Police put the kettle on, they can’t go away
POLICE have only themselves to blame for the mess they are in over the treatment of the press and the public during the G20 protests in London, because they broke their own rules.
Everybody who has been on a major demonstration in the UK capital in the last eight years knows the rules: that things pass relatively peacefully until 5pm — just a few ragged tussles here and there — but after that anyone who sticks around is likely to feel the hard end of a baton.
Five o’clock is when they put the kettle on: inexorably advancing lines of yellow jackets gradually squeeze the remaining crowd into an area that is then sealed off, with cordons on all outlets. No-one leaves until the scrap is over, the coppers have got a few dozen arrests and, most importantly, TV has got its pictures.
“Kettle” has become the jargon name for this process of confining people in a pressurised area. It is an entirely predictable procedure. The first one was at Oxford Circus in central London on May Day in 2001, though some have traced its origins to the equally ritualised set-to that used to begin at 6.30pm under the Westway on the last day of the Notting Hill Carnival every year; this again provided the late evening bulletins with their required images, though it has been discontinued in recent years.
The provision of images of fighting is important for the media — to discredit the demonstrators, particularly for the BBC, with its presumed obligation to report political protest seriously. The “clashes”, as they invariably call them, allow TV to ignore the issues involved in a protest.
But in the City of London in April 1 police put the kettle on at 12 noon, which was iniquitous. All kinds of people were trapped in the cage — city workers trying to get to their offices, people with children and other passers-by. There were no shops open, no water — and no toilets; people had to urinate in doorways.
Everybody who goes on demonstrations knows that the aggravation is always started by the police. But through some kind of wonderful paradox their experience has generally been concealed from general view by the reporting, and for them it has been gratifying of late to see their subculture surfacing into the public consciousness.
What has confounded the police in London is the sheer volume of video evidence that has emerged against them. All those marvellous citizen journalists with their shaky videos, and every one of them in breach of Section 76 of the 2008 Counter-Terrorism Act, the one that outlaws taking pictures of the cops. They can’t really enforce this stupid law, can they?