I've just got a great text from Friend 2 regarding today's protests. She's been watching along on the telly, but could not have expressed the afternoon better if she'd actually been there:
I probably had better things to do that walk about in the cold with no gloves, with people I don't respect, put myself in possible mortal peril, and make no difference whatsoever - but then I get so pissed off at people who think that's a good enough excuse. I've probably got Blake to blame for that, and for the record unlike me, he is obviously a big fan of violent civil disobedience. He'd have thought Millbank was great, but would probably have been a little more efficient about trashing the place. (The Doctor doesn't need a political stance because he can bring down a government in six words or less.) And it's interesting, because I would argue Blake's stance is justified on the grounds that he has no other means of protesting. Freedom of speech, fair trial and rights to assembly - peaceful methods, in other words - are totally impossible for him, making his violence his only option. But then...isn't violence our only option? Working on the basis that the government were never going to reverse the cuts, no matter how many flower children designed witty banners and danced...
I'd been to the previous protest, which was a beautiful fun day ruined by mayhem I totally missed. I figured Protest #2 could go one of two ways - either the pacifists would come out in force to disassociate the student movement from the Millbank mess. Or, as appears to have happened, the troublemakers would redouble their prescence, and the disillusioned pacifists wouldn't bother to show up at all. I could tell at once this was not a protest I wanted to walk with - but I did have my camera with me (been trying to shoot an avant-garde movie, and my ideas require sunlight and Central London), so had a bash at documentary.
One of the things you'll note from the film is my interest not in the protestors, but the police prescence. I couldn't quite take in how darn many there were - somebody was overcompensating. That too bloodied the atmosphere. Being trailed by six riot vans is never going to make a crowd happy. I moved between being just at the back, in front of the police line, and just behind them. Met a guy dressed as the Joker, I guess - he had a bowler hat, clown face paint and a funny manner of speaking and walking, although he had not adopted the purples and greens
"Your card is the - Jack of hearts!" he guessed raspily on noticing my hat. I'm not kidding - to get ahead in the world, wear a splendid hat. Interesting, artistic, millinary-appreciating people feel the need to compliment it, and you can then have conversations with them. He was accompanied by a really pretty chap (I think; retrospectively, could have been female; really pretty in either case) dressed as Edward Scissorhands.
The protest came to a halt in Parliament Square, simply because those at the front stopped moving. I imagine, corralled by police vans at the other end. The atmosphere was not nice. Two separate groups had brought loudspeakers rigged up to dance music, but not the positive euphoric sort. The exciting, ugly sort which is fun if you're pretending to be a post-apocalyptic biopunk at a rave, but is a bit too appropriate to hordes of angry youth. A group had already climbed on top of a bus shelter, with one of the speakers, and a mini-rave had begun.
On the opposite side of the square, a line of people were standing on the sandbags, piled against a temporary railing that kept the protest off an open drain - I joined them for a better perspective, and made a classic mistake. A few minutes later, a sort of stampede toppeled the distant end of the railing, and that dragged the whole thing down section by section. My first instinct was to jump off the sandbags and get away from the trouble - retrospectively, my first instinct should have been to stay there and keep recording. Not a mistake I will make again!
In the middle, a police van was overrun by enemy forces - slogans had been sharpied all over it, an Anarchy banner erected on top, by three revellers who had scaled the sides. One wearing the iconic V mask. I love how the iconography of V for Vendetta has been adopted by real life - it's the kind of reality bending I really enjoy. The despair was new - I've never felt that at a protest before. I think a sense of severe disillusionment was what made it all so nasty, as if everyone were to say "Who cares if a few buildings get trashed? Or if I get jailed? You're not going to listen anyway - I'd rather take out my hate than petition for my hope". After the governmental double-cross, and the miserable end to the last demo, the only people who would bother protesting a third time would have to be the last stand mad-spitfires.
I didn't feel comfortable at all, so stayed to the outskirts where there was still quite a lot of space. I kept shooting until my battery ran out, then went to leave. No such luck - the three police lines were preventing exit on all sides. The chaps I spoke to were all very pleasant about it, suprisingly present considering they were paid today to stand and wait to be beaten up. I would have expected them to be more tense. The man I spoke to on each side helpfully redirected me to the next side, where maybe people were being allowed to leave. In fact, no one on any side could get out unless they had a pass proving - I couldn't work out what, but some businessmen and photographers managed. I found a quiet corner and grumpily ate my pasta - I was quite cold by this point, bereft of the fun of filming, and getting increasingly late for a meeting with people I wanted to impress. Rather stressed about the crowds too - I hung around the police line and watched a lot of people turned away, even though they were still letting people in through a one-person gap at the back.
It increasingly felt like a tragedy in waiting, as different smokes rose from the very front, and someone let off a firework. Moderate people of various sorts had apparently made the same decision as me - this was not a protest they wanted to be at any more, and they wanted to be out before trouble, but were being prevented from. This included many of the reasonably dressed older women, spooked teenage girls and several bands of young kids. This bothered me a lot, because if trouble was on the cards, then surely diffusing the crowds in a controlled manner before it started would have cut down on chaos.
I'll be interested to hear how the situation was resolved in Parliament Square, because it seemed the easiest way of causing a riot/stampede that could have been designed. I attempted exit by all three sides multiple times, and while doing so a huge surge of people swarmed into the quiet space. At the time, I thought "well this is it then!" - I'd known there was no exit for about 15 minutes at this point, well long enough for it to filter through the crowd. I made a break for one of the shops lining the route (poor proprietors! Poor holidaymakers trapped in the cafes!) and got chatting with an older woman from just inside, as we watched people continue to move outside. Nothing kicked off, it was just spontaneous movement. I tried the three sides again, and finally decided to try and break out in the corner where people were entering. There were apparently people trying to exit, and I could see some succeeding.
No. 2, my dad, has an oft-repeated anecdote about getting a great view of a Genesis concert by following a really fat chap all the way to the front - well, I found a pair of overweight older women. They were let through just ahead of me, and then the gap closed leaving me face to face with a brick of a cop. After a moment, he asked "Tourist?". I brandished mny camera, nodded innocently, and tried to look Welsh. It worked, so thank goodness for blonde hair and general panic, because if he'd stopped to think about it, he'd have noticed I was dressed like the studentiest student who had ever studied.
Tadah! Freedom! At which point I allowed myself to be really damned unhappy about how the morning had turned out. Adrenaline does wonders in the moment, but then life crashes. In the ghostly empty street behind the protest, I met a group of school kids who had broken out of their school - literally, headmistress tried to keep them in, they smashed down the gates, to get to the protest. They all praised my hat (see?) and warned me about the corral, and seemed to be warning other latecomers.
I struggled back to my meeting, rather late, and was afterwards so tired that I found an abandoned room in the Strand and napped on a sofa for two hours before I felt able to walk to the Tube. Good day. Depressing and desperate, but no experience is intrinsically worthless, especially one you walk away from, and I'm now going to edit everything together for you folks at home. Catch you later!
Good...[regarding the fact I would refuse to protest with that lot after dark] the atmosphere seemed a bit too...tense/expectant/charged on tv. Like they were all waiting for something. And there were too many police.Because before the protest even started on the Strand, I could hear the three helicopters overhead, and saw riot vans crossing the city, and two policemen taking up post outside the uni.
~24/11/2010 17:15
I probably had better things to do that walk about in the cold with no gloves, with people I don't respect, put myself in possible mortal peril, and make no difference whatsoever - but then I get so pissed off at people who think that's a good enough excuse. I've probably got Blake to blame for that, and for the record unlike me, he is obviously a big fan of violent civil disobedience. He'd have thought Millbank was great, but would probably have been a little more efficient about trashing the place. (The Doctor doesn't need a political stance because he can bring down a government in six words or less.) And it's interesting, because I would argue Blake's stance is justified on the grounds that he has no other means of protesting. Freedom of speech, fair trial and rights to assembly - peaceful methods, in other words - are totally impossible for him, making his violence his only option. But then...isn't violence our only option? Working on the basis that the government were never going to reverse the cuts, no matter how many flower children designed witty banners and danced...
I'd been to the previous protest, which was a beautiful fun day ruined by mayhem I totally missed. I figured Protest #2 could go one of two ways - either the pacifists would come out in force to disassociate the student movement from the Millbank mess. Or, as appears to have happened, the troublemakers would redouble their prescence, and the disillusioned pacifists wouldn't bother to show up at all. I could tell at once this was not a protest I wanted to walk with - but I did have my camera with me (been trying to shoot an avant-garde movie, and my ideas require sunlight and Central London), so had a bash at documentary.
One of the things you'll note from the film is my interest not in the protestors, but the police prescence. I couldn't quite take in how darn many there were - somebody was overcompensating. That too bloodied the atmosphere. Being trailed by six riot vans is never going to make a crowd happy. I moved between being just at the back, in front of the police line, and just behind them. Met a guy dressed as the Joker, I guess - he had a bowler hat, clown face paint and a funny manner of speaking and walking, although he had not adopted the purples and greens
"Your card is the - Jack of hearts!" he guessed raspily on noticing my hat. I'm not kidding - to get ahead in the world, wear a splendid hat. Interesting, artistic, millinary-appreciating people feel the need to compliment it, and you can then have conversations with them. He was accompanied by a really pretty chap (I think; retrospectively, could have been female; really pretty in either case) dressed as Edward Scissorhands.
The protest came to a halt in Parliament Square, simply because those at the front stopped moving. I imagine, corralled by police vans at the other end. The atmosphere was not nice. Two separate groups had brought loudspeakers rigged up to dance music, but not the positive euphoric sort. The exciting, ugly sort which is fun if you're pretending to be a post-apocalyptic biopunk at a rave, but is a bit too appropriate to hordes of angry youth. A group had already climbed on top of a bus shelter, with one of the speakers, and a mini-rave had begun.
On the opposite side of the square, a line of people were standing on the sandbags, piled against a temporary railing that kept the protest off an open drain - I joined them for a better perspective, and made a classic mistake. A few minutes later, a sort of stampede toppeled the distant end of the railing, and that dragged the whole thing down section by section. My first instinct was to jump off the sandbags and get away from the trouble - retrospectively, my first instinct should have been to stay there and keep recording. Not a mistake I will make again!
In the middle, a police van was overrun by enemy forces - slogans had been sharpied all over it, an Anarchy banner erected on top, by three revellers who had scaled the sides. One wearing the iconic V mask. I love how the iconography of V for Vendetta has been adopted by real life - it's the kind of reality bending I really enjoy. The despair was new - I've never felt that at a protest before. I think a sense of severe disillusionment was what made it all so nasty, as if everyone were to say "Who cares if a few buildings get trashed? Or if I get jailed? You're not going to listen anyway - I'd rather take out my hate than petition for my hope". After the governmental double-cross, and the miserable end to the last demo, the only people who would bother protesting a third time would have to be the last stand mad-spitfires.
I didn't feel comfortable at all, so stayed to the outskirts where there was still quite a lot of space. I kept shooting until my battery ran out, then went to leave. No such luck - the three police lines were preventing exit on all sides. The chaps I spoke to were all very pleasant about it, suprisingly present considering they were paid today to stand and wait to be beaten up. I would have expected them to be more tense. The man I spoke to on each side helpfully redirected me to the next side, where maybe people were being allowed to leave. In fact, no one on any side could get out unless they had a pass proving - I couldn't work out what, but some businessmen and photographers managed. I found a quiet corner and grumpily ate my pasta - I was quite cold by this point, bereft of the fun of filming, and getting increasingly late for a meeting with people I wanted to impress. Rather stressed about the crowds too - I hung around the police line and watched a lot of people turned away, even though they were still letting people in through a one-person gap at the back.
It increasingly felt like a tragedy in waiting, as different smokes rose from the very front, and someone let off a firework. Moderate people of various sorts had apparently made the same decision as me - this was not a protest they wanted to be at any more, and they wanted to be out before trouble, but were being prevented from. This included many of the reasonably dressed older women, spooked teenage girls and several bands of young kids. This bothered me a lot, because if trouble was on the cards, then surely diffusing the crowds in a controlled manner before it started would have cut down on chaos.
I'll be interested to hear how the situation was resolved in Parliament Square, because it seemed the easiest way of causing a riot/stampede that could have been designed. I attempted exit by all three sides multiple times, and while doing so a huge surge of people swarmed into the quiet space. At the time, I thought "well this is it then!" - I'd known there was no exit for about 15 minutes at this point, well long enough for it to filter through the crowd. I made a break for one of the shops lining the route (poor proprietors! Poor holidaymakers trapped in the cafes!) and got chatting with an older woman from just inside, as we watched people continue to move outside. Nothing kicked off, it was just spontaneous movement. I tried the three sides again, and finally decided to try and break out in the corner where people were entering. There were apparently people trying to exit, and I could see some succeeding.
No. 2, my dad, has an oft-repeated anecdote about getting a great view of a Genesis concert by following a really fat chap all the way to the front - well, I found a pair of overweight older women. They were let through just ahead of me, and then the gap closed leaving me face to face with a brick of a cop. After a moment, he asked "Tourist?". I brandished mny camera, nodded innocently, and tried to look Welsh. It worked, so thank goodness for blonde hair and general panic, because if he'd stopped to think about it, he'd have noticed I was dressed like the studentiest student who had ever studied.
Tadah! Freedom! At which point I allowed myself to be really damned unhappy about how the morning had turned out. Adrenaline does wonders in the moment, but then life crashes. In the ghostly empty street behind the protest, I met a group of school kids who had broken out of their school - literally, headmistress tried to keep them in, they smashed down the gates, to get to the protest. They all praised my hat (see?) and warned me about the corral, and seemed to be warning other latecomers.
I struggled back to my meeting, rather late, and was afterwards so tired that I found an abandoned room in the Strand and napped on a sofa for two hours before I felt able to walk to the Tube. Good day. Depressing and desperate, but no experience is intrinsically worthless, especially one you walk away from, and I'm now going to edit everything together for you folks at home. Catch you later!
