legitimately can tell the truth; the nature of the hierarchy means only the imbeciles, the suck-ups, only the scumbags ever get to the top. So to truly be free is for everyone to take our part and decide for our freedom.

This is weird English but that's exactly how he says it, and he is not drunk or foreign, just furious. ‘We need to all get together and create a community. All government is just an infrastructure, when we get government out of our vision we can start from the ground up, without corruption.'

At Oxford Circus a thirty-foot Trojan Horse made of wicker is wheeled in by protesters and goes up in flames. The police do nothing, because at this point there are none in attendance.

Along Oxford Street, all the stores targeted by UK Uncut in previous weeks—Topshop, Nike, HSBC—are closed in anticipation of the protests. In front of a branch of Boots, a peaceful picket of Uncutters (everybody dressed as doctors or patients) is busy sealing off the store with tape. Their symbolic message—the death of healthcare and Boots' non-payment of tax. Nearby, police video them and take notes.

A few hundred yards away is Hyde Park, where hundreds of thousands who have stayed to listen to the speeches hear civil service union leader Mark Serwotka call for a general strike. Ed Miliband makes a speech. He is not so well received, and by now the networks are split-screening him with something more televisual.

Anarchists have gathered outside the Ritz Hotel on Piccadilly, pelting and daubing the famous landmark. A few doors down, hundreds of UK Uncut activists invade the upmarket grocer's Fortnum & Mason. This moment—which unfolds across my Twitter feed, with people messaging from inside Fortnum's and from within Ed Miliband's press team—turns out to be the crest of the wave of protest that began at Millbank in November. After this climax comes the crisis.

The police kettled the Fortnum's protesters and, as night fell, 145 of them were arrested one by one. Many were held for the full twenty-four hours allowed by law and then released, in paper jumpsuits like terror suspects, their clothes impounded.

No serious act of violence had been committed at Fortnum's, though some protesters had chalked messages on the shop front. But there had been a mass outbreak of Black Bloc violence and destruction elsewhere. Virtually none of the Bloc had been arrested—but almost all of Fortnum's invaders had.

This posed, point-blank, two problems for the core of activists who had launched UK Uncut. Did they condone or condemn the actions of the Black Bloc, and how would they now function, since most of them were on bail? Of the total of 201 protesters arrested over the entire day, 145 were at Fortnum & Mason. At time of writing, all but thirty have seen all charges dropped.

Meanwhile, in Hyde Park, half a million trade unionists began drifting away to their coaches, oblivious to—but later horrified to learn— what the Black Bloc had done. Half a million low-paid public servants had been eclipsed by the actions of four hundred people: the news bulletins were dominated by images of masked kids, broken windows and a smouldering wicker horse in Oxford Circus.

Towards the English Summer

In the period between Millbank and the trade-union demonstration of 26 March 2011, three social forces had been on the streets that we will meet time and again in the new global unrest: enraged students, youth from the urban underclass, and the big battalions of organized labour. In each phase, social media had helped the movement grow with dizzying rapidity.

The police, still smarting from the condemnation of their tactics at the G20 Summit in 2009, were in crisis. First, they had failed to anticipate Millbank, and their repeated use of kettling had radicalized large numbers of young people. Soon, the
News of the World
phone-hacking scandal would end the careers of London's two top policemen, and the Met would stumble into the 2011 summer of riots seemingly directionless.

But the protest movement was also in crisis. Students got wrapped up in their exams; the trade unions began negotiations over pensions; the small group of activists behind UK Uncut went into a defensive huddle; and the anarchists engaged in mutual recrimination, the Black Bloc openly declaring their ‘right' to be violent. The momentum had gone.

Meanwhile, a third demographic group had gone missing. The urban youth crept back to their estates where, as spring turned into summer, they cranked up the Grime. They pondered the meaning of all the Situationist slogans they had heard, and watched as the Met Police leadership self-destructed during the Murdoch scandal. Then, in August, as a shaken political class retreated to the Tuscan hills, the urban poor staged an insurrection of their own.