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  Millbank gets deconstructed

  ‘Millbank’ is journalistic shorthand for the unofficial nexus of power in British politics. The street, right by the River Thames, houses the political studios of the main TV networks, the party HQs, the offices of lobby firms and think tanks and, at the end of it, parliament.

  But on the cold, clear afternoon of 10 November 2010, as around 200 students broke away from a student march to gather outside Conservative Party HQ at Millbank Tower, the word ‘Millbank’ was about to acquire another meaning. Because Millbank was where they lost control. The Coalition lost control of the political agenda; the NUS leadership lost control of the student movement; the police lost control of the streets.

  Millbank was staffed by that narrow group of graduates who’d bought into the whole story of mainstream politics: the bad suit, the neat hair, the drug-free lifestyle led in hopes of one day becoming an MP. Now they found themselves besieged by their alter egos: girls dressed like Lady Gaga, boys wearing pixie boots and ironic medallions.

  By 2 p.m. the cackle of circling media helicopters alerted the whole of central London that something was going on. Students had pushed their way into the forecourt of Millbank Tower. Police, in pitifully small numbers, found themselves squashed against its plate-glass windows. Now the protesters surged into the building using side entrances, fire-doors and eventually—after smashing the glass—the actual windows. Soon, a crowd of students were milling about on the roof. Others had already made it to the floor where the Conservative apparatchiks, locked inside, were watching it all on television.

  Edward Woollard, an eighteen-year-old further education student, recklessly threw a fire extinguisher off the roof towards the police lines.1 In the forecourt the chant went up: ‘Stop throwing shit.’ The police, outnumbered, looked helpless.

  Then things petered out. The students hung around a bit, lit fires with placards, painted some graffiti and then went home. But on their flame-lit faces you saw the look of people who had discovered the power of mayhem.

  Millbank was one of those unforeseeable events that catalyze everything. The Liberal Democrats under Nick Clegg had ridden a wave of centre-left support in the May 2010 general election. The party’s MPs had signed a pre-election pledge not to raise university tuition fees; after gaining power as part of the Conservative-led coalition, they promptly signed up to support the tripling of fees, to £9,000 a year, and to abolish a small weekly grant for low-income school students.

  The reaction among working-class school students went beyond outrage: they panicked. It was an impossible sum to comprehend. One told me: ‘My mum only earns £9,000 a year.’

  Both the political and media classes anticipated that opposition to the fee increase would be led by the usual ‘student leader’ types, eager to join the Millbank set themselves. They thought Nick Clegg’s residual popularity with students—who, like @littlemisswilde, had voted massively for the Lib Dems in May 2010—would hold things together. They assumed, above all, that the youth were too engrossed in their iPhones and their Twitter feeds, too in thrall to postmodernist insouciance, to notice the freight train of economic doom coming at them.

  Millbank shattered all these certainties. The mainstream media decided that, even if this student movement came to nothing, they had better start covering it as if it were part of something bigger—though they did not yet know what that something would be.

  Spontaneous horizontalists

  29 November 2011. At the London School of Oriental and African Studies, they had occupied a room in the library, which they’d plastered in hand-crayoned manifestos. Their demands were modest, focused on the running of the school, the non-victimization of the protesters and, finally, a request for the college management to state its public opposition to the fee increase.

  In the corner was a prayer area for Muslim students. On the floor lay those iconic books: Hardt and Negri’s Multitude; a Foucault primer; Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, Fanon’s collected works.

  They’d called a mass meeting about 300 strong, a young guy with a beard officiating. To his right huddled a small group of hard leftists; at the back were some of the college staff, including a few veterans of 1968 with long grey hair and beards. The question was whether to continue the occupation—they had been going for a week—but very few people spoke to the issue. One man, a young Syrian, stood up to say: ‘What we’re doing is having a global impact. This French journalist came up to me and said, this is amazing, this never happened before. What are the Brits doing? I said—what, you think the French are the only ones who can riot?’

  The method, as people speak, is to waggle your hands: upwards if you agree, downwards if not, more vigorously if you agree more, etc. I first saw it used in the late 1990s by the anti-globalization movement. But in the space of ten years the whole menu of ‘horizontalist’ practice —forms of protest, decision-making, world view—has become the norm for a generation.

  And the meeting we are attending is not the only meeting: there is another one going on, in the form of tweets and texts that people are sending to their friends in other colleges. This is normal in the student movement: ‘virtual’ meetings that will never be minuted or recorded. As @littlemisswilde describes it: ‘We use Twitter to expand the room.’

  It comes to the final vote. Shall they stay in occupation? One of the Sixty-Eighters pipes up with a last-minute call for a strike and occupation of the main admin block. He is applauded—almost as if it is okay to applaud somebody whose politics and hairstyle date from the epoch of applause instead of hand-waggling.

  But this is a blip. Most of the meeting is conducted in an atmosphere of flat-faced calm. This is an obvious but unspoken cultural difference between modern youth protest movements and those of the past: anybody who sounds like a career politician, anybody who attempts rhetoric, espouses an ideology, or lets their emotions overtake them is greeted with a visceral distaste. The reasons are hard to fathom.

  First, probably, it’s because there is no ideology driving this movement and no coherent vision of an alternative society. Second, the potential for damage arising from violence is larger than before: the demos, when they get violent, immediately expose the participants to getting jailed for serious offences, so they will go a long way to avoid getting angry. Third, and most important, it seems to me that this generation knows more than their predecessors about power. They have read (or read a Wikipedia summary of) political thinkers like Foucault, Deleuze, Dworkin. They realize, in a way previous generations of radicals did not, that emotion-fuelled action, loyalty, mesmeric oratory and hierarchy all come at an overhead cost.

  At the end of the meeting, the consensus is to stay in occupation for another night. ‘That’s good,’ smiles the bearded guy announcing the result, ‘because my house is shit anyway.’

  Day X: Kettled youth

  After Millbank, in the occupations, squats and shared houses, the makeshift ideology of the students had veered rapidly towards a kind of makeshift anarchism. ‘Don’t underestimate this generation, Paul,’ one chided me. ‘Unlike you, they’ve had to do tests every month of their lives; some of them were working for the Lib Dems and Labour six months ago, but they are so angry now, some of them are heading in the direction of insurrectionary violence.’ As the mood changed, students started to talk about a ‘Day X’. The posters proclaiming this new demonstration, slated for 24 November, had begun to borrow the imagery of Paris 1968.

  But since Marx is out of fashion, and Lenin and Mao have been branded left fascists, who else is there to study but the Frenchman whose musings have become required reading in the era of Lady Gaga: Guy Debord?

  Many students were familiar with Debord and his Situationist movement, for the simple reason that he is taught on every art course, and the big London art schools—Slade and Goldsmiths—were centres of militancy. But also because, as we will see, some of the Situationist tactics that failed in May 1968—basically, spreading out to create chaos—do not look
so ludicrous if you own a Blackberry.

  While the undergraduate occupation movement grew, the sixteen-to eighteen-year-olds at further education colleges (the British equivalent to high school) were facing a double hit. If they got to university, they would be the first to pay the fee increases. But in the interim the government had decided to cut the Education Maintenance Allowance, a payment of up to £30 a week Labour had introduced in 2004 to combat—or conceal, depending on your viewpoint—structural youth unemployment. At the time of its abolition, 647,000 under-eighteens were receiving EMA. Though conceived as a kind of paternalistic ‘pocket money’, most of those I talked to were so poor that they were spending the money on essential groceries for their family.

  On 24 November at 11 a.m., school walkouts began in towns and cities all across the UK. ‘They’re taking away our future. They’re rich, they don’t care about us’ was the theme of the vox pops as the twenty-four-hour news channels televised it all. Rough kids from Newham in London; polite kids from Dundee; Asian kids from Birmingham; white kids from Truro, Cornwall. In Morecambe, Lancashire, 200 students blocked the traffic and beat drums. In Liverpool they blockaded Lime Street station. ‘The police are outnumbered, they don’t know what to do,’ one participant texted.

  Instead of Guy Debord, the under-eighteens opted for Anglo-Saxon literalism. They swarmed into Trafalgar Square, off buses from London’s poorest neighbourhoods, clambered over the lion statues and chanted: ‘David Cameron, fuck off back to Eton!’

  Then they surged down Whitehall, trashed an abandoned police van, covered it in graffiti, smoke-bombed it, attacked the police and danced. The iconic image of the day is the police van being protected by a cordon of schoolgirls who thought the violence had gone too far.

  The police, in response, repeatedly ‘kettled’ the protesters, and at one point charged at them on horseback. The experience of getting kettled would be central to the process of radicalization. It was not a new tactic: it had been deployed against protesters on various anti-globalization demos, and at the G20 Summit in April 2009. But for most of the students it was new and shocking: you can tell this from the vividness of the language, the way first-person accounts spark into life when they describe it. Taught throughout their lives that their rights were primarily individual, not collective, but at the same time inalienable, kettling seemed to many like an offence against the person. Sophie Burge, aged seventeen:

  We waited and waited. Kettling does work when you have no choice about where you move; you start to feel very desolate and very depressed. People were crying. It was horrible; it was freezing and there were no toilets … we all just had to wee in a specific corner.2

  Activist Jonathan Moses spelled out the political conclusion many of them drew: ‘that property comes before people; the rights of the former supersede those of the latter’.3

  With the momentum and the radicalism increasing, the school students staged a Day X-2 on 30 November, again clashing with police and attacking property in central London. Now the stage was set for Day X-3: the demo to coincide with the final parliamentary vote on the fee increase.

  The Dubstep Rebellion

  9 December 2010. I start ‘Day X-3’ in the occupation at UCL, where young men are fashioning makeshift armour for their arms and shins out of cardboard. Sleeping on the floor I find Chris, a school student from Norwich who has ‘just turned up’ for the demonstration. He doesn’t know anybody at UCL, but they have let him stay the night. ‘I’m from the lower middle class, you could say. Not poor enough to get a grant under the new system so, though I was hoping to go to university, I really might not go.’

  Lingering at the entrance to the occupation are four young boys from a nearby Camden estate: three black, one white. They are still wearing school uniform trousers, though they have swapped blazers for hoodies and face masks. They avoid my gaze. They smoke. When I catch the eye of one, he snickers wildly, staring into the distance. Though there are hours to go, they’re twitching in anticipation of the violence to come.

  At 2 p.m. about 40,000 people set out peacefully in the biting cold, marching from the University of London’s Senate House to Parliament Square. At the Square they deviate from the agreed route, break through a line of cops who try half-heartedly to baton them, and tear down the six-foot metal fences protecting the grassy centre.

  Then they dance. The hippy in charge of the sound system is from an eco-farm and has, he tells me, been trying to play ‘politically right-on reggae’. However, a new crowd—in which the oldest person is maybe seventeen—takes over the crucial jack plug. A young black girl inserts this plug into her Blackberry (iPhones are out for this demographic) and pumps out the dubstep. Or what sounds to me like dubstep.

  Young men, mainly black, grab each other around the head and form a circular dance to the digital beat—lit, as dusk gathers, by the distinctly analog glow of a bench they have set on fire.

  While a good half of the marchers are undergraduates from the most militant college occupations—UCL, SOAS, Leeds, Sussex—the key phenomenon, politically, is the presence of youth: banlieue-style youth from places like Croydon and Peckham, or the council estates of Camden, Islington and Hackney.

  Meanwhile, the pushing and shoving at the police line has turned into fighting. There are of course the anarchist, Black Bloc types, there are the socialist left groups—but the main offensive actions taken to break through police lines are by small groups of young men dressed in the hip-hop fashions of working-class estates.

  Some of them will appear a few days later in the News of the World, their mugshots released by the Met: a black kid in a Russian fur hat; other young black boys in hoodies. Exhilarated eyes, very few bothering to mask up.

  As it gets dark, there are just two lines of riot police and about thirty yards between the students and the parliament building. The Met has adopted a first-ditch-equals-last-ditch defence: Britain’s only full-time riot squad, the Territorial Support Group, is all that’s preventing the youth from clambering over the medieval walls of Westminster.

  Inside parliament, MPs are debating the fee increase. Outside, getting nowhere with the TSG, the students change direction. They swarm up Victoria Street, which leads away from parliament, pushing back a line of mounted police and breaking through police attempts to form a cordon. But then, in successive charges, both the mounted police and the riot squads fight back. There is now toe-to-toe confrontation.

  Heavy objects land among the police, amid a much larger volume of paint, fireworks and flash-bangs. At one point the horses are unable to cope, and a policeman falls off his mount, getting dragged away on a stretcher by colleagues.

  A girl steps through a break in the police line and gets batoned. She crumples to the ground, where the police continue beating her. Afterwards she stays there, inert for a long, long time, so that the press photographers in their crash helmets stop shooting and cluster around her. She doesn’t speak. Her face is screwed up, disbelief mingled with terror.

  At the point of the wedge, alongside the estate youth, are the self-styled ‘Book Bloc’. They’ve gone into battle in green helmets with mattress-sized mockups of book covers: Endgame, by Samuel Beckett; Negative Dialectics by Theodore Adorno; Debord, of course; and—for levity—the tales of an unruly school-kid, Just William by Richmal Crompton. They’ve copied this tactic from a group of Italian students, who are at the same moment lobbing firebombs into the side-streets of Rome.

  Soon the books-cum-shields are torn out of their hands, and it is metal and bone and Kevlar that is making that clunk-clunk sound. Together with the constant strobe of camera flashes and the throb of the dubstep —or what sounds like dubstep—it’s become like a macabre outdoor nightclub.

  For the police this is an ‘only just’ moment: a couple of officers get knocked to the ground and the students break through. Reinforcements arrive: dismounted motorcycle cops, many without helmets but wielding long batons. One runs straight at me, face snarling. But he’s aiming fo
r someone else. Clunk.

  I decide to get out. There’s one of the Fleet Street photographers covered in green paint; his Nikon’s covered in paint too: irreparable. He shows it off to the others. It’s like shift work, because as we’re pulling out others are going in. The journos are clad in black, like many of the protesters, and we smile at each other as if this is somehow funny.

  On the east corner of Parliament Square, people climb up to smash the windows of the HM Revenue and Customs building. On the west side they scale the façade of the Supreme Court, smash the leaded windows and push lighted materials inside. On the wall, someone sprays Debord’s aphorism: ‘Be Realistic—Demand the Impossible’.

  Outside a pub there is a line of injured protesters being triaged by ambulance crews. Everybody has a head wound and a white bandage. And now the kettling’s started. Some will end up trapped for hours in the freezing cold. Those who can escape go back to the student occupations to discuss where the campaign goes next.

  By nightfall a student called Alfie Meadows is undergoing brain surgery after allegedly being batoned by police. Television footage shows another student—Jody Mclntyre, who has cerebral palsy—being dragged from his wheelchair by an irate policeman, who’s being restrained by his own colleagues. Elsewhere, in the West End, a breakaway group has surrounded a vintage Rolls Royce carrying Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall to a function at the Palladium Theatre. As the protesters rock the car to and fro and throw paint bombs at it, somebody leans through the open window and prods Camilla with a stick. The royal protection squad, it emerges later, were on the point of drawing their guns.

  A few hours later, after I’ve blogged all this under the headline ‘The Dubstep Rebellion’, some protesters make vigorous representations to me via Twitter: they present a detailed playlist of the tracks blasted out in Parliament Square, which proves the music was not dubstep but grime.4 It was the Grime Rebellion, doh.