Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere by Paul Mason

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    Along Oxford Street, all the stores targeted by UK Uncut in previous weeks—Topshop, Nike, HSBC—are closed in anticipation of the protests. In front of a branch of Boots, a peaceful picket of Uncutters (everybody dressed as doctors or patients) is busy sealing off the store with tape. Their symbolic message—the death of healthcare and Boots’ non-payment of tax. Nearby, police video them and take notes.
    A few hundred yards away is Hyde Park, where hundreds of thousands who have stayed to listen to the speeches hear civil service union leader Mark Serwotka call for a general strike. Ed Miliband makes a speech. He is not so well received, and by now the networks are split-screening him with something more televisual.
    Anarchists have gathered outside the Ritz Hotel on Piccadilly, pelting and daubing the famous landmark. A few doors down, hundreds of UK Uncut activists invade the upmarket grocer’s Fortnum & Mason. This moment—which unfolds across my Twitter feed, with people messaging from inside Fortnum’s and from within Ed Miliband’s press team—turns out to be the crest of the wave of protest that began at Millbank in November. After this climax comes the crisis.
    The police kettled the Fortnum’s protesters and, as night fell, 145 of them were arrested one by one. Many were held for the full twenty-four hours allowed by law and then released, in paper jumpsuits like terror suspects, their clothes impounded.
    No serious act of violence had been committed at Fortnum’s, though some protesters had chalked messages on the shop front. But there had been a mass outbreak of Black Bloc violence and destruction elsewhere. Virtually none of the Bloc had been arrested—but almost all of Fortnum’s invaders had.
    This posed, point-blank, two problems for the core of activists who had launched UK Uncut. Did they condone or condemn the actions of the Black Bloc, and how would they now function, since most of them were on bail? Of the total of 201 protesters arrested over the entire day, 145 were at Fortnum & Mason. At time of writing, all but thirty have seen all charges dropped.
    Meanwhile, in Hyde Park, half a million trade unionists began drifting away to their coaches, oblivious to—but later horrified to learn— what the Black Bloc had done. Half a million low-paid public servants had been eclipsed by the actions of four hundred people: the news bulletins were dominated by images of masked kids, broken windows and a smouldering wicker horse in Oxford Circus.
    Towards the English Summer
    In the period between Millbank and the trade-union demonstration of 26 March 2011, three social forces had been on the streets that we will meet time and again in the new global unrest: enraged students, youth from the urban underclass, and the big battalions of organized labour. In each phase, social media had helped the movement grow with dizzying rapidity.
    The police, still smarting from the condemnation of their tactics at the G20 Summit in 2009, were in crisis. First, they had failed to anticipate Millbank, and their repeated use of kettling had radicalized large numbers of young people. Soon, the News of the World phone-hacking scandal would end the careers of London’s two top policemen, and the Met would stumble into the 2011 summer of riots seemingly directionless.
    But the protest movement was also in crisis. Students got wrapped up in their exams; the trade unions began negotiations over pensions; the small group of activists behind UK Uncut went into a defensive huddle; and the anarchists engaged in mutual recrimination, the Black Bloc openly declaring their ‘right’ to be violent. The momentum had gone.
    Meanwhile, a third demographic group had gone missing. The urban youth crept back to their estates where, as spring turned into summer, they cranked up the Grime. They pondered the meaning of all the Situationist slogans they had heard, and