Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere. Paul Mason
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at further education colleges (the British equivalent to high school) were facing a double hit. If they got to university, they would be the first to pay the fee increases. But in the interim the government had decided to cut the Education Maintenance Allowance, a payment of up to £30 a week Labour had introduced in 2004 to combat—or conceal, depending on your viewpoint—structural youth unemployment. At the time of its abolition, 647,000 under-eighteens were receiving EMA. Though conceived as a kind of paternalistic ‘pocket money’, most of those I talked to were so poor that they were spending the money on essential groceries for their family.
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.2
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’.3
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