BY ANDY CAPPER, PHOTOS BY HENRY LANGSTON, SPECIAL THANKS TO GRAHAM JOHNSON
Trapped within Parliament Square by riot police for seven hours, student protesters mingled with anarchists and hoodlums while loads of things were set on fire, smashed, and peed on.
On December 10, 2010, photographer Henry Langston and I were beaten up by a riot squad. We were in the middle of a protest described by the BBC as “the most violent British public demonstration since 1987”. The reason for the upheaval was an increase in university tuition fees.
For six hours the coppers had us trapped in London’s Parliament Square, where 25,000 media students with names like Edwina Farquington-Rothschild were made to look like violent thugs by a 1,500-strong gang of European anarchists, school-age chavs, and stinking crusties.
When not pissing everywhere, setting fires, breaking windows, or trying to steal our photographer Henry Langston’s phone (but not his $1,100 camera), rioters threw billiard balls, cans of paint, and metal fencing at police and their horses. Some of the paint was siphoned off to emblazon signs with freshly coined student mottos like “Tory Scum/Suck Your Mum.” (We should mention that the demonstrations were unsuccessful and now all students will have to pay twice as much to study sociology as they did previously.)
Shortly before eluding three attempted muggings, Henry was twatted on the head with a police truncheon and then booted in the balls by the copper’s mate.
“They didn’t like it when I took pictures of them,” said Henry. “They’re only meant to hit you on the arms or legs, so it was surprising to feel the thwack of baton rubber against my forehead. I fell over, and while getting trampled by some other protesters I felt a few swift kicks to the old family jewels from a few more coppers.” What to do? “I’m going to get the backs of their heads tattooed on my arse cheeks.”
As the afternoon lapsed, things got progressively more violent and mounted police were sent in to dissuade people from setting fire to Parliament Square and smashing the windows of the Supreme Court.
At one point, artist Matthew Stone, who was there to show support for the students and take photographs, heard a maddened cavalryman scream: “Caaaaam on then, you faggot cunts!” before riding his horse into the throng. The horse was then punched in the face by a crusty.
About halfway through the proceedings, we bumped into one of our favorite British correspondents, the crime reporter and author Graham Johnson. Like Henry, he was also bleeding from the noggin, but when we asked him what he thought about the carnage around us—phone booths on fire, excrement everywhere, muggings, screaming teenage girls, etc.—he looked at us and said: “You think this is bad? Just wait till next year.”
Before we could ask him what he meant, 25 Asian kids wearing masks and playing rap music on a boombox started to run toward our area, prompting the riot police to charge again. We got split up, and the last thing we saw was Graham holding his pointer finger to his bloodied temple and his pinkie to his saliva-stained lips in a gesture that meant: “I’ll call you about it tomorrow!” And so he did.
Rioters hucked a giant piece of fence at the cops.
Vice: Hi Graham, how’s your head?
Graham Johnson: I’ve got two wounds, front and back, from a scaffold connector and a lump of concrete, which hit me by accident while I was in the riots on December 9th. It’s not the injury that is important, though, it’s understanding the reasons that led to it—aggression is born of anger, which almost always stems from injustice. I think the students and anarchists have definitely suffered an injustice. I was patched up by a police medic called Stewart. I hope Stewart’s job isn’t next, because we need well-trained public workers like him.
What did you make of the Parliament Square riots?
This was the fourth student riot, and for the first time I felt that the police had been put under serious physical pressure. I could see they had lost their confidence. They had that thousand-yard stare of a Khe Sanh marine whose perimeter is about to be overrun. At the G-20 and rounds 2 and 3 of the student riots I thought the police had been too violent. I also thought that they weren’t seeing what was around the corner. I’ve covered two wars and about ten riots all around Europe over the last 15 years, and I’m looking at the officers who are wasting the underfed, softly spoken students and thinking: “Well, you’re maybe laughing under your gelcoat-layered public-order helmet now. It’s all very well being able to bully a schoolgirl while you yourself are protected by a shield of thermoplastic body armor and 16 GA carbon-steel-reinforced chest plates. But what’s going to happen when you’re faced with a mob of 300 rooting-tooting urchins on the cuts-shredded estates of Liverpool, Southeast London, and Bristol? That’s going to be a different matter.”
How do you mean?
I was recently in Liverpool with a man called Stephen French, one of the guys who started the Toxteth riots. He and two other young black men tried to stop police from getting heavy-handed on one of their friends, and things escalated into one of the worst riots of the 20th century.
That’s Stephen French from the article we did about the Norris Green gangs a couple of years ago [“Mersey Infanticide,” V15N9]. What’s he been telling you?
Well, he does a lot of grassroots community work, often dealing with young gang members in places like Norris Green. He told me that when the government cuts really start to bite into working-class Britain, the demonstrations and the riots will make today’s thing in Parliament Square look like a Punch and Judy show.
When they start repossessing people’s council houses and the benefits are taken away and the health centers close down?
Yes, we know this is going to happen. And the young people in these places are going to be as “upset” as the students. The feeling, among experts, politicians, and even police officers I’ve spoken to, is that the British underclass of this country is going to rise up against the authorities like nothing we’ve seen since the Brixton or Toxteth riots of the 80s.
I was a kid during those riots—I remember being terrified.
But that’s not the important bit. The problem is that many of these “youngers” are proper ruffians and scuffians—they are armed to the teeth with automatic weapons, handguns, and IEDs, which is pretty much standard gang fare in many postwar urbanizations across the country these days. It may sound frightening, but the question then is, how are the police going to deal with what can technically be called an armed insurgency? Even jobless brickies know how to get hold of a gun these days, because, simply put, they are out there in large numbers.
Gang culture is deep rooted on these estates, and the unemployed are swelling their ranks. What’s different is that people today are not afraid to use serious violence, especially against a system they blame for obliterating their future.
Despite total havoc, kids managed to have fun, posing behind stolen riot shields for comic effect.
Sounds scary. Do you have any more evidence to back this up?
Read the papers. The police are also gearing up for the threat. I’ve been scouring them all and looking at Police Authority reports, and I can read you out some basic facts if you don’t believe me.
Sure…
I’ve been researching this story with the help of contacts from both the police and anarchist organizations. What I’ve learned is that the Metropolitan Police have bought 13 armored personnel carriers called Jankel Guardians that weigh about six tons each. They also have sniper platforms in them.
Sniper platforms?
Yep. There’s also evidence that they’ve acquired a surveillance drone and some ballistically protected, army-style Land Rovers—the kind they use in Northern Ireland and Iraq. All across the country, law-enforcement agencies are buying weapons systems used in Afghanistan, including Heckler & Koch G36 machine guns. They’ve got a range of more than half a mile and can fire 750 rounds per minute.
If the police had had those kinds of guns at the riot today, there’d have been a bloodbath.
There’s more. In Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, and London, there will be paramilitary-style training centers where police officers will be taught by the SAS. There have also been sightings of police officers wearing civilian dress but wearing blue caps marked “Police” and carrying modified Heckler & Koch rifles that are exactly the same as the SAS use.
For the benefit of our American readers, what is the SAS?
The Special Air Service. They are Britain’s—and some would say the world’s—most elite troops. You call them up as a last resort when things have gone totally pear-shaped and you need somebody to come in and kill everybody all at once. They make the Special Forces look like traffic police.
I read about this kind of stuff briefly, but the papers said it was because they were training their forces against “Mumbai-style attacks,” meaning Al-Qaeda operatives who would come into our shopping centers and slaughter shoppers.
Hmm. Do you believe that Al-Qaeda is going to attack shopping centers in Birmingham and Leeds, or Liverpool for that matter? Do you even believe that Al-Qaeda exists? Drones and Snatch Land Rovers are tools of oppression. Land Rover was castigated in the 70s for supplying the apartheid regime in South Africa. What’s different here and now? Isn’t it more realistic to think that now the police themselves are losing a sizable proportion of their force and they’re teaching themselves to deal with an increasingly unhappy British population by learning military tricks and accumulating military hardware?
Who else did you talk to about this?
I also spoke to a professor called Stephen Graham, who’s an expert in cities and society at Newcastle University. He reckons the military ideas of counter-insurgency learned in Iraq and Afghanistan are relating increasingly to domestic policing in the UK.
How so?
Well, look at the newspapers. You’ll see that armed-response units are being increasingly called out for relatively minor offenses. And that’s because the authorities are increasingly viewing cities as threatening spaces where everyone is a target.
Cities as opposed to what?
Stephen also told me that in 2011 the civil disturbances will be more widespread and not confined to ghettos. It’ll be the poor white suburbs as well, because those places are already on the breadline, even before the cuts. There’s a tension, a real hatred now of the police antigang units, which is similar to what we had in our day. The main difference now is that in the poor areas where the government cuts are going to hit the hardest—those areas are armed to the teeth.
The problem is that when you militarize the police, activists see them as fair game—as the enemy. That’s bad news for the 50 percent of officers who want to serve the common good and uphold the law—like the police medic Stewart who gave me a bandage after I was attacked by a load of fucking Facebook teddy-boy students and those scruffy twat benefits scroungers from the Whitechapel Anarchist Group.
While Henry was being assaulted by the police, we sent Muir Vidler to take photos of pretty girls amid the carnage for a “fashion story.” (Sorry, Henry!) All that fun follows here. A big thanks to all the extremely patient models we trapped in this scary riot for six hours. Fashion!