After arguing with the armchair socialist in me, who I’d been content with being for a while, I decided to get off my complacent arse and head down to St Paul’s, where the Occupy the Stock Market protest was scheduled to take place, inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement, a series of protests against global corporate corruption. A couple of hours later, I had to leave because the sight left me mildly depressed, and very angry.

Let me clarify. I’m not saying the protest itself led me to that state, because the world-wide Occupy movement, ever since its start, has made me feel the exact opposite. That aside, however, had Orwell and Huxley attended today’s protest, they would have cried bitterly at how their words have, so many decades ago, finally rang true. Big Brother might not be watching us, but there’s a worse enemy rotting in the land of Britain: abuse of power, by the police and the state.

The very first thing I noticed when I arrived was the fact that I could see more police officers and riot vans than I could see slogans, placards and actual protesters. The police had the entirety of the cathedral surrounded by at least twenty vans, and I could count fifty or so police men and women blocking the pathways which could not be blocked by cars. Upon approach, they politely informed people that they are of course allowed to go and join the protest, as long as they”d be willing to not be allowed to decide when they were going to leave the protest area. Effectively, the police was given strict orders to preemptively kettle the so far peaceful demonstration. For clarity’s sake, kettling is a wonderful control mechanism, lauded by the Dahlesque witch Theresa May, with which police forcibly disallows a group of individuals from leaving a particular area for several hours. The first recent example of this disgusting technique was shown during the student fee protests last year, when the state found it wise to prohibit thirteen to sixteen year olds from getting food and water, or going to the toilet, for six or eight hours. This was “justified”, according to the Met, because a small amount of protesters (two or three hundred out of the twenty thousand involved) had caused criminal damage. So how do they justify it today? I have absolutely no idea. All I saw when I arrived was a group of people sitting on the steps of the cathedral, chanting and singing, holding up banners that said “We are the 99%”, and people in (fittingly) Guy Fawkes masks, inspired by Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta and the online hive-mind Anonymous.

Obviously the cynics would argue that the preemptive fascism is there because there are bound to be unruly hooligans who will take advantage of the demonstration to wreak havoc. To which any sane person should respond that pissing on the rule of law is not one of the principles which this country had been built on, nor in conjunction with its democratic principles. Any democratic society is structured on the idea that individuals are innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt, not vice versa. This is also supported by the Article 6 of the European Convention of Human Rights, which this country supposedly has had entrenched through the Human Rights Act, but we’d heard the delightful Ms May’s opinions on that, too.

Besides that, there is also a small issue with the fact that both the ECHR and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights clearly state every signatory state must provide each and every citizen with an unequivocal right to protest, without them fearing for their own safety, either physical or otherwise. But of course, the notion of the current UK government protecting human rights is a ridiculous one, as they have more important issues to deal with: showing the general public that, after the debacle of the recent London riots, they can beat the resistance and opinions of anyone who does not follow the Tory rhetoric. How that’s done is by taking these subversive societal units and slowly building a health and safety box around them.

In conclusion, I fear that we live in a country where the issue is not whether or not people care enough to react to injustice; on the contrary, they care enough but are slowly worn down by a war of attrition and bureaucracy, slowly forced into apathy by a regime pretending to be better than Arab dictators but feels the need to shut people up before it has even listened to what they have to say. What we see today might not be a boot stomping on a human face forever, but it certainly feels more insidious and dangerous precisely because it’s less obvious.



