Dancing in the Streets

Tlierp's somethuigvery rock-atid-roUabout a Hot. STREET PROTESTS IN EUROPE WERE ALL THE RAGE THIS PAST HUNTER. WHENMATTERS GOT OUT OF HAND IN LONDON, tTOR STREET-FIGHTING MAN WAS THERE TO CELEBRATE

A

re you gonna be our Norman Mailer?" a man on Malet Street, central London, asked me around noon on December 9 of last year. "I'm sorry?" I queried, not sure I'd heard him right, given the cacophony enveloping us—horns tootling, drums booming, adoles­cent voices chanting—and my own advancing years. "Are you gonna be our Norman Mailer?" the fellow reiterated. "You know, get yourself arrested the way he did on the Pentagon march in 1967? We could really do with a high-profile arrest to further the cause."

"I'm not actually here to further the cause," I replied, taking in the thickets of placards proclaiming resist THE coalition with an airy wave. "I'm here to report on the demonstration." Actually, I was being disingenuous. I did have some sympathy with the cause, which was to oppose time-tabled British government legislation that would increase the cost of a college education nearly threefold. And while I wasn't interested in the demo per se, I was on Malet Street, immediately below the foursquare Stalin­ist bulk of the University of London's Senate House (the building that inspired George Orwell's Ministry of Truth in 1984), in order to report to you, dear reader, on the riot I was pretty certain was imminent.

Not a healthy attitude, really, waking up on a fine win­ter's day and positively hoping large-scale civil unrest breaks out. It occurred to me, as I packed camera and notebook in a sensible jacket, that I was like an urban version of those wackos who chase tornadoes across the Midwest. 1 wasn't the only one spoiling for a fight that morning; the students and their hangers-on were

definitely up for it, and even the police couldn't have been immune to the adrenalized atmosphere as they zipped up their navy-blue jumpsuits, laced their giant black bovver boots and strapped their two-foot-long truncheons to their belts. After all, being a British bobby is mostly a thanklessly dull task—there's precious little graft, car chases are neces-*'sarily a stop-start affair due to the tininess of the territory and you don't even get to carry a gun (unless you belong to the Royalty Protection squad or certain squads of the Met­ropolitan Police). Under such circumstances, the prospect of a day away from the desk, hanging out with your mates and cracking a few heads must seem pretty inviting.

For myself, I hadn't intended to whistle for a horseman of the apocalypse to come and take a dump on my patch—he just kind of trotted across. In October it had been the French who were revolting, taking to the streets in the hundreds of thousands to protest the minimum retirement age going up to 62. In the time-honored way, these manifestations quickly turned nasty, and soon enough the barricades were up and the Molotov cocktails were being chucked.

Say what you will about the French—they know how to have a riot; their latter-day Communards look so comme il faut in denim blousons with urine-soaked cotton scarves tied around their mouths to filter the impressionistic swirl of tear gas. As for the French riot police with their RoboCop-style contoured black-rubber body armor and their coffin-shape Plexiglas shields, their fastidiousness—before, during and apres any head cracking—amply confirms a (French) friend's contention that the reason there has never' been a big gay rights movement in France is because all Frenchmen are gay (or at least pretty damn camp). I liked

the idea of getting mixed up

in these evenements not, you

understand, because I'm a

slavering violence groupie

but simply because even the

most committed armchair

anarchist likes getting out

once in a while—a bit like

the British bobby.

And besides, in Europe at least, rioting looks like the shape of things to come as nation after nation topples into the black hole of a Standard & Poor's triple-B credit rating. True, a European riot doesn't measure up to a stateside one. There is no National Guard shooting looters on sight and no guns on the revolting side at all; even the Greek rioters— for all their undoubted ferocity—have simply dreadful taste in street fashion. As for the British rioters de nos jours, the preceding month had seen two unexpected outbreaks of fisticuffs during the student demonstrations, the first when a posse broke away from the main march and invaded the headquarters of the ruling Conservative Party.

There had been much fulminating in the media as to how this could have happened and why the police weren't ready for it. The conspiracy theorists argue that the police allowed it deliberately. Given that they are facing swingeing cuts in their budget, what better way to ensure their manpower isn't reduced than ushering in the public-order breakdown? Per­sonally I'm a far greater believer in what we Brits term cock-up than in conspiracy, but even I found it a little fishy the way that, during the second big student demo, the rioters conve­niently got hold of a police van and smashed its windows right beside the Cenotaph in Whitehall. The Cenotaph is a memo­rial to the British dead of two world wars and as such is the state holy of holies—for such a profanation to occur was as if Abbie Hoffman had succeeded in levitating the Pentagon.

Still, on that sunny morning in Decem­ber the Metropolitan Police didn't look as if they'd learned their lesson. True, they were out in force, lining the street in their fluorescent yellow jackets, blue riot helmets dangling ready at their sides, but when I eavesdropped on their radio chat­ter it was clear they were speedily being outpaced by the columns of demonstra­tors converging on Parliament Square. The reason for this became apparent as soon as the column I was embedded in moved off from Malet Street.

I'm a veteran of the big British political demos of the early 1980s, the Liverpool dockers' strike in the 1990s and the miners' strikes, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and assorted antiracist marches. In those days the nat-

urally sluggish pace of the pot-smoking, beer-drenched Brit left was further damned by the carrying of enormous and ornate banners—at best such pro­cessions would move at a leaden-footed mile an hour. But these students, leav­ened by still younger pupils furious at the abolition of their Education Mainte­nance Allowance, scampered along like a load of ravers jitterbugging on ecstasy— which in a way they were. In no time at all we'd whipped round Russell Square and reached High Holborn.

Later, when the hurly-burly was done and the heir to the throne's Rolls-Royce had been attacked on Regent Street and the windows of the Treasury and the Supreme Court had been broken and mounted police had been dragged from their mounts and all of Parliament Square had descended into a lurid sat­urnalia worthy of Hieronymus Bosch, assorted pillars of the state stepped for­ward to plaint that while they had no

objection to peaceful protests, and they were sure the majority of demonstrators concurred, the day had spiraled out of control because of the malign influence of elements one Conservative member of Parliament (who really should have known better) laughably described as "professional anarchists."

I was there, and this was arrant non­sense. Almost from the start a significant minority of these kids were game for a riot: masked to prevent police photog­raphers getting a shot of them, buzzing and brandishing the sticks of their plac­ards. One was sporting a Vfor Vendetta mask, and lo arid behold a couple of hours later I saw him stoking the flames of a bonfire of burning benches in Par­liament Square, looking for all the world

like some devilish little imp. Marches of this kind normally have a route determined by negotiation between organizers and police, but in this case the students' official representatives— the National Union of Students—had backed down, and in their stead were Soviet-style committees of "elected" stewards. When I asked one of them what the route was he didn't even know. All of this is by way of explaining how pathetically the authorities misjudged the situation; unlike previous antiglobal-ization rallies in London, this one had no anarchist ringleaders who could have been preemptively arrested—just a load of teenagers playing the role of the mob on London's timeless stage.

Peter Ackroyd in his magisterial Lon­don: the Biography typifies the London mob as the real agent of the city's evolu­tion through the ages. Whether baying for the execution of Charles I outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall,

parading through the streets to see mur­derers executed at Tyburn or stoning the hated Duke of Wellington's carriage (he was known as the Iron Duke not by reason of his military prowess but because he had to have iron shutters on the windows of his house), the London mob has always been a self-consciously theatrical affair—and these kids, a mot­ley crowd of middle-class students and multiracial tearaways from the inner London burbs, were gripped by the transcendent spirit of the place.

When I reached Parliament Square, after diverting into Soho for a spot of lunch—middle age has its prerogatives— I discovered that they'd fully assimilated their part. The march had meant to skirt the Palace of Westminster and go on to the Embankment by the River Thames, but the kids had instead smashed through the barriers cordoning off the square of grass and taken possession of it. Someone had dragged up a shopping cart loaded with a big sound system, which was blast­ing out dubstep, the specifically London genre of grimy, bass-infused dance music. A duo of lithe young Emma Goldmans in tight ski pants were gyrating in the roadway beneath the hefty bronze of Churchill, while elsewhere in the square other kids were spraying graffiti tags on the plinths of Lincoln, Disraeli, Lloyd George and all the other avatars of democracy. Overhead police and media ' choppers rat-a-tat-tatted.

You don't have to be an armchair anar­chist to appreciate how such a scene could drive an already exhilarated mob into a frenzy: the gothic fiutings of the Mother of Parliaments, within which the legislators at that very moment were debating their fate; the blanched sepul-cher of Westminster Cathedral, within which are buried a millenium's worth of British monarchs; to the east the neoclas­sical facade of the Treasury building; and, feebly attempting to protect it all, the thin blue-and-yellow lines of riot police. I strolled around the grassy plot admiring the dishabille of civic pride: the dancing kids, the burning benches, the roiling and moiling of the senselessly disaffected. Then I stepped over to the thin blue line of helmeted and shielded cops lined up in front of Parliament and asked, "Is it okay if I come through this way?"

"If you don't mind, sir," said one of the police, gesturing toward the junction of Whitehall and Westminster Bridge, "it would be better if you go through over there." Sir? Sir! What a very British affair this was, such a polite civil distur­bance. It reminded me of the Poll Tax riot of 1990, which had effectively ended Margaret Thatcher's premiership. On that afternoon, being in an apolitical phase, I'd gone unawares into the West End to see a movie and stepped out of the tube at (concluded on page 115)

DANCING IN THE STREETS

(continued from page 89) Leicester Square, straight into the melee. The police had just lost control of the situ­ation and were retreating up Charing Cross Road in a makeshift testudo, riot shields held overhead to protect themselves from a hail of bottles, stones and scaffolding poles. But what was still more deranging were the drinkers outside the Porcupine pub, stand­ing within feet of the battle, smoking and clutching their pints while pointing out the finer points of the action. A mounted police­man herded us noncombatants back toward Leicester Square, saying quite calmly, "If

you don't mind, ladies and gentlemen "

It was this theatricality that I could see unfolding before my eyes as I went through the police line and walked casually beside Parliament. I had effectively stepped into the wings of the theater, and here were the big-booted ballerinas awaiting their call: police helping one another on and off with their kit, reporters cross-legged on the ground, tapping copy into their laptops, and farther along, drawn up in front of the medieval Jewel Tower, those iron-shod principal danc­ers, a mounted squad. The cavalry charge is to the British riot what tear gas and water cannons are to the continental European gig, and when I saw the horsemen—who had a peculiarly centaur-like appearance

due to the fluorescent yellows worn by both the cops and their mounts—I realized things were about to escalate.

Further confirmation came from the vol­leys of flares, fireworks and other projectiles that I could now see were being thrown at the northwestern corner of the square. Clearly the police were intent on kettling the demonstra­tors, a tactic used in recent years whereby the mob is surrounded and temporarily impris­oned for hours. I worked my way round behind the Abbey and up through Smith Square and gained Victoria Street at the point where the missiles were being thrown, in time to see another mounted squad surge into the rioters, who parted like a ragged cloth.

This charge of the heavy brigade was the point at which the Metropolitan Police defin­itively lost control of the situation. Later armchair analysts said the "professional anar­chists" used Google Maps to locate squads of police and outmaneuver them; this may or may not be true, but in my experience the average London teenager is handier with an iPhone than any paid-up agitator. Suffice to say that in the next few hours the armies of the night fanned out across central Lon­don, marauding gangs heading up into the West End to smash the windows of depart­ment stores and generally run amok. And into the midst of all this came the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall in their Roller, en route for—you couldn't make this

up—the Royal Variety Performance.

This, a hangover from the British vaude­ville tradition, consists of cheesy popular turns entertaining their doubtless ennui-drenched majesties. But before the prince and his swain could get there they were surrounded by a mob on Regent Street that bayed "Off with their heads!" while kicking the car, splash­ing it with paint and eventually breaking one of its windows. It was a fitting culmination to a theatrical day that also saw the rioters remaining in Parliament Square smashing the windows of Her Majesty's Treasury while chanting "We want our money back!" That the son of Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour was among those climbing atop the Cenotaph only helped to make the whole topsy-turvy riot that much more Alician.

But a wonderland contemporary Britain is not; something has happened in the past decade not only to make these kids disaf­fected but to inure them to all but the most stagy of impulses. When the curtain finally fell that night, London hospitals were full of the injured from all sides. As for any Nor­man Mailer-ish impulses I may have had, they were safely contained: I was tucked up at home, watching the aftermath on the box. After all, it's one thing to take up arms against a conspiracy, but battling a cock-up is the lowest form of farce.

"My name is called disturbance.

I'll shout and scream and kill the king, '

I'll rail at all his servants.

What can a poor boy do

Except to sing for a rock-and-roll band?

Because in sleepy London town

There's no place for a street-fighting man." —THE ROLLING STONES

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