The boys realising just how close they are to the horses.
Few things in this life are a certainty but I think it’s a fairly safe bet that teenage boys will laugh at just about anything involving poo. It certainly proved true yesterday as a group of five boys, still in their school uniforms, watched intently to see which unlucky passerby would tread in the pile of horse shit sitting in the middle of the Whitehall pavement. The exercise seemed so absorbing and amusing to them that I wondered if they’d completely forgotten where the offending poo had come from: namely, one of the large police horses not five meters away, keeping at bay a huge student protest (or, as some newspapers have today called it, a “riot”).
Yesterday’s demonstration was the second round of large-scale protests against the government’s proposed cuts to education funding (resulting in raised university tuition fees) although many yesterday were apparently also out to protest the scrapping of the educational maintenance allowance (EMA). Following the vandalism at Millbank during the previous student protest of 10 November (resulting in a broken window, a fire extinguisher hurled off a roof, and some terrified Tories locked in their offices) there were calls for yesterday’s protest to have a carnival atmosphere and to not allow the event to be hijacked by anarchists and vandals.
No luck. By 2pm BBC news was reporting on clashes between protesters and police at the bottom of Downing Street. I got down to Whitehall about an hour later and found the street eerily quiet and empty, the drone of four (count them) helicopters only adding to the bizarre sight of a traffic-less, pedestrian-less central London thoroughfare. It wasn’t until I got down to Downing Street that I figured out what was going on.
The plunger effect.
Like some gigantic cafetiere, the police were plunging coffee grinds of students, using a double line of officers on horses to slowly but surely compress the crowd into Parliament Square and away from Number 10. I couldn’t get past the line into Parliament Square and those on the other side couldn’t get out. I’m not sure if this could technically be defined as “Kettling” but it sure looked like that to me.
The sit-in: you can see them on the road between the police.
It didn’t take long for the numbers on our side of the police line to grow. Younger students seemed to be arriving direct from school, as I suspected the five poo-fixated boys next to me had, and other onlookers like myself strolled up for a peek at the group of people sitting on the ground, peacefully protesting and stopping the police line from moving back further. Not much time could have passed before I suddenly and unexpectedly found myself right at the front of a large crowd, only one person back from the police line.
Then several things happened at once: the police tried to move those sitting on the ground; the crowd reacted with anger; there was a surge forward; something was thrown at the police line; horses startled and moved back; those sitting on the ground scrambled to avoid being trampled. On the Parliament Square side of things I saw burning debris hoisted up on a stick. Caught in the crowd surge, I couldn’t go anywhere but forward and I barely had time to marvel at how, in a matter of seconds, things had gotten nasty and dangerous.
The crowd lurches forward.
Fortunately, that was the extent of any drama on our side of the police line – except for when one of the sitting protesters asked me for something to clean up the bloody cuts on his mate’s swollen hand. “A horse stepped on it!” I was told. Otherwise, the young people around me, unable to get to where the real action was, starting to talk more about their hunger, being cold and needing a piss – although most were only too happy to join in the occasional chants. “No ifs / no buts / no education cuts!” seemed the classiest to me although one about making a bonfire out of politicians was clearly the favorite. A young lad behind me freestyling a rap that went “no education cuts/I stab ya in ya guts” was mildly disturbing…until I turned around and saw he was 15 if he was a day.
I wasn’t at the protest long and thankfully wasn’t kettled into Parliament Square (I had plans last night). But I was glad I got to see first hand some of what was happening. Although smaller than the previous protest, there was still an extraordinary number of extraordinarily young people out on the streets in Whitehall yesterday. Sure, many were preoccupied with juvenile and immature aspects of the situation and some were merely there waiting for things to “kick off.” But a lot of them seemed genuinely concerned about the cause…and each other. When that boy asked me for a tissue for the other boy’s hand – it was bleeding badly and looked swollen, probably broken – I unfortunately had to tell him I had nothing like that for his friend. It was only when the injured boy told us both not to worry before waving goodbye and making his back to the front of the crowd that I realised the first boy didn’t know him at all. One young man had just wanted to help another out.
Yes, there’s violence and mischief at these protests. But there’s also concern and caring…and that shouldn’t be overlooked.
Tags: Education Cuts, Student Protest, Whitehall
