The City and the City

Like my previous post, this is salvaged from the old blog

It must be from 2011. People less lazy than I can probably date it.

Earlier on this evening I was standing with the remnants of a small group of protesters outside the Millbank Tower. We were facing a line of police, who were clearly in the business of preventing a repeat of last year's escapades. Our day of demonstrating was coming to an end; somebody invited us to a party. At this point I said something to the effect that I'd prefer to go home and put my feet up with a mug of cocoa. I followed this up with an apologetic, "I'm a crap revolutionary". Perhaps, on the other hand, the point of socialist politics is to create a world where we can put our feet up with a good conscience. Either way, I should tell you how I ended up outside Millbank.

Millbank by night is a glorious sight

It was a long day for me, consisting of one meeting and three protests, surely the title of a less successful film by Richard Curtis. The early afternoon was spent at the Labour Briefing AGM. For those of you who don't know it, Briefing is a socialist journal read mainly by left-wingers within the Labour Party and the trade unions. I am involved in producing it and, since today's meeting, am on the editorial board.

The meeting itself was engaging. We were addressed by John McDonnell MP and George Binette from Camden UNISON. Louise talked to us about the UKUncut movement. We discussed the future direction of Briefing in particular, and the Labour left in general. To sum up the feeling of the meeting, there was a sense that this is an important time for the left, coupled with a realisation that the left in the Labour Party is in a weak state. For some people this issued in a certain pessimism, for others in a resolve to fight hard. I'll return to this.

During the meeting I followed the progress of the day's anti-cuts protests on my smartphone. I shared, to much amusement, the news that the baleful Aaron Porter had been escorted away by police from the Manchester march "for his own safety". Meanwhile, the ever vigilant Laurie was a constant source of news about events in London. It became clear that a large group of protesters had made their way to the Egyptian embassy in Mayfair to express their solidarity with the present struggles in that country. When the AGM finished, Louise, her partner, and I joined them.

I quickly lost the other two, as Louise went off to take some excellent photos. The mood of the demonstration at the embassy was exhilarating. By the time we got there a few hundred people, of all ages and backgrounds, were there, joining in chants alternately in Arabic and English. There was both an anger and a confidence about the gathering, both sustained in spite of the bitter cold. As is becoming traditional at such events, fires were lit to counteract this.

It was whilst warming myself by the above pictured fire that I learned that a group of protesters had gone to the TopShop on Oxford Circus - TopShop boss Phillip Green is a notorious tax avoider, and his stores have been frequent focuses for anti-cuts anger in recent months. I'd been inspired by Louise's account of the UKUncut demos, and decided to head over to Oxford Circus.

I was not, I'm afraid to say, very impressed with what I found there. A small group of anarchisty types were sitting down in front of the building, with a few others - one guy with a makeshift Green Party sign - standing around. Police lined the building. Shoppers made their way in and out of the building, ordinary people on their days off from work, many of them obviously confused, and even frightened. It was not clear who the chants of "bourgeois scum" were supposed to be directed against, and there were no apparent efforts to engage with shoppers about TopShop, tax, and the cuts.

I fully support targeting tax-avoiding and evading businesses as a protest tactic. It ties up the act of protest against cuts with a vision of an alternative, and it provides an opportunity for communicating with the wider public. Last year's UKUncut actions were exemplary in both respects. Unfortunately, what I saw this evening wasn't - it looked like a bunch of clichéd middle-class activists attacking shoppers. That wasn't what it was; but that's what it looked like. In some people a moralising anti-consumerism wasn't far from the surface - one of the assembled commented that "people are just annoyed because they want to buy shiny things on Saturdays". Yes, and why not? If this movement is to win, we need the great majority of those shoppers on side.

I retreated to a café for refreshment and to consider my next move. Twitter told me that stuff was happening in Piccadilly. So I decided to make my way there...

I didn't get very far before I was met face-on by a crowd of about two hundred people, mainly school-age, marching down the middle of the road shouting "Whose streets? Our streets?" Their placards revealed them to be part of the anti-cuts protest, something which was confirmed when the chant modulated to "No ifs, no buts, no public sector cuts". I was put in mind of Laurie Penny's description of one of last year's marches as a "children's crusade". I saw people who could not have been more than nine or ten years old. I went along with them.

For the next couple of hours we weaved our way around the West End, studiously avoiding being kettled by the police. A couple of vans' worth of police were omnipresent, but either unable, or unwilling, to halt the progress of this dexterous snake of dissent around the highways and byways of Westminster. Once two police horses rushed at a group of kids in an attempt to clear them from the road; they were promptly chased back in the direction they had came. On another occasion, officers made moves to arrest two teenage boys for the heinous crime of removing a traffic cone from one of Her Majesty's highways. The efforts of the boys' fellow protesters quickly dissuaded the constabulary from this course of action.

Our route was too convoluted for me to fully recall. Highlights included a second visit to TopShop. As we marched past this time there was no doubt what the message was - "Phillip Green, pay your taxes". We called on the Liberal Democrats at their HQ. Alas nobody was in: or if they were, they weren't letting on. Finally, we made our way to Millbank, a site which I suppose is the closest thing this movement has to a place of pilgrimage. As time went on, we became fewer in number, partly because we split up as an anti-kettling tactic, and partly because people began heading home. Throughout it all, I was buoyed up by the experience of marching alongside passionate and politicised people, some of them a third my age. There is a freshness and vibrancy about this movement which must be preserved.

So there we have it: two very different political experiences. The organisation and experience, tempered by a tendency to pessimism, of the seasoned labour movement activists at the AGM. The energetic rage and enthusiasm of the marchers, tempered inevitably by a certain inexperience - the dangers of which, whilst pleasingly absent on the march, were all too evident outside TopShop. The challenge for the left in the months to come is to act as a bridge. It falls to us to communicate the intensity, the desire for change, and the activist innovation from the anti-cuts movement to established labour movement institutions. That movement needs a voice within Labour, it needs political representation. At the same time, we have to make socialist ideas and analysis available to a new generation of protesters. This, it shouldn't (but probably does) need to be said, is something very different from co-option.

One thing, at least, is certain: this is going to be an interesting political year. With which reflection, I retire to put my feet up with a mug of cocoa.