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Authors: Paul Mason
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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 doesnât speak. Her face is screwed up, disbelief mingled with terror.
At the point of the wedge, alongside the estate youth, are the self-styled âBook Blocâ. Theyâve 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; andâfor levityâthe tales of an unruly school-kid, Just William by Richmal Crompton. Theyâve 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 âor what sounds like dubstepâitâs become like a macabre outdoor nightclub.
For the police this is an âonly justâ 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 heâs aiming for someone else. Clunk.
I decide to get out. Thereâs one of the Fleet Street photographers covered in green paint; his Nikonâs covered in paint too: irreparable. He shows it off to the others. Itâs like shift work, because as weâre 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 Debordâs aphorism: âBe RealisticâDemand the Impossibleâ.
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 kettlingâs 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 studentâJody Mclntyre, who has cerebral palsyâbeing dragged from his wheelchair by an irate policeman, whoâs 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 Iâve blogged all this
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 doesnât speak. Her face is screwed up, disbelief mingled with terror.
At the point of the wedge, alongside the estate youth, are the self-styled âBook Blocâ. Theyâve 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; andâfor levityâthe tales of an unruly school-kid, Just William by Richmal Crompton. Theyâve 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 âor what sounds like dubstepâitâs become like a macabre outdoor nightclub.
For the police this is an âonly justâ 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 heâs aiming for someone else. Clunk.
I decide to get out. Thereâs one of the Fleet Street photographers covered in green paint; his Nikonâs covered in paint too: irreparable. He shows it off to the others. Itâs like shift work, because as weâre 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 Debordâs aphorism: âBe RealisticâDemand the Impossibleâ.
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 kettlingâs 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 studentâJody Mclntyre, who has cerebral palsyâbeing dragged from his wheelchair by an irate policeman, whoâs 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 Iâve blogged all this
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