Recent posts

Ive been thinking about the recent posts, they come across as quite angry. I think there is good reason. I am angry, very angry. It was highlighted for me this week when I was in London. At about 4.30 pm last Thursday I received a phone call from my son saying he was stuck - kettled is the new term used by police, in Westminster Square. He explained that he has asked to leave the protest over student fees as soon as the police horses ran through the crowd because it was not somewhere he wanted to be, and police had sent him first to one corner of the protest area and then another.Each time he got to the barrier he was told that he couldn't go out that way and to try a different exit. His phone calls grew increasingly concerned, as it grew dark and much colder the police started to move closer in on the group of young people in Parliament Square. By eight pm the riot police had started to arrive in volume on the scene. By this point my son was quite clear, he was not going to be let out of the square, and the police were moving people towards Westminster Bridge. I happened to be returning from work through Waterloo Station and so I called him and said I'd meet him there, as by this point it was obvious that the crowd would only be released through that route. I got to the exit of Waterloo Station and walked up towards Westminster Bridge to be greeted by a huge group of riot police, in teams of about twenty five hammering on their shields, well away from the protests, but clearly gearing up for trouble. It was very scary. Even more so when I realised that they were systematically taking off their identifying numbers, a requirement of our police in tis country is that officers can be identified individually, to remove the number means that the individual becomes lost in the police crowd, and makes identification much more difficult, especially in riot gear and face masks. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that I was not to go any further towards the bridge. I watched as a slow trickle of people started to be released - many of them were really quite young kids, maybe 14-16 years old, by this time it was well past 10.30pm. My son called me, this time he was clearly anxious, the riot police were pushing forward and the crowd had to move together much much closer, this in itself generated fear, but to make matters worse, the police who were holding the line the other side of the bridge did not know, or at least appear to know that the riot police were pushing forward. The result was that those at the front were being frequently hit by police batons as the officers thought they were rushing their line, in fact they were stuck being pushed from behind by the crowd. More young people began to come through the line, many of them with blooded faces, there were no cameras here, no press at all, just police, protestors and from across the street, me. As they walked down the street away from the protest the riot police were swinging at them still. My son finally got out at midnight, hours and hours after he had wanted to leave, he was visibly shaken.
There are always many sides to a story, but what I saw being dished out by an aggressive, mean looking police force last week appalled me and sickened me. A sign of what is to come, maybe, but what is clear, unidentifiable police are a menace, a criminal force, and it should be condemned as quite unnacceptable in just as vociferous terms as all the other acts of violence of that sad day. What is being defended here? And at what price - we could have easily seen the first death last week in that debacle of crowd management, riot police are just as culpable as the minority who fought them, otherwise why would they feel it was necessary not to be able to be identified?