Imagine having emphysema. For those who don’t know what that entails, emphysema is when the lining of your lungs is destroyed, meaning that it gradually becomes harder and harder to take in the oxygen your body needs. To start with, you notice that you get out of breath just a bit faster than you used to. Then, over time, it gets worse. And worse. After a while you find yourself fighting for breath even while sitting still. And then, after a few years – for most of which you’ll be constantly hooked up to oxygen tanks, barely able to speak, move or even feed yourself – you’ll most likely die, either from a simple lack of air or from heart failure as the low oxygen levels in your blood cause your veins and arteries to constrict and your blood pressure to skyrocket. There is no cure. Oh, and if you smoke regularly for many years, the odds of this happening to you get a lot shorter (12 to 13 times shorter, in fact – although technically that’s for COPD rather than just emphysema).

None of this is really news – most people who smoke are aware that their habit is likely to have some nasty health consequences as they get older – and plenty of them would probably argue that the reason they smoke is that the pleasure they get from doing so outweighs the negative health effects. But this ignores the rather glaring issue that tobacco is an addictive substance, so the enjoyment of smoking for most people lies in large part in the relief from your addictive craving (though I’m not denying that smoking is enjoyable in itself as well). And it’s for that very simple reason that I support the announcement today that displaying tobacco in shops is to be banned.

The libertarian argument often used in cases like this – that people should be free to do things which put their own health at risk if they want to – is a compelling one, especially if those activities bring in more to the Treasury than is spent by the government tackling any associated health issues, as is commonly claimed to be the case with smoking. But autonomy shouldn’t be the only consideration when you’re thinking about addictive behaviour, for the fairly obvious reason that people who are acting under the influence of an addiction aren’t acting completely autonomously, which probably goes a long way in explaining why people still smoke despite the fairly high likelihood of severe health problems in the future. If you’re addicted to tobacco and want to quit (as the government claims one in three smokers are) then not seeing cigarettes displayed every time you go to the shop could well make it that bit easier. It’s easy to mock the idea that displays in shops affect your retail habits, but you know what? The reason that shops put up displays – and have been doing so for decades, if not centuries – is because they make you more likely to buy things. Of course they’re not the only thing determining what you buy (and the government’s claim that they’re the main reason teenagers start smoking does admittedly seem pretty implausible) but it’s ridiculous to claim they have no effect at all. And when those things are products you’re addicted to, that’s doubly true.

In any case, getting rid of shop window displays doesn’t do anything to restrict the sale of tobacco, just the advertisement of it. This ban does next to nothing to limit the freedom of smokers to buy and consume what they want, and there’s a good chance it will help the large numbers of people struggling to overcome their addictions. I really don’t see a problem with it.

As readers of this blog may or may not be aware, Cambridge Student Union’s Women’s Campaign has a petition running at the moment, calling on the Union Society* to withdraw its speaking invitation to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, on the fairly reasonable grounds that he’s a deeply unpleasant individual who seems to have a serious problem with the way he treats women. And some people, including this Cambridge student blogging for the Guardian, aren’t happy about this:

[U]niversities exist to open our minds. If we can’t listen to controversial speakers during these three hallowed years, when can we?

[…]

Freedom of speech is a double-edged sword. If the tuition fees rise has proved anything, it’s that students can get moving when we really feel strongly about something. The question is whether students who cherish their own right to protest should also allow DSK his opportunity to speak.

Most of the writers of this blog are Cambridge alumni, so I’m aware of the danger of parochialism when it comes to stories like this, but I think this has wider significance because it’s symptomatic of a particularly naïve and ill-thought-out conception of free speech which is alarmingly widespread. Whenever an organisation or public figure faces protests or condemnation for acting in a way that offends or upsets people, a large number of other people pop up to decry this as ‘censorship’ and trot out variations on the theme of “you know, supporting freedom of speech means you have to let people speak even if you don’t agree with them”, as if they think the people they’re arguing with aren’t aware of what the term means. What’s particularly annoying about this is that everyone who takes this line seems to believe that doing so makes them some kind of lone radical freethinker singlehandedly holding the liberal line against the censorious hordes, ignoring a) the fact that they’re normally saying it on the internet, where the risks of blowback from saying something controversial are negligible and b) the existence of countless others saying exactly the same bloody thing.

More importantly though, this kind of reasoning is completely, utterly wrong. A private organisation is not the public square. Strauss-Kahn’s freedom to write articles, give interviews or otherwise express himself is in no way curtailed if it’s decided that he’s no longer welcome at the Cambridge Union. When he exercises his freedom of speech, he doesn’t run the risk of being attacked, arbitrarily imprisoned or tortured. There’s a world of difference between censorship and merely withdrawing an invitation, and to conflate the two is ridiculous. That’s not to say that there always has to be a hard and fast distinction between them, or that the State is necessarily the only entity capable of censoring others. But here, the difference is abundantly clear, just as it was in the row over retailers selling clothes with sexist slogans a few months back, and – despite what the likes of Brendan O’Neill would have you believe – just as it was a couple of months after that when people were trying to stem the tide of misogyny, hatred and overt threats of violence which women writers face online. (The fact that online abuse was itself having a censorious effect and deterring many women from writing is an irony that appears not to have occurred to O’Neill. Depressingly, it’s probably not a coincidence that debates in which the ‘censorship’ line gets erroneously trotted out tend to be those which have a feminist dimension to them.)

Fighting censorship matters. But it’s not the same thing as merely expressing disagreement. Equating cases like the DSK issue with actual serious constraints on freedom of speech and expression only serves to trivialise the latter, and are – fittingly enough – pretty damn offensive.

*To forestall confusion, the Union Society is the student debating society at Cambridge, and has no official link to either the Students’ Union or the University.

Abu Qatada is a nasty piece of work. Probably. From yesterday evening’s coverage of his release, it’s actually surprisingly difficult to find any specifics as to what it is he’s actually supposed to have done – according to the Guardian “judges accept [he] remains a threat to national security”, and the Daily Mail quotes someone who tells us he has “a litany of terror connections” but both are notably light on specifics. The BBC does have more details, but there seems to be a rather touching faith across much of the mainstream media that if the government wants to lock someone up without charge (especially, it seems, if that someone is brown and beardy), then we can take it as read that they must have done something, so we don’t need to be bothered with the actual details of what that is. Still, it seems unlikely that a man who’s given a sermon condoning suicide bombings and who was once found to be in possession of an envelope full of cash marked ‘For the mujahideen in Chechnya’ is completely free of links with Islamist terrorism, so let’s accept that he probably at least had such links in the past.

The fact remains, though, that he’s never been found guilty – or even put on trial – for any crime in this country. Committing terrorism is a crime. Conspiracy to commit terrorism is a crime. Inciting terrorism is a crime. “Having links to terrorism” isn’t. He has been found guilty in his absence of conspiracy to commit terrorist acts in Jordan – and the British government wants to deport him there – but they’ve been blocked from doing so for the very good reason that the evidence for his conviction was obtained by torture, which as you can imagine is generally held to throw the certitude of any testimony obtained by such into doubt. And since torture and unfair trials seem to be endemic in the Jordanian justice system, I’m also inclined to be cynical about any assurances Jordan’s government gives ours about how if we do deport him we can count on them not to mistreat him.

Of course, the inevitable response to this from many will be incomprehension that we should care at all how he’s treated. There’s hysterical tabloid outrage (such as in the Daily Mail link above) about how much it’s costing the British taxpayer to have him kept under house arrest for 22 hours per day, but no outrage whatsoever at the fact that he’s been detained – for literally years – and then placed under house arrest despite never having been convicted in a fair trial of any crime. But that’s how human rights work – they apply to everyone, even nasty terrorist sympathisers. Restricting someone’s freedom without a fair trial or deporting them to a country where they’ll be tortured isn’t OK, no matter how much we might – justifiably – wish they weren’t in the UK. And no, asking “but what about the human rights of the victims of terrorism?” as Tory MP Robert Halfon did on The World at One yesterday isn’t a sensible response. “Terrorists do it, so we should too” is about the most disastrously misguided principle to apply to criminal justice that I can think of.

It’s at this point that a rightwing troll (if we had any left here at TTE) would probably interject something like “so you’d rather have suspected terrorists roaming free in the streets would you?” The simple answer is yes, I would. That doesn’t mean I’m happy about it, but if we’re supporting the principle of universal human rights, we shouldn’t have to pretend that the people who need theirs upholding are nice people. Abu Qatada might well be a fundamentalist preacher of hate. But if we accept that it’s OK to lock him up then you’re tacitly accepting that we live in a society where you can be indefinitely deprived of your liberty without anyone needing to prove that you’ve done anything wrong. And it’ll take a hell of a lot of would-be terrorists to be walking the streets before I accept that.

This is a guest post by Matt Mahon

Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe of the Met – played excellently on Monday by Iain Glen, fresh from the set of HBO’s Game of Thrones – was supposed to explain his ‘total policing’ policy at LSE on Monday. In fact, he flannelled for half an hour about the challenges facing the force, then quite comfortably fielded a mixture of questions. On the one hand, fawning entreaties for him to explain just how it is he copes with the self-same challenges that he had just defined, and on the other, increasingly hostile attacks, and later chants, from students and anti-racism activists. The most powerful of these came when Hogan-Howe was skirting around a question about deaths in police custody, and disparate sections of the audience began spontaneously naming some of the three hundred and thirty-three dead. Given that the subject of the session was ostensibly to discuss total policing, though, Hogan-Howe did a remarkably good job of saying very little in many words.

It’s clear that events of this type are spectacles in the purest sense. The aim of the talk wasn’t to advance any debate that might emerge, or even the content of the lecture that Hogan-Howe gave. Instead, the event itself is what mattered: a veneer of academic respectability is given to the Met, and to BHH himself, by the fact that he can appear to be engaging in such a conversation. His talk was a mixture of down-home wisdom and flat-out contradiction, though those questions which weren’t anodyne or purely polemic exposed some interestingly large gaps in Hogan-Howe’s own understanding of policing in London: for instance, he doesn’t seem to have a desire to explore the disproportionality of stop-and-search further than to ‘explain’ it by pointing out that more stops take place in BME areas. But beginning debate like this isn’t the point of the event, when there’s such apparent disconnect between the rhetoric at the top of the Met and the realities of public order and inner-city policing.

Hogan-Howe likened total policing to Johan Cruyff’s total football; everyone can fill everyone else’s positions. But as one questioner noted, the immediate implication of total policing is high barriers at protests and a massive increase in the ability of officers on the street to decide exactly how the law should be enforced. Public order policing at the moment is heading in two directions: firstly, an increase in the ability of officers on the street to determine exactly how the law is applied. The state of exception, the moment in which particular police officers are able to determine the law, has been particularised and extended with new police powers – as in the case of the imposition of section 60 orders, the ban on face coverings and the restrictions on protest materials outside the agreed route of a march. Secondly, there is an increasing tendency for officers to be placed in situations where the instructions that come down to them from on high force a logic of escalation on to situations.

This mixture of increased power and increased institutional pressures – and the ever more apparent inseparability of police policy from the demands of government of the day – makes it clear that Monday’s talk could never represent a forum for a genuine discussion of total policing. I could go further: Any explanation of total policing from the top cannot encapsulate what it may mean for activists and black youth whose relationship with the police is much less mediated by such rhetoric. Hogan-Howe may represent a nicer face of the Met, but he does not speak for them, or to us.

A podcast of the talk will be available here in the next few days.

Last week’s seminar at the Frontline Club asked a very pertinent question of the Occupy London movement pitched outside St. Paul’s. What do you want? I was surprised to see from the show of journalistic hands that the majority in the room did not know exactly what the protesters are camped out for, though, given the lineup of speakers included accountant turned campaigner Richard Murphy and Julian Assange, fresh from court after losing his extradition appeal earlier that day, it was less surprising that the majority supported their broad aims.

Self-confessed occupy sceptic, Harry Cole, one of only two voices of dissent on the panel, accused the protesters of possessing an overwhelming mismatch of ideas.

“If you’ve got a movement that is calling for a realignment of capitalism, having speeches about climate change and Kurds within the space of 10 minutes, it’s not working,” Cole said.

More baffling opposition came from Daniel Ben-Ami, who described himself as of the left, but lost me when he called the protesters a deeply conservative movement loved by the establishment.

It fell to Murphy to give the most passionate defence of the movement, offering a rare charisma I had thought was bred out of accountants at playschool.

“The message from Occupy is you guys have got it wrong,” Murphy said. “After 30 years of neo-liberalism, which has actually suited both left and right in many ways, we end up with a social movement which is actually saying hang on a minute, what this is about is creating a geography of dissent. A space where people can say we are looking for alternatives ideas because our right to dissent, our right to even think has been crushed.”

“Yes it’s messy, but so is reality,” Murphy added.

Assange, confessing he had “had a bit of a busy day”, played up the importance of new forms of media and criticised the role of the mainstream press as the reason movements like Occupy were not in place five years ago.

“We now have ways to bypass the mainstream press,” said Assange, whose own means of bypassing the mainstream press, Wikileaks, has already helped topple governments, “pouring oil on the fire” that fuelled the Arab Spring.

From the speeches, particularly that of activist Naomi Colvin, and from contributions from the floor, it was clear that Occupy, despite the disparate groups that came together to form it, knows what it wants. A stand against cuts and tax avoidance and for the reform of a broken capitalism; a stand for the world’s poorest against the excesses of the world’s richest.

After my lunch breaks spent at the camp and marching on Westminster, swapping caps between journalist and protester, I find it hard to see why anyone could accuse the movement, messy and messianic as it is, of not knowing what it wants. They are persistent in their cause and assured of their politics – turning on, tuning in and dropping out in true radical spirit – and in that I can only wholeheartedly support them.

Equally, when Colvin talked of government not working in the interests of the general population and of her concern with financial services out of control, I found it hard to disagree. What worries me slightly, however, is the tendency of some protesters to link the movement to the Arab Spring.

“It’s one manifestation of a global emancipation movement that began with Egypt and Tunisia,” said Colvin.

Those make for stirring words, powerful, pretty, but also pretentious. It’s a pretention exemplified for all to see in the sign sitting opposite St. Paul’s reading ‘Tahrir Square EC4M’.

I can see what Occupy is trying to do and in showing solidarity with the people of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and the millions oppressed across the Arab world yearning for freedom from the yoke of dictatorship, they have a noble cause.

But where are the bullets and the cavalry charges? Where are the arrests, the beatings and the killings? I do not envy the Occupy protesters shivering in tents towards Christmas. But Paternoster Square is not Tahrir Square and they are not putting their lives on the line trying to get into it. I’m sure no one in the camp means to belittle the struggle for democracy in the Middle East, or lay claim to a struggle as dangerous, but as destructive and exploitative as modern capitalism is, as immiserating as its failings have been for the most vulnerable people in this country, the Arabs paid in blood for their emancipation, while the St. Paul’s protesters have been given a protected space by state and church – at least until the new year – in which to air their rightful grievances. To forget that, or to elevate a lengthy unseasonal politically charged festival to the status of a fundamental struggle against a sovereign that is trying to destroy you for speaking out against it, smacks of pretention.

That said, what they have done, in creating a space for discussion and democracy, linked with movements across the world, with a clear sense of what they are for and who they are against, is create a powerful symbol that politicians cannot afford to ignore.

As Sun Tzu famously wrote, “if know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles”. I suspect there will be more than a hundred battles ahead. Capitalism will not be over by Christmas and the camp may be gone by Easter. But the Occupy movement has tapped into a mood that stretches much further than a few hundred tents outside a famous London landmark. And, if indeed they do this once speak for the 99%, then that mood is not going away anytime soon.

Yesterday’s news that the Met is giving its officers access to plastic bullets for tomorrow’s student demonstration is, obviously, pretty disturbing. I’d guess it’s pretty unlikely they’ll actually be used – making a big announcement to the press two days before the event looks a lot more like an attempt to warn off any would-be troublemakers than anything else – but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be cause for concern. If they are deployed, it would be the first time they’ve ever been used for crowd control in mainland Britain, and they’re nasty things – not as deadly as the rubber bullets they replaced, but they were used pretty extensively in Northern Ireland during the 70s and early 80s, and apparently killed at least fourteen people during that period.

But the fact that the police are considering using plastic bullets isn’t what really worries me, discomfiting though it is. What’s far more concerning is that there’s a good chance that if the worst does happen and the police do end up shooting someone tomorrow, no one’s going to care.

OK, maybe not “no one”. But certainly no one outside of those you’d expect to worry about excessive police violence anyway – those involved with the demonstration and the wider activist groups and networks that were involved in organising it, and assorted leftwing and liberal commentators (this blog included). Jenny Jones’ denunciation of the use of plastic bullets, quoted in the BBC story linked to above, is undoubtedly admirable, but how likely is it really that “[a]ny officer that shoots a student with a baton round will have to answer to the whole of London”? The memories of August’s riots are still fresh in people’s minds, and a clear majority of people were pretty happy to support harsh retribution for people who were involved in those. People in the UK tend to be pretty illiberal on crime and punishment at the best of times, riots scare people, and it’s not exactly news that people tend to care a lot less about civil liberties when they’re scared.

This being the case, how likely is it that most people are actually going to care if the police use plastic bullets on student demonstrators, especially if that news is read out over TV footage of protesters breaking windows, chucking bricks and letting off flares? I wouldn’t hold out much hope.

Just to be clear (and to forestall some of the criticisms I can imagine this piece is likely to receive), I’m absolutely not arguing that a few smashed windows tomorrow would in any way justify the use of plastic bullets – it wouldn’t. Nor am I out to excuse any of the other examples of dubious police behaviour, such as sending letters to those it apparently sees as potential troublemakers to scare them off trying anything, as they apparently did today, or to get into an argument about the rights and wrongs of vandalism and violence as methods of political protest – I’ve had enough of the rubbish which people come out with on all sides of that debate to last me a lifetime. All I’m saying is that my impression is that for all that people might have little love for the government, the public mood is currently leaning more towards the forces of law and order than it is towards masked protesters with a propensity to smash stuff.

So if you’re going on the demo tomorrow and you care about having popular opinion on your side (which I’d sincerely hope anyone involved in trying to build a mass campaign does), how about trying to avoid doing stuff which might put off the average viewer of the ITV evening news? That doesn’t mean I’m hoping that nothing happens tomorrow beyond all the protesters marching from A to B like good little boys and girls – there are any number of other ways to protest than that (legal and otherwise), as UKUncut and the like have proven time and again. Not being violent or smashing anything doesn’t guarantee the police won’t be violent, of course (whether that takes the form of plastic bullets or not), but it does make it a lot more likely that there’ll be some public sympathy for you – and, at least as importantly, for the cause – if it happens.

On Saturday one of my fellow Third Estaters (I’m assuming Reuben) tweeted:

Definitely don’t think the left should be calling for a state van [sic] on the EDL march

Image: lionheartphotography/flickr

While compelling, I think this view is seriously mistaken. Granted, it’s always a good idea to be wary of calling on the State to do anything which limits either civil liberties or freedom of expression, given the countless occasions when it’s proved itself willing to do so in unjustified and harmful ways. And yes, the recent riots have given rise to a volatile political environment in which any number of unpleasantly authoritarian measures are far more politically viable than they were just a few weeks back. Even before the riots concerns were being raised about the criminalisation of political protest, from the anti-royalist demonstrators at the Royal Wedding I linked to above to the UKUncutters arrested at Fortnum and Mason’s in March. You don’t have to be a die-hard liberal defender of the principle of “I disapprove of what you say…” to think that this isn’t a tendency we should be doing anything to encourage.

There are, though, a couple of very important counter-considerations. The first is that banning the Tower Hamlets EDL march wouldn’t exactly be an unprecedented step. The English Defence League has already been banned from holding marches at least three times in the past couple of years – in Luton, Bradford and Leicester. Whether those bans were right or wrong, a ban on the proposed 3 September protest wouldn’t be sliding further down the slippery slope of authoritarianism, just a continuation of the same policy towards the EDL that’s always existed; letting them demonstrate as they please, except when practical concerns about the likely consequences of a march are judged to outweigh the right to freedom to protest – and the second counter-consideration is that in this case such concerns are very well-founded indeed. It’s hardly a secret that EDL demonstrations have a strong tendency to turn violent. How likely is it that an EDL march through a largely Muslim area less than a month after the worst riots the country’s experienced in decades is going to pass off peacefully? (As an aside, I’m well aware there are some on the left, whether they openly admit it or not, who are quite keen on the idea of a ruck with the EDL, but suffice to say that while I’m not such a naïve liberal that I think violence can’t ever be justified when it comes to countering the far right, actively desiring that it occur is stupid beyond belief.)

There are real and pressing concerns about the growth of State restrictions on political protest in the UK, but they pale into insignificance compared to the danger of serious violence if the 3 September march goes ahead. I don’t relish being in the position of calling on the government to shut down yet another political protest, but it’s by far the least worst option.

Dear Judges,

In 1748, the Baron of Montesquieu singled out the English political system as an exemplary form of protection of liberties, and the avoidance of corruption and despotism. He described in The Spirit of the Laws the separation between what we would now call the legislative, judiciary and executive powers.

His argument was extremely simple: that by any combination of these powers, the liberty of the subject would immediately be made null, because liberty depends on a stability of mind, and a predictability of outcome. This stability, he argues, is present when the branches are separate. However:

“When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty; because apprehensions may arise, lest the same monarch or senate should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyrannical manner.

“Again, there is no liberty, if the judiciary power be not separated from the legislative and executive. Were it joined with the legislative, the life and liberty of the subject would be exposed to arbitrary control; for the judge would be then the legislator. Were it joined to the executive power, the judge might behave with violence and oppression.”

Now, perhaps it’s sometime since you last learned of the political system – so let’s recap. In England currently, the three branches are represented as follows: the legislative power is made through the Houses of Parliament (mainly in Acts of Parliament). The executive force is the civil service (including the police). The Judiciary – now, that would be you.

However, the current actions of the legislative government has been to ‘advise’ the judiciary so strongly, as to essentially bring a conjunction between the legislative and judiciary powers. This means that “the life and liberty of the subject would be exposed to arbitrary control.” Further, Montesquieu adds this:

“The judges ought likewise to be of the same rank as the accused, or, in other words, his peers; to the end that he may not imagine he is fallen into the hands of persons inclined to treat him with rigour.”

For the last week, the courts have been overflowing not only with adminstrative paper work, but with class conflict. The rich are judging the poor, the privileged the disenfranchised, the powerful the weak. Those who have been scared and frightened by the rioting of the angry are now sitting in judgement and meting out punishment on those who frightened them. This is the source, surely, of the willingness to impose sentences of 6 months as a minimum for shop-lifting, for handling stolen goods worth an insignificant amount, and for the refusal of bail even in the most demanding of circumstances for the accused.

I am no great believer in the means of Liberalism, but I imagine many judges are. If the judiciary continues to be complicit in this new regime, then there is no liberty. I lay down the challenge for a judge to step forward and denounce what is occurring in the courts as I write.

I.

What follows is an account of one of the most politically interesting nights I have experienced. At 6.30pm on Wednesday, I arrived in Deptford High Street for a demonstration of unity, called by an assembly which had met the night before. An odd collection of local leftists and community activists, along with various other trade unionists and odd-balls, amassed around the Anchor at one end of Lewisham’s main stretch.

The demonstration was not to condemn or condone the riots, but ‘to march against the cuts that caused the riots.’ At the front of the march for much of it, and hounding around mainly predictable speeches at the start and finish was a shouting white man, barking that we needed to show working class organisation and discipline, to provide ‘leadership to the community’ – to show that protest could happen without rioting.

We processed along the road, the police conveniently closing it for us. We held a couple of banners, one of them the large black and red of the South London Solidarity Federation. We shouted ‘cut back, fightback’, various ‘no ifs, no buts’ about public service cuts (especially when going past the fire house) and the strange ‘Blame the government, not our kids.’ Often, with more passion: ‘No justice, no peace’ – but, with the police presence, not the follow up line (‘fuck the police’).

The police themselves concentrated on the front and back of the demo. There were various police cars and vans around the roads, which have become standard over the past couple of nights of police-rule, and while a car kept watch on the front of the protest, three cavalry tailed the back. A scattering of officers walked along the sides. Still, we had plenty of room to move about.

Only at one point was there any tension with the police; they seemed to be holding the march up for no reason outside the Islam centre. After talking with a policeman, I found out that they believed there was tension between our demonstration and the Muslims outside the centre, and that we had been ‘squaring up to them’. In truth, many people on the demo were calling to the centre’s members to ‘join us’, to become part of the unity demonstration. To show that solidarity, a few people (I believe misguidedly, though not wrong) began chanting ‘Free free Palestine!’. The local coppers, however, didn’t realise that this was an attempt at solidarity. In fact, on questioning, I found that the policeman believed the chant to be a racist jibe of some kind. The police, clearly, had no idea who we were, what our politics were, or why we were demonstrating.

Actually, I can’t blame them. It was extremely difficult to answer this question – even though it seemed like an obvious march in which to participate. It is not the case that the scenes were overdetermined, but simply that they were indeterminate. I am white, and marching with 100 other folk the vast majority of whom were white as well, it was easy to mistake us for the fascists, or some other petit bourgeois manifestation. We were remarkably white. The symbols of our demo were the anarchist black, or hippiness and hipsterness or flat-cap, white working class militancy. Only later did I realise quite how white we must have looked, marching through Lewisham centre, so eerily quiet in the quasi-lock down that has swept through London these past couple of nights.

II.

On the way back from the demo, the streets now dark and empty, our bus swung over the hill towards Lewisham College – at which point we saw a group of around 30 black men were being essentially kettled by the police on the street, three police vans and two cars parked up. We pinged the bell, shot off the bus, and dashed back down the road.

Black unity demonstration stopped by police

A few of us had legal support materials, so we managed to hand those out – though it was more of a gesture of solidarity than a practical crutch. It helped us make friends though, even while we had to dodge between some police to do so. The coppers then wanted us to move away a bit, chatting asinine rubbish about the bad influence we might have – by telling people their rights. I moved to the other side of the street and watched, occasionally standing up to intervene with the police’s harassment of someone standing in the road. At one point the police did imply that they wanted us to leave, as the presence of white people at a distance might make ‘some people’ think that there was racial tension in the area. This from the 30 white, baton-wielding police surrounding the 30 hooded black men.

Some more people started to trickle into the residential street, and eventually the police got the go ahead from HQ to escort the group on its way. We walked on the other side of the road, in parallel with the black men – until a couple of them hollered us over. Chanting ‘peaceful march’, they wanted to stop the division between black and white. So we joined in.

Being enveloped into the police ‘bubble’ (a moving kettle), was a privilege. Now, we could talk. The group of friends, from all over Lewisham (it’s a big borough), had decided to show that ‘not all black people are looters’, and to protect their community from the EDL. News had reached them that there were hundreds of EDL supporters in Eltham, about one hour’s walk away. Concerned that the EDL might make their way up to Lewisham and Catford, the group were marching down there.

There were some important differences between the demonstration we were now on, and the one we had participated in earlier that evening. Though the black demo was perhaps a third of the size of the white demonstration, the it was encircled by police, who kept the pace up and pushed along the back at more than a quick walk. Harassing black men, as we all know now, is a favourite past time of the London Metropolitan police. We were told that we weren’t being detained or stopped. Nonetheless, we were both contained fairly tightly within the circle of police, and were also periodically stopped and made to wait for uncommunicated reasons. I can only speculate as to whether the presence of a hand full of white supporters made any difference to the police’s behaviour.

Another difference was the chanting – the black demo had only one chant: ‘Peaceful march, peaceful march; We’re protecting our community, we’re protecting our community.’ It was a more simple, clearer message than the variety of socialisms barked out earlier.

More striking, however, were the similarities. Both demonstrations were predominantly young adults. We took almot identical routes. Of paramount important, both were indeterminate. The black demo passed by shops and was also met with a questioning gaze, sometimes fearful, while our new friends shouted at the shop keepers ‘We’re here to protect you!’. While the police and some of the local working class population had seen us and thought we might be an all-white localist mob of the worst kind, those same people were concerned that we were now a group of looters, being escorted by the police.

Indeed, in several conversations I got the impression that the earlier unity demonstration had actually been interpreted by some of the black demonstrators and their friend as an EDL march through town; our worst fears confirmed.

After marching all the way through town, we stopped where earlier in the day the white demo had had a rally. This time, we sat around, and had a good chance to talk about things, and make some new friends. The police turned up with a book of spotter cards, and some reinforcements. But I guess it was late and dark, so they decided we should go back. Tired, and still surrounded by police, we sloped all the way back up the high street and the hill. As the police eventually, rather arbitrarily, decided they had had enough, we were told ‘You’re free to go’ and then, added hesitantly – ‘as you were all along.’

III.

There are some important lessons to be learnt and question to be asked here.

First, it is absolutely imperative that we, black and white, make practical moves to be understood clearly as calling for unity, solidarity, anti-racism and for an egalitarian politics. It we don’t do this, we risk being misunderstood by our allies, and conceived as the enemies we both oppose.

This is unfortunately, easier said than done. It can’t mean bringing out the hammer and sickles; certainly not in the context of the Eastern European population in London. I would hope that our forms of action can speak louder than our words and internet-circulated statements, but this too requires careful thought. What does active solidarity mean right now, and how does it engage with the undeniable complexity of the riots, without trying to resolve that complex?

Secondly, I think both demonstrations showed the almost total lack of working class and community organisations in London. A friend of mine says that back in the 1970s, an incident like the past few nights would have had an immediate response from hundreds of community groups across the capital. The black community no longer has such groups, and there have been only a handful of meetings. The only organisations that may have the ability to call such cross-generational – and also cross-community – meetings, are the churches. But they have remained silent. We will do well, I feel, to keep asking what the historical reasons for this are. (This also might explain why the politics of community groups are so unknown to London’s younger population, including the police). I am told that years ago, the local police would have known who the local political groups were, what they represented, and what they were trying to achieve. That South London SolFed were thought a threat to the Islam centre is not only worrying, but historically interesting.

Finally, last night’s demonstrations acted as a useful benchmark of the problems and hopes inherent in this kind of unity. With any luck, the friendships we formed last night will provide some small opportunity to bring together some of the black and white residents in Lewisham who want to undertake similar shows of unity and defence of their community from both rioters, and the police.

For Lewisham folk, there’s an assembly at 1pm at the Lewisham Clocktower on Saturday, to discuss ways forward. For North Londoners, the demonstration on Saturday, called by anti-cut groups and the Turkish/Kurdish community centres – the only working class organisations with the politics and responsiveness to have met and called such a demo in Hackney – will be of no small importance. If that gap between black and white can be bridged, and a politics of solidarity and anti-fascism can be communicated to all those who see, join and comment on the demonstration, then we might be able to begin reforming the kinds of community and labour organisations we will need over the years ahead.

P. S. If someone has a photograph of the first demo, I’d like to put one in this piece, so I’d be grateful if you could tweet it @thethirdestate

On Saturday, a little bleary eyed from a party the night before, I went and marched with the Campaign for Justice for Smiley Culture.

Smiley Culture (born David Emmanuel) was a star before I was born. Half Guyanese, half Caribbean, Smiley became an early success story from the Afro-Caribbean music scene of South London. Pick up a CD compilation of British reggae and you’ll find his name on there. His music career didn’t bring riches though, and he became a businessman – apparently inspired by the wheeler dealers of the East End. However, just after his 48th birthday, Smiley was killed. During a police raid at his house in Surrey, he suffered a stab wound to the chest, and died.

The police claim that the knife wound was self-inflicted. However, as the Pan-Afrikan Society Community Forum puts it: “Either you believe Smiley stabbed himself or that he was stabbed by one of the police officers present. Based on the testimonies of those that knew Smiley best coupled with the fact that he had everything to live for, [we] take the position that he was murdered by the police.” As do many others.

Smiley Culture, performing in 1985

I went on the demo because I was inspired by a post at Top Soil on why those arrested at Fortnum and Mason on March 26th (which include a number of my friends) should show solidarity with the Campaign, and also because I was involved with the G20 protests in 2009, and remember well the circumstances of Ian Tomlinson’s death.

Many of the marchers on Saturday were also there to protest against other deaths in police custody or at the hands of the police directly: Kingsley Burrell Brown, Julian Webster, Sean Rigg, Jean Charles de Menezes, Brian Douglas, Shiji Lapite, Derrek Bennet, Azelle Rodney, Terry Nicholas and many others.

The crowd was predominantly Afro-Caribbean, and when speakers referred to ‘the community’, my feeling was that it was that community which was meant. I don’t have a problem with this. I think it’s fine to feel like an outsider at someone else’s demo; if I’m marching in solidarity, it’s still powerful if I say ‘your community has this problem, and I want it to stop too, because in some small way, I understand.’ My experience of the police as a political activist has meant that I have known small sporadic moments of the state’s violent intrusion: still, nothing like the systematic violent hammering which many parts of London’s black community sustains, along with many other racial communities in London.

This isn’t the same as a knee-jerk response for ‘unity’. While it was an event that was open to all, certain communities were more represented than others: it was, as I said, a mainly Afro-Caribbean demo, and not one which visibly brought in the Somalian, Ghanaian, Nigerian communities, etc. Similarly, the Africanism did not overtly extend to those most revolutionary parts of North Africa at the moment: Libya, Egypt and Tunisia still remain firmly in ‘the middle east’ it seems. This is not a critique of diversity, but a move away from the bland catch-all term of unity, and instead a recognition that certain communities are at this moment engaged in certain struggles.

The demonstration was very different from any I have been on. The mood was at times celebratory, of the show of strength and determination – around 2,500 people gathered on Wandsworth Road and marched to New Scotland Yard – and also anger and passion. The pace was quick, and the placards weren’t resting on people’s shoulders but held out in front, and high. One I kept spotting said ‘CPS: Shame on you’ and another ‘Underpoliced as victims; overpoliced as citizens.’

As well as Socialist Worker placards, a banner from the Lambeth anti-cuts group and a small swarm of obligatory paper sellers from a range of far Left groups (all of whom had been building for this demo admirabley), there were also people selling the Whirlwind newspaper, the official publication of the Alkebulan Revivalist movement, and leaflets going round for the release of Mumia Abu Jamal. The stewards wore a mixture of plain fluorescent vests, as well as a fair few with PCS, RMT and TUC logos. There were also the unwelcome bright green tabards of Liberty volunteers, there (by their own account) to both watch the police, and to make notes of any demonstrators who veered off the permitted route.

The stewards were quite shouty – several times they stopped the crowd to ensure that everyone (including journalists) was behind the bereaved family members. But this wasn’t unwelcome. There was a sense that the crowd wanted to be firm and close, to be a force that could be reckoned with. When we passed underneath a steel bridge just before Vauxhall, the noise was deafening, as people shouted, hollered, whistled and yelped, all the noises echoing back down to the ground. Through all the noise you could, of course, still here the extraordinary thumping amps booming back at you, and beneath it all a strung out, eerie remix of ‘Give Peace A Chance.’

Music, aptly, formed the atmosphere. In 1984 Smiley brought out two records which both stormed the charts. The first of these was Cockney Translation, in which Smiley recounts the story of both cockney rhyming slang and Jamaican patois, all through his thick Caribbean accent. As we turned round Westminster Abbey, I could here it being played on a tiny amp, its bass being absorbed into the crowd along with the noise of honking cars. Alternating between the two slangs, and explaining what they mean only by reference to eachother, the song is a very conscious statement of London multiculturalism as a fact of life, and also a celebration of its working class texture.

As we moved towards Victoria, I progressively bumped into more friends from various political groups and movements, most of them young and white, there to show solidarity. We were also often the youngest adults in the crowd, as well as marked aside by our colour. At New Scotland Yard, the crowd funnelled into the narrow street, and I was privileged to hear some extraordinary speeches. Merlin Emmanuel, Smiley’s nephew, truly rallied and encouraged the crowd. He listed the five demands the family have made of the Metropolitan Police, including the immediate suspension of any officer who has someone die while in their custody, and the recognition of the partiality of the ‘Independent’ Police Complaints Commission.

Beyond these demands (for which a mass petition is being organised), there was a real feeling that more had to be done. Merlin shouted that we ‘will march everyday’ if that’s what it takes to stop the police from killing. Kingsley Burrell Brown’s sister, in an incredibly emotional and fiercely angry speech shouted near the end ‘Brixton police station, I’m coming for you’. And you could tell she meant it, with us or on her own. When Merlin mentioned the Brixton riots of ten years back, he immediately compared those fires to a more important fire that burns now, ‘a spiritual fire’. At this parts of the crowd shouted and cheered in a way which reminded me of the centrality and important of Christianity in the lives of so many people there.

But, in the end, I think it isn’t the church or the petition which will be the face and future of this campaign. I wonder whether the public face of this struggle will actually come out through the music. There is also a concert being organised, announced at the rally – an announcement followed by the DJ putting on Smiley Culture’s second big hit of 1984 – Police Officer. The story of Smiley getting stopped by the police and them taking his weed – and partly letting him off for being such a great reggae musician – is as upbeat as it gets, even while masking the continuing narrative or racial harassment by the police, then and now.

It was clear that this wasn’t just a march for a murdered reggae star. It was a demonstration of strength against the continued killings by the police against our population. I sincerely hope that there will be further demonstrations, and I urge others to help build for them when they can. While the left focuses so much of its energies on resisting the cuts, it’s vital to remember that for many people there is little difference between the attitude of the state now and two years ago – or twenty years ago, or fifty years ago.

(ammended Tuesday 19th April).