Of Protests

Sick as a dog, I slept through most of yesterday and awoke to this stuff about London riots.

I've been around a few protests, and a riot or two as well; walked through a small but perfectly formed example of undue ferocity in Brixton, smashed windows and all the rest of it, been on a few where Class War might try to stir things up, been on a lot press-painted to look violent when nothing was happening: the standard way to discredit a protest is to focus on any two seconds of less than impeccable behaviour.

I even experienced my own moment of police brutality, two big policemen lifting me out of a sitting protest twisting my arms behind my back so viciously that the pain felt like a break was coming or my arm might pop out of its socket. They carried on doing that while I screamed, only dropping me on the pavement to chase the photographer who had caught sight of the moment and was clicking away.

I've had great support from the police in more recent times, but in Maggie's Day they were pretty much enforcers and little more. Things changed when it became clear that you can't police people without consent. You can't break in every door or stop and search everyone on the street, not least because the day inevitably comes when you need the community to help you and you're stuck if you've turned it into a wall. Where the police tread heavy, organised crime comes in smiling and suddenly any kind of policing becomes much harder, much more deadly. God knows how it works in a country with guns, but certainly, wherever you are, you can't expect a quiet life after the broadcasting of a man being asphyxiated by a copper's knee. There's no way this ends well.

Truth is though, protests that are legal in their day outline an area of potential vote loss and that's about it. I was living in Edinburgh at the time when Maggie's poll tax system was first being tested and met a very sharp and thoroughly illegal response; some hacker broke into it and installed a glitch that replaced 500 living names with 500 dead ones on repeat. It caused havoc for a while, but wasn't quite the end of the poll tax...

A while later when I was down in the West Country, I saw the strangest protest ever, an embarrassed trickle of twinsets and pearls and prams, one policeman at the head of the procession, one at its tail. They bore placards which were almost on the verge of Down with this sort of thing. 'Can't pay won't pay!' was the familiar legend on a few, and that was a sit up moment. These people were well off, tory heartland voters, and they couldn't, wouldn't pay the new tax. It was then I knew, no doubt at all in my heart, that the poll tax was doomed and Maggie with it. Legal protest can be a windsock for sure. Beyond that?