💾 Archived View for gemini.spam.works › mirrors › textfiles › politics › SPUNK › sp000865.txt captured on 2022-03-01 at 16:40:58.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Anarchy in the UK, a personal view
This is my account of the anarchy in the UK festival
that took place in London in October of 1994.
The first thing to emphasise about anarchy in the UK
festival is it's positive points. It gave us a good
opportunity to meet anarchists from many other countries,
and to exchange on an informal level ideas and our
experiences. For people from Ireland which lacks any
historical tradition of anarchism or any sizeable
organisation it was heartening to see thousands of people
who called themselves anarchists.
The good side was almost incidental to the event however.
The cultural end of things appeared to go off well but the
political end was always seconds away from complete
disaster. It was organised only in the most minimum
fashion, space had been booked for meetings and one or
two speakers obtained but beyond that things were
chaotic. There was no organised translation which meant
comrades who were not fluent in English were completely
left out. A squat had also been opened to provide
accommodation for the week.
This was the organisers fault, the main individual behind
it, Ian Bone seemed to play no part in maintaining things,
just paying the occasional royal visit to venues. (He would
stroll in, wave at a few people and leave). To us it seemed
that only four or five or the organisers made any effort to
hold things together, the rest vanished early on. This
meant the international rally was held together by one guy
who was running around trying to line up speakers and
start a collection while chairing the meeting at the same
time. Most of the workshops never happened. The events
promised in the advance publicity for the most part, never
occurred.
We expected this going over and most organised
anarchists in Britain expected it. This led to the decision by
all the national organisations to boycott the event
altogether. This was a mistake as they lost the opportunity
to address those attending the festival and it also made it
difficult to make use of the venue that were organised for a
concrete purpose. To talk about the events we attended
The anarchist bookfair, an annual event which the festival
was coinciding with was very successful. Thousands
attended this, the main hall and corridors were lined with
stalls and their were meetings going on continuously. The
meetings themselves, although promising were dry and
often irrelevant to those that attended. There was one
good meeting I caught the second half of with somebody
from the French O.C.L. talking about his experiences of
1968 in Paris.
I was told there were more people than ever at the
bookfair, this was attributed to the festival. One worrying
thing was that despite this huge attendance the national
anarchist organisations in Britain can only claim a
combined membership of less than 200. I presume at least
some of the thousands that attended are involved in local
groups but its clear that a lot of potential is being wasted in
terms of making a national impact.
On the Sunday the only event that caught my interest was
the "Levitation of parliament". As a joke event connected
with a week of serious meetings and activity this would
have been fun. The problem was the week was scattered
with meetings that had nothing to do with anarchism,
including religious ones on magic and paganism. As a
result I'm unsure whether this event was meant to be a
media grabbing wind up or not. Also in this context it had
the harmful effect of re-inforcing the stereo-type of
anarchists as oddball nutters.
A lot of people turned up for this, probably up to a
thousand. This was quite funny as the police were
unprepared for such number and initially only 8-10 cops
were to be seen. They panicked at the sight of the growing
crowd and called for re-inforcements so that over the next
hour many vans arrived, sirens howling until we had a
line of police facing us. A helicopter and a few horses also
arrived. This ended with the burning of USA and British
flags and then everyone drifted off.
On Monday I was helping in the organising of a workshop
on using the internet (the global computer network).
Fastbreeder BBS and Spunk Press had organised this, it
attracted about 60 or so people. It was good as a practical
session, giving people information that they could use
when they went home. It was also good from a
networking point of view as I got to meet many anarchists
who I had previously only known through e-mail. it was
also the first demonstration of the possibility of doing
something serious and worthwhile with the week.
That evening that was what was billed as an "International
Anti-fascist Rally" in the LSE. I arrived a bit late for this, in
the middle of a contribution from two French anarchists.
There were two interesting speakers Larry O'Hara who
talked about the connections between the fascists and M15
(British secret police) and Lorenzo Evins a black anarchist
from the USA who talked about the need to combat racism
and not just concentrate on fascism. Some New Age
Travellers also spoke from the floor about the physical
attacks they have been experiencing lately and appealing
for help in finding out who was behind these attacks.
A number of problems also arose at this even however that
were to be repeated for all the major meetings. Their was
no effective chairing so that some speakers were allowed
to ramble on for as long as they liked, even if they were
drunk. On a couple of occasion drunks were also allowed
to interrupt from the floor, and a stupid dialogue then
ensued between the speaker and the drunk over some
personal matter which many of us could not understand.
When it came to taking contributions from the floor at the
end the chair did not see some people until he was shouted
at by others for 'ignoring' them. These problems meant
that the meeting lacked direction or focus and so came
across as somewhat farcical.
I spent Tuesday having informal meeting with different
anarchists I had met so far. This activity was the most
useful of the week. Other people reported that the various
workshops they had read about in the brochure had not
taken place.
On Tuesday evening London Class War held a meeting in
one of the festival venues but independent of the festival.
They had been giving out a leaflet denouncing the festival
during the week and predicting that far from shaking the
world it would not even shake a bar table. The meeting
started off well if very basic, with a concentration on the
need for anarchists to be organised. However in response
to questions one of the speakers went on a 20 minute
macho rant were he tried to convince the audience that the
test of being working class was getting drunk and getting
into fights. He also claimed that he knew someone from a
wealthy background who become working class by going
out with a skinhead women and getting I love Britain
tattooed on his arm! Despite the promising start it
appeared this meeting had also become infected with the
bizarre atmosphere of the week.
On Wednesday and Thursday we attempted to go to
workshops that had been advertised in the program.
These were to be held in the Cool Tan a large squatted
building near Brixton tube station. Only two of these
actually took place and apparently many of the workshops
advertised never happened. One that did take place was
an impromptu one on 'organising the rest of the week'.
Organisation had more or less collapsed at this stage, none
of the organisers for instance turned up for this. The
reason the workshops had not taken place it transpired
was that space and topics had been booked but no
arrangements made to find someone to lead off or facilitate
the discussion!
On Thursday we decided the best thing to do was to
arrange a series of meetings ourselves in the Cool Tan for
the Friday so we spent Thursday producing and
distributing posters to advertise these. On Thursday
evening I spoke at the International rally which was
terribly organised. Only one speaker (Lorenzo) had been
got in advance and all but one of the organisers had
abandoned the meeting. The remaining guy was running
around trying to arrange speakers and a collection as well
as chairing. He was putting on a great effort but its
impossible for one person to hold together a meeting of
that size (200+ people) and it also appeared he lacked
experience of chairing as he was unable to deal with the
constant interruptions of a couple of drunks from the floor.
Earlier on Thursday evening there had been a picket of
Brixton police station against the killing of a Black man by
the police earlier in the week. (He had 'fallen' from the
balcony of a flat being raided by immigration police). Well
over 100 anarchists turned up for this, many of them
masked up, some even wearing balaclavias. The picket
was somewhat farcical being almost completely white
despite being in the centre of Brixton a London suburb
where many Blacks live (and that was the front-line of the
inner city riots in 1981). It had been called by the trotskyist
Socialist Workers Party. About 12 of there members
marched around in a circle in the centre of the picket
chanting 'No Justice, No peace', obviously somewhat
freaked by the surrounding mass of anarchists.
On Friday we turned up to find the room we were to hold
the meeting in had no lighting, no windows and no
electricity. It had a couple of punks asleep in the middle of
the floor. So after waking them up and explaining that a
meeting was starting in bout five minutes we wandered
around and managed to dig up enough mats and chairs for
people to sit in, a long piece of cable and a bare light bulb
with some clear plastic struck around half of it. It looked
OK if not beautiful by the end.
We gave two talks, one on the IRA cease-fire and the other
on what sort of organisations anarchists need. We
followed this up by a workshop in which everyone talked
of their experiences in campaigns and how anarchists
could reach out and work alongside other people. About
40 people turned up to one or all of these sessions and
considering the haphazard arrangements everything went
very well. It also proved that despite appearances there
were a number of well motivated and serious people at the
conference, they were just hard to find in the general
bedlam.
The police
The week started with a minimal police presence, I suspect
they knew of the chaotic and confused nature of the
organisation of the festival and so expected no one to turn
up. So the first reports were just of them being places
where you would expect them, like the squat opened to
provide accommodations for people from outside London.
All this was to change over the course of the week.
On Sunday 23rd the event happened which started to get
the police worried. This strangely enough was the
'levitation of parliament'!! but it was obvious the police
had grossly underestimated the numbers that would
attend. I arrived on time at 2:00 by which there were about
100 anarchists and 8 police. Over the next hour the crowd
grew and the cops panicked calling in re-inforcements
which arrived sirens howling. Soon we were faced with
about 200 police including a circling helicopter and some
riot horses. Everything was peaceful however, the high
point being an attempt to pull down one of the union jacks
so it could be burnt. In the end the flag burning went
ahead with ones people had brought themselves, including
a union jack and a stars and stripes.
On Monday 24th about 200 people took part in an
occupation of part of the M11 road under construction
around London. There has been a long running campaign
against this. The security guards got rough with a few
protesters breaking cameras and ripping clothes but there
were no serious injuries or arrests that I heard of.
On Wednesday 26th I took part at a meeting to discuss the
poor organisation of events to date. At this I was told that
the cops were now taking photos of everyone entering or
leaving the accommodation squat. The excuse for this was
the death of an Italian anarchist there the previous night,
various rumours attributed this to suicide or a drugs
overdose. They had also taken to randomly stopping and
searching people leaving any of the venues on their own.
Later that evening I was waiting for a meeting outside one
of the venues (Conway hall). It's on one corner of a square
which has a park in the middle. A full cop van repeatedly
circled the park with all the cops staring out the window at
those of us outside the door.
Saturday was when things got out of hand. There was a
CND march in London that day and the organisers of the
festival suggested as many anarchists as possible show up
to march as a block in the march. On Friday evening the
Police had gone on local TV to say anarchists were
planning a riot in the city centre the next day and that
shoppers should stay away.
I turned up early to find about 2000 marchers assembling
including maybe 150 anarchists. There were also 25 riot
horses, cops on the tube station roof with riot gear, cops on
all the overlooking office block with cameras, lines of cops
blocking every visible road junction and bizarrly two
police launches on the river.
As the march started I joined the rest of the anarchists
around three black flags towards the centre of the march.
Some had masked up because of the cameras but the
atmosphere was non-hostile, we were partially
intermingled with CND pensioners and children. Some of
the CND crowd had been made nervous by the police
scare stories of the night before but by the time we set off
they were happily chatting to us.
As the march proceeded we passed about 20 cops frisking
two anarchists against a wall. Some people wanted to try
and rescue them but we were so obviously outnumbered
that most just kept walking. Seconds later we passed a
spot where about 200 police were assembled on each side
of the road in padded jackets, boots and wearing gloves.
As we reached this spot the cops on the left started to walk
through the march, as if they were crossing the road. As
they got to midway however they started grabbing any
marchers who looked like an anarchist i.e. punks, crustys,
people masked up or those carrying flags. There were so
many cops they had lifted about 100 people straight off.
12-15 German anarchists realising what was happening
linked arms. The cops from the right rushed in, punching
them in the stomach until they let go and dragged them off
too. This was the only resistance put up due both to the
surprise nature of the attack and the fact we were
outnumbered at least two to one. One grey haired old
women from CND did punch a cop but they ignored her.
Those of us who had escaped arrest continued on in
shocked silence, there was little we could do except choose
to get arrested as well.
The police had shut down every tube station on the way
into Trafalgar square. Every road was blocked by a double
line of police, normally with more polices videoing the
marchers from the top of a van. A helicopter circled the
march. Trafalgar square was completely ringed with
police, every road off it had a triple line of police across it,
with a line of vans behind them. The entrance to the park
at one end had several ambulances, backed up with their
doors open. At this stage there were no more than 20-30
anarchists left. Leaving the march I passed line after line
of full cop vans, one line consisting of 26 vans. Somebody
had indeed been planning a riot!
I walked to the London greenpeace bookfair in Conway
hall about 2 miles away. As we approached it we noticed
another 6 police vans parked down a side street. When we
got there we discovered an ad-hoc defence campaign was
being set up and that police vans were outside all of the
festival venues. Of the 100 or so hauled off from the march
most were just held (and searched) till the march got out of
sight. Some 30 were arrested and of these only two were
charged (one for assault!!!) and the other for possessing a
knife. They were released after several hours.
Of course as an anarchist I expect this sort of behaviour
from the police. I've also nothing against people defending
themselves from or having a go at the police providing in
doing so they have the general support of those around
them (i.e. I'm not into a small group provoking a riot to
get other people heads bashed). I've written this account
both for the information it contains and for those who see
the police as a neutral body following some sort of rules of
fair play.
Was there anything we could have done to stop the arrests.
Probably not, we were massively outnumbered, they were
about 3000 police along the route of the march,
outnumbering the anarchist contingent at about 20 to 1.
They had 2ft+ truncheons, padded clothes, horses, riot
shields, helicopters, vans (they drove these at speed
through crowds during the Poll Tax riot) and presumably
plastic bullets if they wanted them. As the arrests show
we had nothing that even they could consider a weapon
(I'd guess the knife was of the Swiss army variety rather
than a two foot machete). Those who attempted non
violent resistance were beaten up feet from me. Even if the
rest of the march had come to our aid we were still
outnumbered and many of the marchers were young
children or pensioners. This time the police had us cold.
The march was the last event of the festival I attended and
really it was typical of it. The week was characterised by
lack of organisation and communication. For the most part
those that had come from other countries were left out in
the cold by the organisers with one or two exceptions.
Because of the boycott by most of the British anarchist
groups there was almost no voice other that the counter
culture there. I suspect for anyone for whom the week was
their first exposure to anarchism it was a disaster. The
impression you would be left with was of drunken lunatics
into looking different but incapable of organising a piss up
in a brewery. One member of the Solidarity Federation I
met asked me if thought the conference would put British
anarchism back ten or fifteen years.
On the other hand it was an opportunity to meet a lot of
motivated people many of whom were involved locally in
activity. There were opportunities to address many people
at the major meetings and even set up your own fringe
meetings. We did this with some success considering their
were only two of us there. That perhaps is the main
tragedy of the week, despite the sloppy organisation a lot
of it could have been turned around into a political event
rather than a theatre of the absurd. But none of the British
organisations tried to do this. The fact that they were
unwilling or unable to do so suggests that they are just as
much ghettoised as the organisers of the event, just in a
different ghetto.
Andrew Flood
Andrew Flood
anflood@macollamh.ucd.ie
Phone: 706(2389)