At about four thirty
this plan reached a sort of climax as the police decided to take
Nelson's Column, presumably so that we had nowhere to sit. People put
up various degrees of resistance. I saw one man having a riot shield
forced into his throat as he tried to keep his place on the monument,
while a superior officer shouted at the shield-pusher to stop.
Apparently he wasn't shouting loud enough though, or maybe the riot
helmets make it hard to hear anything, because this went on for some
time. No-one really felt much like having a proper battle though, and
it wasn't all that long to before the only pockets of resistace were up
on lions.
Eventually it became
clear that they were actually letting us out in dribs and drabs, as if
the collosal police presence would be overloaded if they allowed more
than three people to be walking in the street outside their circle at
any one time. Every now and then a couple of police would suddenly
seize someone from the crowd and drag them off without explanation.
At
around six o'clock I was finally allowed out of the Square. Hungry,
tired, dehydrated, fevered and toilet-deprived for some hours, I set
off to find a way to get home. However, I arrived at Charing Cross to
find the tube station shut; so I then I walked to the Embankment, also
shut. I thought I'd see if the police might be able to tell me how to
get back, but they appeared to take some pleasure in informing me they
had no idea. 'Fantastic,' I thought, 'what a way to disperse a riot.'
Or, more accurately, a non-riot, since what it really was up to this
point was a big, mainly peaceful demonstration with two shop-smashings,
a couple of isolated fights and some graffiti.
Running out of transport options and finding myself blocked by police
lines everywhere I turned, I decided to try crossing Waterloo Bridge to
see if I could find a South London station. As I was crossing, some guy
with a plank (presumably in a bad mood after being trapped by police
for five hours with nothing to eat and nowhere to piss) was inexpertly
smashing car windows. He was using the plank like a slapstick, failing
to smash one windscreen and then moving on to the next, but I read
afterwards that he had smashed half a dozen. As I arrived at the other
end of the bridge, it looked like I was about to reach a main road with
buses running but before I could reach it the police sealed off the way
in front of me. This at least allowed me to stop walking for a bit and
sit on a wall watching the Waterloo sunset, but after a painfully brief
period they started us moving again, shuffling haltingly through South
London at an incredibly slow pace. It took us a couple of hours at this
speed to make it as far as Kennington Police Station, where we stopped
and sat around for about another hour with no explanation as the
evening grew cold. Finally they started letting people go in ones and
twos, searching us and photographing us, and I got free some time after
ten.
Next morning I saw The
Mirror describe those of us who had been arbitrarily trapped in this
fashion as 'about two hundred hardcore protestors.' Hardcore,
presumably, in that we had not yet passed out from the combination of
dehydration, hunger and fatigue. Perhaps it never even occurred to the
Mirror reporters that people might be herded like this just because
they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. With tragicomic irony,
the paper then saw fit talk about the importance of the right to
peaceful protest, whilst roundly denouncing even the most peaceful of
the protestors and heaping praise on a police operation which really
didn't even bother to pay lip service to this 'right.'
The Ballad of May-Day 2000
Squall's pictures from
the day
To pictures and reports from the
Festival of Ganja in Brockwell Park on May 6th, which was much bigger -
but also much nicer, and therefore almost completely ignored by the
media.
To
the Index
