Peace police, don't hurt the kids

It's going to be harder than usual to be positive tonight. I'm recovering from flu', which means I've had a lousy week... But worse, the news of the student 'riots' in London tonight is upsetting.

It plunges me straight back into memories of the Poll Tax demo in 1990, when tens of thousands of people marched to protest against the huge new charges we were all being expected to pay.

I was there. I was with my friend Carolyn and her baby in a pushchair, so when things started to turn from joyful to nasty, we left, and went to wait for our friends in a cafe. We were all due to catch a coach back to our north-of-England university town.

It took a long time for our friends to arrive. In fact some of them didn't make the coach. But over the next few hours, most of us gathered and shared experiences. I was young. I was naive. My friends saw some shocking things, and hearing about what they'd seen shook my middle-class complacency badly.

Almost everyone described how they'd felt to be 'kettled': trapped in Trafalgar Square and not allowed to get out, then squashed into a smaller and smaller space as the police squeezed in. It was scary, basically, and definitely dangerous.

Then, worse, one friend sat in a section of the crowd that was staging a peaceful sit-down protest ... and couldn't get up in time when mounted police charged ... and the woman next to him had her shoulder crushed ... and he held her until the ambulance arrived.

Two other friends saw a police van drive into a 'kettled' crowd at speed ... hook a woman on its bumper ... and drag her several hundred yards down the road while people yelled at them to stop.

As I say, what I heard was shocking. But even more shocking was the news coverage. We got home and turned on our TV, to see the events we'd witnessed described as 'riots', with no mention at all of the police's own role in the violence. I was young. I was naive. My belief that the police or the media 'served the people' was dead.

These were the days before the internet, remember, so there was no YouTube. The 'other side of the story' only came out months later, in a couple of little pamphlets printed by small anarchist publishers. It never hit the mainstream media at all.

But the world is different now.

Tonight's violence is shocking, and the BBC - disappointingly - has repeated the mistake it made in 1990 and presented a simplistic, anti-protester view: the students were angry about higher fees so they rioted.

But as first-hand accounts of the student protest begin to hit YouTube, it's already clear that 'riot' isn't the whole story: the police and the BBC may be slow to realise this, but the streets today were full of mobile phones with cameras...

It looks like the demo started with a nice enough atmosphere ... Then the police started using horses ... And they used fences to push people back ... Then it got dark and it all got a bit scarier ... And this vid shows what happened a couple of weeks ago, which maybe explains why – and how – things got nasty tonight.

You can see why I'm struggling to find a positive side to all this.

But here's it is...

All those people posting their own little snippets of video care about the way today's demo is represented. These people know the 'mainstream' view paints only half the picture, and they've taken the time to add their own little daub of paint to the 'other side'.

All of us should care enough to ask whether the police are behaving acceptably - or even sensibly - here. My own answer is 'no': I can't for the life of me see how it can be OK to trap people into a confined space, let alone charge horses into a crowd of children.

But if you need more persuasion, the two linked videos here and here show why the right to demonstrate is so important. Bless this guy Radfax, as he goes on and on and on saying "peace police" and "don't hurt the kids".

When we were kids, and we came home complaining about the way the police had behaved, our parents didn't believe us. Now many of us are parents, and we know it's true: too often the police behave badly at demos.

It's time for the grown-ups stand up and say so.



Flow x