London G20 Protests: From Peach to Tomlinson, has anything changed? (includes my eyewitness account of the protest)

The emotions I’m feeling at seeing one video after another being released in the mainstream media following the G20 protest on 1st April simply can’t be described. It’s sad and annoying that all this reporting is taking place only after an innocent guy, Ian Tomlinson, died after being struck by the police at the protest.  Had this not happened, it’s highly unlikely the media coverage would be what it is.

Indeed, the original reasons for the protest seem to have largely been forgotten.  Barack Obama was making his first visit abroad since becoming President of the USA.  People in UK were taking the opportunity to protest against the banks, Presidents and Prime Ministers who are presiding over a credit crisis that is leading to rapid job losses worldwide.

I was there at the G20 protests around the same time as Ian Tomlinson and saw what it was like and what was going on in the area.  I had given a presentation on ‘Citizenship’ in London that day, to an audience consisting largely of those who work with Deaf people, and when it was over I headed out to meet a friend who had been at the protest and caught in a ‘kettle’  near the Bank of England.

My problem is that what I saw from the police has been witnessed so often in my involvement in politics over the last 25 or so years.  Such experiences never diminish in their ability to shock but soon after I quickly start thinking ’seen it all before’; even the news reporting afterwards seemed to follow a typical pattern of cover up. 

Not this time.

I went to join my friend at the Bank of England protest but people were kettled in by that time. Luckily my friend managed to get out of the kettle and I met up with her; a group of us tried to go to various points outside of the kettle to see if there was any protest we could join and to see what was going on and a couple of us ended up unintentionally getting caught up in a police surge.

It’s a long story but we had gone down an alleyway to see what was going off with a group of protesters.  We’d witnessed these protestors running from the police, who seemed to be chasing them off with sheilds and batons.  There was a lull in this battle so we went to see what was happening.  Some protestors were sitting in the road and there appeared to be a stand off with the police.  Suddenly the police made a surge that blocked off the alley so we couldn’t escape down it; seated protestors were forced to stand up and move backwards by the sheer police attack, and so I found myself at the very front of it, aggressive cops shouting at us to ‘get back’  pushing at those of us in the front with their shields…only we couldn’t retreat because those behind were a stationary dense bunch of people many of whom seemed to be taking photos (!), plus individuals next to us kept pushing back at the cops.  There was also no chance of moving sideways into the crowd cos that was a far worse police onslaught. Protestors were occasionally running at the police lines with their arms up, and things like empty cans were being thrown at them, bouncing off their shields or helmets.

It’s hard to describe emotions at that stage.  For me it was not one of ‘fear’ because I was too busy thinking ’s**t, how the f**k do I get out of here’ and ‘hey hang on, I wasn’t meant to be part of this!’, and trying desperately to work out how to escape while keeping one eye at the aggressive cop in front. [As we've since learned, the police tend to hit people when they aren't looking.]  They are jabbing their shields at you, and all I can think of is trying to keep out of the way, afraid that if I get hit too much for no reason I will instinctively react, and make the situation worse for myself and those around me.

My friend managed, however, to push her way through the dense body of people, and I did too eventually, and once through we both ran as far and as fast as we could.  My biggest fear was that this was the start of a police riot, where the police chase people away, hitting out at whoever gets in their way, whether you are part of the protest or not. 

It was during this period of time that the police hit Ian Tomlinson, which leads me to believe there was a higher order going around at the time for the police to be more aggressive.

We then walked over to the climate camp protest site, which appeared to be even more tightly kettled in than the other one; it was truly very scary and as well as fearing for the people stuck inside and unable to get out, I felt utterly powerless to do anything to help them out.  I kept thinking: ‘if only there were another 10,000 people here…’

The police kettling was truly astonishing to behold, taking up huge amounts of police resources in terms not just of numbers, riot gear and shields, but of vans, horses, cars, etc; to ensure they could completely kettle people in. So that’s where the £7.5 million was going…

That experience by itself is emotional in a lot of different ways. But to see the shift in media reporting is truly unprecedented and adds to the emotional impact.  It seems clear at this stage that the rise of the use of personal video cameras is significant.  I followed the initial press releases that (wrongly it seems) reported Ian Tomlinson had died of a heart attack, and then, late on 2nd April on Indymedia I read the eyewitness accounts of Ian being attended to by protestors while police declined to assist.  These were highly significant because during these early post-protest stages of the story there were reports of police medics being hampered as they tried to revive Ian; soon the news story was being reported in a ‘balanced’ manner: a non-protestor suffering a heart attack, with the possibility that there had been contact with police so this was ‘being looked into’ (by the police), meanwhile the police report having come under attack from protestors while trying to revive Ian.

As the Indymedia eyewitness accounts make clear, however, it had been the protestors who had tried to revive Ian, the police then moved in and surrounded him. Some protestors did throw things at the police, but quickly stopped when they realised a man was lying suffering on the ground.  The heart attack story persisted though, due to the autopsy that had been carried out; but once the video showing Ian being hit by the police was released the entire story was turned on its head by the mainstream media, and the police really had very little option but to question the officer and re-do the autopsy.

It is plainly becoming clear by the day that without the various video evidence that is coming in, the original story would have persisted, with the real version kept out of mainstream news reporting.  The parallel here is the death of Blair Peach, which the media reported as ‘misadventure’…but back then there were no CCTVs, neither were there many handheld camera’s; then, as now, eyewitness accounts hold little real value in the media.

The police actions (hitting people with their batons) aren’t new (though the kettling is actually quite a recent tactic, first employed in London during the May Day demonstrations in 2001); the fact they are being shown on all the big hitting press websites (such as the BBC and the Sunday Times) is, for me, totally surreal.  I mean the airing of all these videos of police brutality as prime news just doesn’t normally get reported in this way.   Even more remarkable is the way the police are being portrayed as being well out of order here; that’s so unusual to see too.  Normally it might be the odd baton whack that gets reported or commented on, and even that will be lost under a weight of news stories of protestors burning a rubbish bin or something that makes what the police do appear justified.  And that kind of thing doesn’t happen here, not with our police force. Greece maybe, France probably, but UK?? 

It is so unbelievable to see a far more accurate depiction in the mainstream media of what really happens when you go on a demonstration in the UK that has been reported to have ‘turned violent’.

Some key questions for me are:

(a) it is right and just that the officer who hit Ian Tomlinson is charged and brought to justice, but it should not stop there.  What exactly is the role of the Territorial Support Group, the group of police officers who are organised specifically to deal with ‘violent protest’ (even though there wasn’t any on the day)? Who organised and ordered its actions on the day? 

(b) will there be an independent public enquiry into the conduct of the police, particularly their use of ‘kettling’?  It is totally absurd that the enquiry should be conducted by the police. And finally

(c) how many cover ups of police brutality have taken place over the years if, as seems likely, all that’s different about this is that the police got caught on video?

And this brings up yet further emotions, to the killing of Blair Peach, almost 30 years ago.  An innocent guy, a teacher, hit by a police truncheon on 23rd April 1979.  And all those protests I’ve attended over the years seeing people get hit and hurt by police actions, and then the next day zero news reporting about it; or, worse, all reporting heavily biased, as if the police were simply reacting to violent protests.  [Yes, to be absolutely fair, the deaths of people protesting is not high in the UK, which is how it should be anyway; and that perhaps is why this death holds particular shock value; however, the violence is very real and sometimes I have left demo's wondering how nobody got killed.]

You really had to be there to believe it was happening: the forces of the State using violence as a means to an end; the media reporting of the events being totally opposite of what you saw with your own eyes; and then day to day life going on as usual the next day, with me still boiling inside at the injustice of what had happened. It is an education about capitalist society, for sure.

After the death of Blair Peach the dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson wrote and sang an emotionally powerful song entitled: ‘Reggae Fi Peach’: some of the lines went as follows:

“…deh Special Patrol…dem a MURDER-AH, MURDER-AH/we can’t let dem get, no furder-ah/
deh S.P.G. dem a MURDER-AH, MURDER-AH/we can’t let dem get, no furder-ah”

The SPG refers to ‘Special Patrol Group’, which was the ‘Territorial Support Group’ (TSG) all those years ago, and so all that seems to have changed are the initials; while the message of the song remains.

Peace.