GLOBAL POLITICAL AWAKENING: England politics

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Will the Revolution Begin in London?

London Riot - Wiki Commons

Laurie Penny
Adbusters

‘The revolution is in the mind.’ Those words were scrawled in wobbly spray-paint on Nelson’s Column on March 26, at the end of a day that saw half a million union members and outraged citizens march against government spending cuts in central London. The plan, cooked up by students and activist groups and advertised benignly on Facebook, was to have a picnic party and ‘Turn Trafalgar Square into Tahrir Square,’ as if some sympathetic magic could summon the regime-toppling energy of the Egyptian uprising to these soggy shores. What it turned into instead was a bloody mess.

As dusk fell, 200 police in full riot armor descended on the picnic without warning, cracking heads, breaking limbs and penning hundreds of young protesters in the biting cold for hours, with no water, no shelter and no way out. This is a form of collective punishment known colloquially as “kettling.” Its use at the London G-20 protests in 2009 was recently ruled illegal in a landmark decision by the high court.

The same dangerous police tactics were employed in London last winter at the student protests that saw hundreds of thousands gather in London to challenge a prohibitive rise in college fees and the privatization of the British university system. School children and students carried placards that asked, “Where’s my future?” Instead of getting an answer, they were subjected to a vengeful model of “public order” policing that has radicalized this generation with breathtaking speed.