Demonstrators sit down on Piccadilly during a protest organised by the Trades Union Congress, in central London. Photo: Paul Hackett / Reuters

What went wrong?

As the dust settles and the slogans are scrubbed off the walls of

Fortnum and Mason, that's the question the entire British Left is

asking itself about the events of March the 26th. What went wrong?

Where do we go from here? And most importantly, who do we blame?

That last part is easy: we blame it on the kids. The story currently

being spun by the police, by parties in government, and by most of the

press is that an otherwise successful mass demonstration was ruined by

disgusting little vandals with hate in their hearts. That mindless

acts of violence were perpetrated by a small, hardcore group of

hooligans calling themselves 'the black bloc', who trashed banks and

businesses at random and attacked the police without provocation. That

their behaviour undermined and discredited the half-million citizens

who marched to the rally point in Hyde Park. That it was a major own

goal for the Left in this time of crisis.

That assessment is incorrect on nearly every level. Unfortunately, the

handful of reporters, including myself, who dared to produce accounts

of the day that run counter to the mainstream consensus, have been

savagely attacked. We have been called thugs, liars and terrorists for

having the temerity to put on record the police brutality that some of

us observed and experienced in Trafalgar square. We have faced down

attempts to bully and threaten us into retracting our testimonies.





Ben, 21, was struck on the head during marches in London.

I feel obligated to restate that the accepted public narrative about

the events in London on March the 26th is factually incorrect on

several important counts. In the first instance, there were not a 'few

hundred' dedicated 'criminals' on Oxford Street and in Picadilly on

Saturday, but thousands and thousands of people, mostly under thirty and

unaffiliated, many of whom had come straight from flag-waving and

banner-holding on the main march through Whitehall to join in with the

peaceful actions planned in central London. These actions had been

organised by the campaigning group UKUncut. Some of them, such as the

store occupations, were potentially

unlawful- but they

were peaceful and politically motivated, like all of

UKUncut's previous projects.

Secondly, the 'black bloc' – a phrase that will undoubtedly be used to

terrify wavering tabloid readers for years to come – is not an

organisation, but a tactic. It is a tactic used, rightly or wrongly,

to facilitate the sort of civil disobedience that becomes attractive

to the young and the desperate when every polite model of political

expression has let them down. Although there were a small number of

genuinely violent agitators in attendance on Saturday, most of them

middle aged, drunk and uninterested in the main protest, a great many

of the young people who chose to mask up and wear black in order to

commit acts of civil disobedience had never done anything of the kind

before.

Those young people came from all over the country. They were students,

schoolkids, workers and union members. Nine months ago, many of them

were political interns, members of the Labour party or volunteers for

the

Liberal Democrats. Nine months ago, many of them still believed,

however naively, that the democratic process might deliver real

change. Now a new spirit of youthful unrest has been born into an ugly

and uncomprehending political reality. A generation has been

radicalised by the betrayal of their modest request for a fair future,

and by repeated experiences of police brutality against those who

chose to resist.

Those young people, with their energy and their idealism, briefly

looked set to capture the hearts and minds of the nation. Following

the events of march the 26th, former sympathisers in the Labour

movement and on the liberal left are now falling over themselves to

disown Britain's disaffected youth.

Facing lazy calls to 'condemn the violence' or be held complicit in

the media backlash, most of the centre-left has condemned, and

condemned, and condemned. They have paused only to blame one another

for ever entertaining these 'kids' and their politics. They have

dismissed the angry young people of this country without actually

asking themselves how it came to this.

That dismissal cannot be allowed to continue without serious

unpacking. Ultimately, it is not these young people who have let down

the Labour movement – it is the Labour movement and the Labour party

in particular that has let down

the young, the poor and the desperate, not once but repeatedly,

failing to stand behind their

demands for change, failing to offer any alternative to the cuts other

than its own re-election on a platform of slightly mitigated

austerity. We should not be surprised that so many thousands couldn't

be

bothered to listen to Ed Miliband speak, and went to Oxford Street

instead to do some direct action.





An injury suffered by Ben, 21, is treated by a medic during marches in London.

Then there's the third misconception. The 'violence' enacted upon the

defenceless shopfronts of major financial fiefdoms may have looked

terrifying and uncontrolled on camera, but it was far from mindless.

These targets were not chosen at random. British banks and major

tax-avoiding companies were attacked because these companies are seen

by large swathes of the public as being responsible for the banking

crisis and for subsequent ideological decisions on the part of the

current government to mortgage healthcare, welfare and education. In

the rush, Spanish banking giant Santander was also vandalised – and we

need to be asking ourselves just what has made our nation's children

so very upset with world finance that they believe any

bank is fair game.

Nobody's children are at risk from this sort of political 'violence'.

Many children were, in fact, part of the protest, singing and dancing

on Oxford street or carried on the shoulders of their parents to watch

UKUncut's comedy gig in Soho square. There are serious problems with

the way in which the press chooses to discuss 'violence' in relation

to the protests, and chief amongst those problems is the way in which

the violence done to private property is now considered morally

equivalent to physical violence against human beings.

It's the second sort of violence that really does put people's

children at risk, and it's that sort of violence that I saw dispensed

without mercy by police on the bodies of Saturday's young protesters,

the vast majority of whom were engaged in peaceful civil disobedience,

almost a hundred of whom were hospitalised for their trouble, with

broken limbs and streaming head-wounds.

"The police tried to kettle us outside Fortnum and Mason, and fearing

for the safety of the crowd in case of a crush, some of us formed a

line in front of the police," says Ben, 21, whose face is swollen and

covered bloody cuts. "This was passive resistance. Our arms were

interlocked and we were clearly no threat to the police. Without

provocation, an officer punched me six times in the face, hit me three

times on the head with the edge of a riot shield, kicked me ten times

in the shins and three times in the groin.

"I could not move or defend myself, so I bent my head to shield myself

from his blows; it was only when I saw the blood running down my

tshirt that I realised how badly I'd been hurt."

'They were kicking people on the ground and dragging them away to be

arrested. That was after blocking us inside the store 'for our own

safety' and promising we would be allowed to leave peacefully," says

one member of UKUncut who was involved in the quiet sit-in inside

Fortnum and Mason. "We were handcuffed and taken to cells across

London, made to strip to our underwear and given white paper jumpsuits

to wear.

"I was left for eighteen hours without food and woken up repeatedly,

once for DNA swabs and fingerprints. It felt like they were trying to

scare me away from peaceful protest, treating me like a faceless

terrorist when I'm just an ordinary citizen standing up for what I

believe in."

Commentators are not wrong in calling march the 26th a loss for the

Left. It is unfair, however, to blame that loss on the thousands of

young people who chose to demonstrate outside the approved march

route- although undoubtedly mistakes were made by organising parties

in picking targets and anticipating the size and energy of attendance.

The implication that the day would have been a success had everyone

just played by the rules is a vastly disingenuous statement unworthy

of the many respected liberal commentators who have made it.

After the event, Vince Cable released a statement to the effect that the

March for the Alternative is to have no impact whatsoever on the speed

and savagery of public spending cuts. The speed with which the

statement was released

strongly implies that it had been written before the first protestor had got

on the coach. What 'ruined the day' was not young people committing

acts of civil disobedience and spoiling it for everyone else. What

'ruined the day', if the day really was ruined, was the state's

determination to ignore the weight

of public opposition to its savage programme of spending cuts.

This is not to imply that the march was a waste of time, nor that

those who marched were wrong to do so. Not everyone feels able to risk

their job in order to occupy a bank. What the march and its aftermath

reveal, however, is that the model of opposition and public

mobilisation offered by the unions and the Labour party is totally

inadequate to the task at hand, and alienating for a great deal of

workers and families , as well as the many thousands of

people who are already too desperate to protest quietly and obediently.

Marching from A to B to voice vague objections to government spending

plans, marching behind Labour and union leaders who fail entirely to

offer a coherent alternative, is no longer a sufficient response to these

cuts. It is not sufficient because this government, like the previous

government, is not at all worried by the prospect of hundreds of

thousands of people marching from A to B. They are worried about the

prospect of a truly popular people's uprising. They are worried about

losing the ideological argument over the necessity of destroying the

welfare state. They are worried by the prospect

of a run on the banks engineered by digital people power, as just

occurred in Holland, and they are worried about the prospect of a

general strike. It's safe to say that the government has a lot less to

worry about this week than it did last week- and activists, anarchists,

unions and the Labour movement all need to be asking ourselves why.





Police confront demonstrators at a march near Picadilly Circus in London.

This government isn't scared of mass vandalism. The public, however,

is – and that is precisely why fistfuls of images of young people in

masks smashing up the Ritz and throwing smoke bombs have been tossed

at our screens for five days now. The state requires us to be fearful

so that it can acquire our consent

for its spending cuts, and the public fears disorder even more than it

fears mass unemployment and the decimaton of public services. So

perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that the

images of officers of

the law assaulting unarmed young people, and the images of riot

cops arresting an entirely peaceful protest group on orders which are

rumoured to have come right from the top, have largely been

been overlooked or dismissed.

Meanwhile, UKUncut – a group whose modus operandi is

inclusive, creative, defiant people power of the type that really does

scare the government – has been brutally suppressed. A hundred and thirty eight

members have been detained, including a fifteen year old girl who was

so frightened in jail that she was made to sign a form excusing the

police from culpability, should she go on to commit suicide.

There has been very little

public outcry. The

next wave in the battle for the hearts and minds of the British public

has truly begun.

•

This is the follow-up to an earlier article published at the New Statesman.