Email
A young man wearing a taqiyah looks up at me as his friend moves out of earshot. He is worried his friend's family may not understand the minor nature of the crime they have committed. We are in the foyer of Croydon police station, where I am offering support to those arrested at an anti-fascist march. Both men, along with several of their associates, have been released from custody within the last half an hour. A few moments later, a woman informs us that she is three months' pregnant. She says she was arrested, along with the others, at around 2pm on Saturday and has been in police custody for more than 12 hours.
More arrestees, Spanish, come out, the trickle now gaining some momentum. One of them, a young woman, tells me of how she had asked for an interpreter and had for some considerable time required access to medication while in custody. She was provided with an officer who spoke broken Spanish and who she thinks could barely understand her. At no point was she given access to a doctor or asked about the medication she required. Another man, of Bangladeshi origin, tells me he was arrested on the street on which he lives, while his friend says he was arrested on the street on which his mother lives; both are incredulous that peacefully assembling in such places is a criminal offence.
A few hours earlier, I had been in Sutton police station, once again assisting in legal support. This involved getting names and contact details as well as providing food and drink for people as they were released from custody. The range of languages I overheard in both stations was remarkable: English, French, Arabic, Turkish, Bengali, Italian, Spanish and German. The arrestees offered a representation of the London that I know. Spaniards and Italians talked to British Bangladeshis from Tower Hamlets. Some were activists, most were not. Earlier in the day a friend said he had seen several young women on the protest wearing Galatasaray jerseys while in Sutton I had the pleasure of meeting a group of cousins, nearly all in their teens, speaking Turkish to one another. They had all been arrested.
A total of 286 people were arrested in Tower Hamlets on Saturday as they moved to confront a nearby demonstration of the English Defence League. The arrestees were a mix of activists, many from the Anti-Fascist Network, and local residents. Nearly all were arrested for alleged offences under sections 12 and 14 of the Public Order Act. For many it felt as if their crime consisted of little more than exercising their democratic right to free assembly.
This episode follows on from the 145 arrests in Fortnum & Mason in 2011, the 182 arrests the following year on the eve of the Olympics, and the 58 arrests of anti-fascist protesters in Whitehall earlier this summer. In all four cases, not to mention countless others, there were few or no charges for more serious public order crimes such as affray or violent disorder (charges which have been deployed in a seemingly highly political manner, most prominently in the 2010 UK student movement on individuals such as Frank Fernie, Zac King and Alfie Meadows). A picture emerges from these figures: anyone who deviates from a choreographed protest route or seeks to step beyond the confines of official dissent, no matter how peaceful, will likely face arrest.
It should be remembered that protest is by nature both contentious and disruptive – any scholar of its history will tell you as much, and if a polity is incapable of dealing with collective contention it is difficult to see how it is embodying democratic principles. That the UK increasingly accepts protest only overseen by official administrators of dissent, such as the TUC, whose lives more closely resemble those with whom they are supposedly in contestation than much of the general public, is of great concern. Even for these institutionally embedded and well-resourced actors the scope for unchoreographed dissent is increasingly limited, and this holds true with regards to not only protest and public order law but also some of the most stringent anti-strike legislation in the OECD. In an age when policymakers claim to want a strong civil society and frequently ask how to politically engage younger generations, mass arrests, primarily of young working-class people whose only crime is assembly, renders clear how insincere such questioning actually is.
Those arrested on Saturday represent the London I have come to know: ethnically diverse, of all ages and from a range of economic backgrounds; bound together by mutual respect of difference and recognition of shared commonality. On the other hand the actions of the police on the day represented the continuation of a strategy based on a complete disdain for the principles of free association and assembly. A bronze commander standing by a number of empty buses, soon to be filled with protesters, smirked when he said: "We're not leaving until these wagons are full." Such words and the equivalence he drew between a politically engaged public and cattle to fill quotas belies the contempt in which the public, when they choose to disagree, are ultimately held.
;
Comment from the paper
Steve Bell: Steve Bell on the Lib Dem conference – cartoon
George Monbiot: How much longer can MPs resist this flat-Earth love-in?
Melissa Kite: Why legalising cannabis isn't logical