by I Fought the Law- A Riotous Romp in Search of British Democracy (epub)
Before we were knocked off our perch by China, Gordon Brown was very keen to point out that Britain had the fourth largest economy in the world. Now, as I said, I’m very naive when it comes to the economy. But if ten people are killing themselves every day, others are suffering neglect in nursing homes, the gap between rich and poor is wider than ever,15 our pensioners are scraping by on £85 per week when their council tax and energy bills keep rising, people are dying becausc the NHS is more concerned with targets than its patients,16 1.6 million children are living in ‘Bad Housing’17 and we’re all £ trillion in debt, then perhaps being the fourth largest economy in the world isn’t such a good thing. And while we’re at it, where’s all this money our economy is producing going if we are a trillion pounds in debt? Pm talking about the fruits of our economy. Where are they? They exist, we can be sure of that. We should have the fourth largest fruits in the world, for goodness’ sake, but where have they gone? Where are they being hidden? I certainly can’t find much evidence of them in Britain.
MPs seem to value the fruits of economic growth more than the happiness of the British people. It makes you want to question their priorities, and we all know where you have to go if you want to question an MP. The House of Commons. Parliament is where the power lies. If you want answers from your democratically elected government about the state of Britain, you have to go down there and ask the people in control. It’s a great British tradition, after all. It’s called freedom of speech and the right to protest.
Well, it used to be. Now, of course, unless you’re prepared to fill out a form and wait six days to see if the police and the government’s bureaucratic machinery will grant you the privilege of exercising the basic right of free speech, it’s breaking the law.
Chapter 2. The Teddy Bears' Picnic
People have always gone to Parliament Square to call the government to account. From demonstrations about slavery and women’s suffrage to apartheid and the poll tax, protest has always been a crucial part of our democratic process. How often has something been denied the people of Britain by the government until the tide of popular opinion, through the act of protest, forced them to change their minds? Protest works. Demonstrations work. In a democracy, they are as important as the ballot box.
On the day the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act became law (1 August 2005), people with gags on their mouths assembled in Parliament Square holding banners bearing the words ‘Freedom of Speech’. The police warned them that they were breaking the law. The protesters ignored the warnings and were promptly arrested, beneath the statue of Winston Churchill, who I d wager would have found the sight of their being carted away for exercising free speech outside his beloved Parliament more disturbing than the time when he acquired a green Mohican. As soon as one group of protesters was arrested, another appeared to take its place. Then Mark Barrett and his friend Sian had an interesting idea. They thought the exclusion zone was sinister and ridiculous, so they decided to organize a weekly picnic in Parliament Square. They met there at noon with their fellow protesters, sat on the grass and ate sandwiches and cakes (with that illegal icing). At first the picnickers were arrested, then the arrests became sporadic. The law, it seemed, was being enforced on a whim.
Now I don’t usually go around breaking laws. Although that’s not to say 1 wasn’t outgoing and interesting when 1 was younger. I drank alcohol before I was eighteen. I stole a rubber once when I was twelve. I’ve taken illegal drugs, broken the speed limit while driving, been drunk (although not while driving), ridden my bike on the pavement, and skateboarded where signs strictly prohibited me from doing so. But this law was different. This was one of those laws you could actually get a criminal record for breaking. Up to that point in my life I had also managed to exploit the middle-class force field that put the police off the scent if I was ever up to no good. My friend Greg took this idea one stage further. If the police ever paid him any attention while he was driving to a rave in possession of illegal powders he would simply turn on Radio 4 before they asked him to wind his window down, ‘because it formed an impenetrable bourgeois sphere that the police simply couldn’t penetrate’. But as it was, I didn’t mind getting arrested. You see, it was all part of my plan.
Cecil Rhodes once wrote that being born an Englishman was like winning the lottery of life. Now, clearly, sentiments like that are rooted in the days of the British Empire which has become rather politically incorrect to admire today, but the exploitation and greed of the Victorian era aside, there is still an element of that quotation that has always made me feel a certain sense of pride. Whenever I heard it the Empire was certainly not what dominated my thoughts, just the simple idea that the things in life that mattered were still valued here. Looking around the nation in the twenty-first century, however, Rhodes’s words seem increasingly hollow and out of date.
When my partner Rachel and I started a family the future into which our country was heading began to preoccupy our minds. It wasn’t just the question of civil liberties being eroded, although that weighed heavily enough, it was the maternity ward with invisible midwives where our son was born; the grotty, leaking community centre down the road where the government’s Surestart initiative was being implemented; our badly lit and nerve-racking local train station; the grimy local swimming pool threatened with closure; and the community police officers taking a breather in our local park instead of proper old-fashioned bobbies walking the streets.
Put simply, life in general has become based on its cost rather than its value. Every time you go out of your front door to go shopping you always get the feeling that you are about to buy what the shop can get away with selling you for the most money rather than something honestly priced that was made with pride. Hospitals are not valued by the services and the care they offer but by how much money they spend and the length of their waiting lists. (Pregnant women can’t be put on waiting lists so midwifery is simply not a priority for spending in the NHS, such is the effect on the ground of the upside-down thinking of government policy.) Schools are not valued for nurturing new generations of children but for how well those new generations can be taught to jump through the same hoops, making it easier to compare, streamline and reduce schools even further from places of education into simple production lines for the job market or, increasingly, as cheap childcare for the millions of parents working longer and longer hours to help pay off those credit card bills.
If you have the good fortune to be alive, you’ll certainly have spotted the huge disparity between the way we are told things are and the way your experience proves them to be, whether it’s the difference between what the brochure said about your holiday and the holiday you experience when you get there; the pert, tight, seventeen-year-old bottom enclosed by that pair of size 6 jeans on the billboard by the bus stop as opposed to the way your thirty-year-old, size 12 bum looks in them when you get home; or the politician who tells you what you want to hear then mocks your naivety as soon as your back is turned. We live in a time when what our brains tell us has value is rarely reflected in the reality of the world being constructed around us, and I wanted to get to the heart of that basic question of truth. Why were the politicians and corporations that ordered our lives as workers and consumers striving to take away the faith we had in our own experience and ideas, and to make us reliant on the wisdom of their highly paid ‘experts’ instead? Rachel and I were becoming terrified that our son would grow up in a country stripped of its values and sense of place. The government was certainly no longer fighting to protect it because they were the ones forcing the change. According to the newspapers, any meaningful political debate is now over anyway. ‘All our political parties are fighting over the same ground’ seems to be the conventional political wisdom. Worryingly, this new mainstream ‘political consensus’ appears to be that politicians no longer fight for the long-term interests of the people who elected them and the country of which they are the custodians but for the short-term interests of those w
ho want to make money out of this country. I was determined to do what I could to preserve what I felt this country stood for so that my son could experience it and enjoy living in Britain too.
But what could someone like me do?
These days it’s not enough to talk or write about something. People don’t notice. They haven’t got time. You’ve got to do something visual. You’ve got to make a statement by proving you can be stupid on a scale never seen before. We’ve seen many types of desperate behaviour to which people will lower themselves for celebrity status, but we’ve never seen anyone deliberately attempt to become a criminal to point out how far from real-life experience, how authoritarian, our ‘democracy’ has become. Well, not for a while anyway.
You may not think the idea of my deliberately becoming a criminal went down well at home, but Rachel was rather pleased by the change of direction my journey had taken. Breaking new laws rather than old ones meant that, among other things, I would no longer have to contract bubonic plague before attempting to hail a London cab, or try to take possession of a beached whale (all of which are owned by the Queen). In fact, the enthusiasm that seemed to fill her at the prospect of my being given a lengthy jail term made me think she was quite keen to get away from me for a while. Despite such misgivings, I took her enthusiasm as nothing more than simple, unconditional support.
And then my criminal life began. With a picnic.
Outside the YMCA a man with a feather in his hair was dragging on a cigarette. I was looking for a signal that I’d come to the right place, and a man with a feather in his hair was as good a sign as any. I snuck in through the door and sat next to a young man making notes in a Che Guevara notebook. So far all my prejudices were present and correct. The meeting was about to begin.
I surveyed the room with trepidation. These protester types were bound to be dangerous extremists. I remembered the riots in 1999 when a McDonald’s and the futures exchange were ransacked during a rampage through the square mile. I remembered the ‘guerrilla gardening’ event of 2000 when another McDonald’s was destroyed and Churchill acquired that green Mohican. I also remembered the seven-hour stand-off in Oxford Circus on 1 May a year later. These demonstrators were regularly portrayed as dogmatic, frightening radicals. Before the stand-off in 2001 Tony Blair set the tone for the approach the police would take by accusing the demonstrators of planning ‘fear, terror and violence’. Most of the protesters were demonstrating against arms dealers and Third World debt, but Tony was unmoved, labelling them all as criminals with no genuine grievance. ‘The limits are passed when protesters, in the name of some spurious cause, seek to inflict fear, terror, violence and criminal damage on our people and property,’18 he was quoted as saying. Jack Straw, Home Secretary at the time, weighed in too, calling the guerrilla gardeners ‘evil’.19
Being a good middle-class boy I was therefore a little nervous about the type of people I was sitting with in that room. I positioned myself by the door because it would allow a speedy exit if things became too radical. As I looked round, however, that idea began to seem rather unlikely. I had imagined lots of Doc Marten boots, slightly unsettling piercings, pointless anarchist drivel and that disquieting look of the pious anti-capitalist evangelicals you sometimes get stuck talking to at weddings, but the proceedings were remarkably polite and good-humoured, if a little earnest. But then they were discussing freedom of speech, which they clearly regarded as something of value. Having said that, there was an eighteen-year-old American anarchist who kept calling for us to storm Parliament and take over the state, bless him, but everyone else seemed surprisingly normal. In fact, it was a bit like being in a Benetton advert where diverse groups coexist happily. There were a few old rebels, a couple of legal experts, a few ladies who looked like schoolteachers and about fifteen young, angry men and women, all hoping that, after half an hour debating who would be the chair and the scribe, and what exactly the purpose of the meeting was, they’d start talking to one another.
It soon emerged that Matthew, the man I had sat next to by the door, the chap with a feather in his hair (Mark Barrett, the original picnicker), and three others dotted around the room were the picnickers who’d been arrested. The rest were people like me, who had just turned up out of curiosity and a willingness to get involved.
After about forty minutes someone suggested that everyone in the room should explain why they had decided to come to the meeting. The same opinion came up time and again: the right to protest outside the Houses of Parliament was a democratic right that the government simply could not just decide to take away. It was clear to me by this point that these people were not dangerous radicals after all. Not unless by ‘dangerous radicals’ you mean people who are simply prepared to take responsibility for something larger than themselves. There was something else clearly apparent in that room too. They didn’t just want to organize protests, they wanted to arrange them, wherever possible, in the pub, which was a price I was prepared to pay to further the cause of civil rights.
A brainstorm of ideas soon began. I put up my hand. ‘What about having a teddy bears’ picnic instead of a normal picnic? We could all dress up in teddy bear suits. Then the police would have to arrest teddy bears. It would be hilarious!’ They wrote ‘teddy bears’ picnic’ on the board of ideas to be discussed later. Then a man sitting in the corner suggested that protest itself should be celebrated as a vital function of human progress. By the end of the meeting it was agreed that for 6 November 2005 they would organize something on a larger scale than they’d attempted before. Email addresses were taken and jobs were dished out. Those of us on the periphery were told to keep an eye on the website for further updates.
*
As a new father, I have to admit that the path down which I was about to travel felt slightly self-indulgent. I had no doubt about the importance of the political journey I was setting out on, but found it hard to balance that with my new responsibilities as a parent. I’d read Gandhi’s autobiography to get the inside track on this activism business and was surprised to discover that despite his amazing achievements he was, nevertheless, a totally shit dad. Going off to South Africa to save thousands of indentured Indians is all well and good, not to mention the enormous role he played in securing India’s independence, but while he was off being a hero he left his wife to bring up his children single-handedly for years on end. Another of my heroes is Satish Kumar, who in the sixties embarked on a pilgrimage on foot from his village in India to meet the leaders of all the then nuclear powers to campaign for disarmament. In a village in Russia he came across a tea factory where a woman gave him four boxes of tea. She asked him to give one box each to the leaders of Russia, France, Britain and the USA and to plead with them to stop and make a brew if they ever found themselves contemplating pressing the nuclear button, hoping that this small act would remind them of all the ordinary people who would be massacred if they went ahead. After visiting Russia and France, in London Satish met Bertrand Russell, who wrote the original article that prompted his journey years before, then boarded a boat to New York to meet President Kennedy. But when he arrived Kennedy had just been assassinated and his long journey ended at JFK’s grave. Satish then decided to carry on with his pilgrimage by walking to China.
It is a remarkable story, and his autobiography is a beautifully written account of a man with a vision of hope he wanted to share with the whole world. But, once again, despite being a remarkable man who inspired thousands of people, Satish turned out to be a crap dad to the child he’d had with his first wife who, like Mrs Gandhi, was left holding the baby at home while he went off on his grand adventure. From what I have heard about his current life in England, where he started a new family, this criticism may seem a little uncharitable, but the fact remains that it was clearly easier for these two men to contemplate and then set out on an epic adventure thousands of miles away than simply to stay at home and concentrate on being a good father. I decided I would not allow myself to lose sight of that
fact whatever I came up against, and resolved to make sure that I was a family man first and political revolutionary second.
A few days later I headed for Parliament Square to attend my first illegal demonstration. The nerves started kicking in as I ambled along the pavement. I wasn’t sure if I was ready. After all, making the transition from ‘member of the public’ to ‘political activist’ was something I wouldn’t be able to reverse. At that moment I was completely unknown to the police. They didn’t have my fingerprints, my DNA or even a photograph of me on file. I was just another faceless member of the public, someone who quietly got on with his life and who never stepped out of line.
I have to admit that I was utterly petrified of being hauled off and dumped in a cell. Now I know there have been lots of books about people spending time in real prison, criminal memoirs and that kind of thing, so my being scared of simply being arrested may sound a little pathetic. So instead of me contemplating a night in the cells, imagine if you were facing the prospect. I don’t know you very well, but I’m guessing you’re either an old hand at this protest stuff or an intrigued hand who has never done anything like this at all. If you’re an old hand you’re probably the kind of person who is so alternative you don’t care about modern society and its values, but then you’re also bound to be really paranoid about the power of the ‘state’ so you probably understand my wariness. If you’re the intrigued hand, then you’re the kind of person whose life would be completely turned upside down if you got a criminal record. Not entirely unlike me. I’m the kind of person who likes being regarded by authority as a decent, law-abiding citizen. My personality has been built on the foundations of the middle classes. I’m proud, not remotely ashamed, of where I come from. I’m not an outsider. After all, the police, the Establishment and the government are the middle classes too. It’s probably uncool to admit that I admire the police. I don’t, by and large, refer to them as ‘pigs’. Even when I hear about them doing something awful my first thought is that when someone is out on the street waving a gun around and everyone is running away in panic the police show courage to walk towards the maniac holding the gun. That takes some doing. I know I couldn’t do it, I respect them for it, and I didn’t want to get arrested by one of those people. Of course that just made me even angrier with the government, because they had turned me into a criminal. I was being drawn away from my status as a law-abiding citizen because I dared to value freedom of speech.
