Read Online Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere by Paul Mason - Free Book Online

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