Ed Andrews: Thoughts on a protest
March 26 saw over 250,000 people descend on London to protest against the government's planned spending cuts, but did it make any difference?
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I went on my first protest this weekend. As someone who considers themselves to be quite politically minded and with a Political Studies degree to back it up, I should have really been on a few others before but trivial pre-occupations always seemed to get in the way.
Anyway, come Saturday lunchtime on March 26, I grabbed an SLR and headed down to Victoria Embankment and followed the TUC’s March for the Alternative around to Trafalgar Square, snapping away at the various banners that warmed the cockles of my heart. These included such gems as ‘Cameron puts the ‘N’ in cuts’, ‘You can’t kettle me I’m a librarian’ and the Father Ted homage that was ‘Careful now! Down with the sort of thing!’.
I couldn’t help but feel elated. Affirmed that my own centre-left beliefs were actually shared by others, and in some bizarre revelation, that this march would actually help stop the Tory-led coalition’s planned decimation of all the public services that actually make the UK a fairly decent place to live.
However, after seeing through the joys of Twitter that things were kicking off around Oxford Street, thanks to an unofficial splinter demonstration led by UK Uncut, I followed the basest of my journalistic instincts to get some photos of people smashing shit up and ran up there.
I was not disappointed. On my way to the battleground, I saw a paint-splattered branch of HSBC with its windows shattered at Cambridge Circus and then a similarly daubed TopShop and Santander branches given the blunt end of a demonstrators stick on Oxford Street. The irony of seeing a line of riot police guarding the interests of ‘Sir’ Philip Green, a man who by his tax avoidance consistently rips off their employers, is something I’m not going to forget in a while.
Oxford Circus had been effectively pedestrianised with a mass sit-in and one giant paper horse. Provoked by a crowd of hooded yout dems wearing masks, the police rushed to defend the Apple Store nearby from harsh language and the occasional paint balloon – all while the shoppers inside continued to shop to their hearts' content. Stuck in a riot with an angry mob? There’s an app for that.
I then followed the angry, black-clad mob down to Piccadilly to see Fortnum and Mason’s balcony commandeered by what looked more like drunk students than granny-bashing anarchist extremists (as some wings of the press have painted them) waving banners and dancing. It all got a bit nasty after that as the riot police began kettling the area, including the 138 peaceful protesters from UK Uncut who had occupied the shop to highlight the expensive food emporium's habitual game of hide-and-seek with HM Revenue and Customs. Come 6pm with my memory card full, I headed off.
So that was my experience of it. Following in all the self-righteous, po-faced lines taken by the media, I should now be thoroughly denouncing the smallest of affrays or the so-called ‘violence’ against property as ‘unacceptable’, ‘inexcusable’ and ’wrong’. But in all honesty, I have to confess that it felt good to see things kick off! Seeing banks and the premises of companies who squirm their way out of paying their rightful debt to the society that allows them to exist damaged was quite exhilarating.
In my mind, I see all the trouble simply as one part youthful over-exuberance and one part utter frustration at the current state of the world. For all the financial crisis has highlighted is how utterly impotent the state is in the face of financial institutions and extremely powerful corporate interests. Yeah, smashing stuff didn’t achieve or change anything, but as the passage of history will probably confirm, neither did the main march. It was purely symbolic but necessary all the same. Symbols are often what people need to cling on to in the hope that things will one day change for the better: that the powerful will be accountable and that the interests of ordinary people won’t be ignored.
At the end of the day though, once the crowds have departed and the media interest fades, the cuts will go ahead and those ministers responsible will spin the classic lines over why such things are unavoidable before heading down their local c[o]unt[r]y club to chomp on Havanas and slurp single malt with their super-rich corporate donors.
But the most poignant thing I saw all day was an elderly women on her own stoically shuffling with the help of a cane through the carnage on Piccadilly, holding a simple banner requesting that her local day care centre be spared George Osbourne’s axe.
It really reinforced to me that ordinary, unglamourous, un-mediafriendly people will get seriously hurt by this government and yet they won’t make any headlines at all…
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Thoughts on a protest (text) by Ed Andrews is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.Comments (4)
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For the record I don’t think all protests should be peaceful. When people have their liberty taken away from them, are being murdered, beaten and abused by their own government, when violence is being done to them, then, hells yes, take to the streets with a show of force (it can work as we’ve seen around the world recently). But in this instance. I think it was counterproductive.
So, civil disobedience = massively effective and i really do believe in it for the right cause. But throwing paint at banks = pointless.