by Craig Taylor
Each case will have a security assessment on it. If armed protection is required, that goes right up to allowing the deployment of armed police. It is decided by the Senior Presiding Judge and the police, but it has to go through the legal process for that to be deployed and they will be deployed under very strict guidelines. They’re not here actually. I normally have a car out there full of armed police. That’s a fact of life here. Last year was the first time that we overtly deployed weapons around the court. Normally they’re bagged. We now have a chap actually in the court, a taser officer, so they don’t need to use lethal force, but the risk is that high that a taser might be used before anything else. There are very very strict guidelines.
With each case, you’ve got the defendants coming in from whichever holding cell that they’re going to be in. They all come through the same entrance and that, of course, is a risk in itself because you know that there’s only one place that all the defendants will come in and they then go down into the cell area where, depending on which category, they’ll get searched again. Their belongings, if they’ve got any with them, will be bagged, recorded and then they get put into the holding cell usually nearest where they’ll be going up to court. We’ve got cells on three floors. We’ve got seventy-four of them. And we also have a Category A wing. Category A is high security. I can’t go into too much detail about that, but put it this way, you can’t put a telephone in there without cutting through steel. It is the Hannibal Lecter type. We’ve got nearly twenty Category A in today. Which is a lot. We also have vulnerable defendants and, sadly, we have an awful lot of youngsters. Last year, we had a boy who was sentenced for murder: he was 10 when he committed the crime. It was subsequently overturned to manslaughter, but we’ve had a couple of 14-year-olds who committed the most atrocious crimes, murder being part of it. I don’t think one could necessarily say that murder’s on the increase, but I think the age has dropped and that’s the scary bit.
I’m very glad my children are not living in London, to be honest. It’s not the London that I grew up in and I’m much more wary. But that may be a sign of me getting older. I’m not as comfortable with London as I used to be. And I think here in the City we’re cocooned to a large extent because it’s so well looked after and people are professional. We see what appears to be a fairly significant increase in the number of crimes committed by youngsters, that’s the edge that worries me and how quickly it happens. You know, one bit of ‘dis’ and you’ve got a knife. There’s one chap who’s on trial at the moment because the other chap looked at him while getting on the bus and the guy just pulled out a knife and killed him. They’d never met before. And seeing some of the youngsters’ attitude of ‘I don’t care’, or ‘So what? I’m in jail.’ So I think we’ve made the right decision by not living in London.
BARBARA TUCKER
Protester
She prowls the pavement of Parliament Square, directly across the road from the Houses of Parliament. She smokes roll-ups and wears a light pink knitted hat that keeps slipping down. Nearby, a rumpled square of canvas covers a sleeping bag
I always say, every single building around here should be covered with the truth. It should be all over the place, you know? Then they’d soon stop, wouldn’t they? Because what I’ve noticed is, they don’t mind doing what they’re doing, but they really don’t do shame. What they’re doing is really shameful. It beggars belief. You have to share that truth. The dynamic is brilliant here, because the global community of people come past, and we’re giving them the opportunity to learn as much as they want. Not only to give you information, but to show you that yes, you can challenge your government. Yes, you can say no.
The people who are suffering and dying will never be forgotten while we’re here. You know? And if that was happening to you or your family member you’d want somebody to speak out about it, wouldn’t you, really?
The ground vibrates in Parliament Square thanks to the Tube trains below. In the spring I had watched the leaves of freshly planted pansies vibrate. Another group of protesters had planted crops in the square, including lettuce and carrots. There was a kitchen with drinking water in the Peace Camp, a table with painted rocks holding down pamphlets on Gaza. Tucker stayed apart from the camp. She walks her own patch of the pavement. Now, months later, the tents are gone. Metal barriers have been erected. Police in reflective vests walk the pavement in long lines, eyeing Tucker.
I say to people, ‘Welcome to Westminster Village. The only thing we do well is making a killing out of the suffering of others.’ I’ve been arrested thirty-nine times in five years. I’ve learnt that if you cannot stand your ground in a public space to tell the truth without violence, you shouldn’t be doing what you’re doing. It’s those in government who duck and dive, and run and hide behind their gate, the weapons, the cheap sound bites in the TV studios and the corrupt courts.
Some nights when they have a late night getting out I stand here with the loudspeaker, and I say to them, as my little bedtime story: you are going to spend the rest of your miserable lives looking over your shoulders, checking your holiday itineraries, cos whether it’s ten years, twenty years or thirty years from now, you know, people will hunt you down, bring you to justice – we’re not saying we’re going to murder you or slaughter you, but we’ll bring you to justice and change the systems that have allowed this to happen where human life is not protected. It’s my little bedtime story. It’s like, go to sleep with that one.
Quite often on a Tuesday night or a Monday night, the MPs like to go out in a row, all at 10.30, bless their little cotton socks. So they all leave at once. One night the secretary of state for transport or something, you know, winds down his window and has the nerve to say to me, ‘F off’ and looks at the police to get rid of me, and they look back. They say to him, ‘I think you’d better go.’ That’s your representatives.
I’ve got ‘Arrest War Criminals’ or ‘Stop Killing Children’ or other banners. They’ve got big tough machine guns. Protecting what? It just wakes up people. It was marvellous when I put up the banner outside Downing Street, cos you’ve got wonderful foot traffic, so it’s brilliant for talking to people too. The tourists loved it. You know, the shot of Downing Street with banners in front saying here’s the truth. What are these big tough guys protecting? You know? But they ended up with zero tolerance around Downing Street.
We are in the belly of the beast, really. We’re surrounded. I say to people who pass by, I say on the loudspeaker, as long as this country will want to occupy other countries, then we’re occupying the Westminster Village. We will occupy your minds, your time, your money, to remind the thousands of people that work in Westminster, that all you do is perpetuate the lies of this government that lead to the suffering of innocent civilians. And that when 90 per cent of the casualties of these legal wars are affecting civilians, it can’t be war. Here’s the levers of power, whatever you like to call it. Here’s the people you need to wake up, the people you need to put pressure on.
They gave me a community order once, you know, oooh, bad, community order, saying I couldn’t protest for a whole year without permission of the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Well then, in my local community, shouldn’t everybody know who the criminal is? So I went and put my community order on all the lampposts and said you must tell everybody that I’m this dreadful criminal. They went around ripping them down, and I said, excuse me, gentlemen, please. They would have sent me to prison on that one but they got a bit of cold feet, because it wasn’t really compliant with the Human Rights Act to criminalize peaceful campaigning in that way, was it. But they are moving that way. It’s got worse over the years here.
You can arrest us, you can put us in prison, you can hurt my body, but you’ll never have my mind. You can kill me, but my spirit will live on. Because I think the human spirit in one way or another does. See, you can’t kill people’s human spirit. The state gets completely confused by the human spirit.
They sort
of think of this road as a moat. It protects them from us.
You got to wake them up before you really get through to them, don’t you? So this was the wake-up part. I’m trying to connect with their humanity. You got to look me in the face, you got to look this in the face.
The MPs complain about my loudspeaker. I’ve got a 25-watt loudspeaker. You know, I used it for three years, no problem. Well, that’s not strictly true, I got arrested a few times but they never prosecuted me. It’s a little 25-watt loudspeaker. From Edgware Road, £49. They got quite a good supply.
She looks back at the metal barricades surrounding the square.
I might remove the statues if I could. I just think it’s really nice having Parliament Square as grass with a few seats around there. And just some more trees here would be quite pleasant, wouldn’t it? But, to me, the most important thing is please put in proper crossings for people, and get over their phobia about members of the public crossing the street, the moat, meeting us and discovering we’re actually quite normal, you know?
If we’re going to have a normal world, let’s bring people together. Because they try and portray it, ‘Maaad people over there,’ because that’s the game, isn’t it really. ‘They’re mad over there.’ Let’s make it as hard for you to go over there and discover that actually it’s quite interesting, you know, who’s doing what. I’d love to see this open, you know, as a sort of people’s square. It’s got to be kept open for everyone. What’s the point of having a square if there’s no access to it? It’s got to be the people’s square, you know. It should remain with the people for ever.
It is a really powerful place to campaign, because the government considers this to be their own village, really, so they don’t want anybody here. It has always been zero tolerance. One of my friends, he was arrested outside Downing Street for having a George Orwell quote that said, ‘In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.’ He was arrested. A guy has a criminal conviction for holding a George Orwell quote outside Downing Street! You have to swear, you know, in court, and he’s swearing the affirmation and the judge says to him, what are you swearing on? And he says George Orwell, 1984. The judge says, ‘You’re bringing the court into disrepute,’ and he said, ‘I don’t think so. You are!’
The thing is, you never know who you are going to run into in the Westminster Village. They all make appearances. There used to be a little cafe on the corner where the Metropolitan Police Authority is. It’s no longer around, but one day Lord Goldsmith was there. He’s the one who provided the legal justification for the use of force in Iraq. And he saw me.
He was leaving and having a conversation with someone, but he saw me and I saw him. I thought to myself: the next few moments are going to be really important. I walked up to him. I knew I had to keep really, really calm. As a mother I felt a huge amount of anger and disgust. I looked him in the eyes and said, ‘One day you’ll stand trial for war crimes.’
The colour just drained from his face. To me, he knew what he’d done. He knew. He’s surrounded by yes people, so he needed to hear it from someone else, from someone on the other side of the moat. When would he ever hear it otherwise, you know? But obviously he fled to his car.
These people walk the streets of Westminster. You need to understand who these people are and you can only do that by looking into their faces. I wanted to see who he was, really was. You know what I saw? A man who was scared. A man who knew that what he did was wrong. You don’t see that around here much. He knew what he’d done. He can hide around here, but that’s all he can do.
STAYING ON TOP
STUART FRASER
Chairman of the Policy and Resources Committee, City of London
I go to meet him in his office as he is trying to steward the City through the financial meltdown. A wooden door swings open to reveal a large flatscreen television against the wall, with President Obama’s face moving on it. Fraser prepares himself and tries to turn it off but only succeeds in turning the channel to show the ragged ridges of an Asian stock market. ‘Forty-five years,’ he announces. He lowers his flattened hand toward the floor. ‘I came here as a child prodigy.’
In terms of financial services, there are only two global cities in the world: New York and London. And frankly that’s probably going to be the same case for another twenty-odd years, I don’t see anybody else even coming near it from a global-city perspective. Other centres will become major hubs for their own savings market; probably. But to achieve a global position you have to go through many hoops, particularly the legal one for getting the legal contract in place and everything else, you’ve got to have transparency and you’ve got to be open to the rest of the world – any creed, colour, whatever you want, who come and work here. And to be brutally honest there aren’t many places that are getting anywhere near that. I think this is the difference between the regional hub, the regional centre, maybe verging on small international – in other words, within the area – against a full global city.
I was in China last week discussing how they are trying to achieve that type of status in the years to come. It’s very much of interest for us that the world’s financial services industry does expand. We’re not sitting here saying it can only be through London. I mean, it’s been demonstrated many times in the past that if the cake rises sufficiently quick, then your share of it is growing at the same pace. So you know you don’t necessarily have to create more market share, you just have to make sure that the cake keeps growing as quickly as it can.
I have reasonable confidence that the politicians do understand that this business is a large part of the UK economy. It’s larger than the UK manufacturing base, but it might not be the case next year. But what would be the point in trying to destroy it? Surely you just rebuild it, make it better than it was and carry on and it’s a great opportunity for the next fifty years. You’ve got billions of people who want to try and achieve the same living standards we enjoy in the West. They’re all going to need financial services, they’re all going to need more sophisticated financial markets, they’re all going to want insurance products, they’re going to want a whole host of financial areas as they move from a basic economy into a more sophisticated one. So if we can retain our markets and remain competitive and remain global and flexible, we’ll benefit. And we do it quite well.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s no fault of its own, but financial services probably has become a somewhat overly large part of the UK economy. But then you’ve got to say as well, okay, so what else is going to take it over? Now, in the longer term, because we make deliberate efforts, our creative industries and research and technology and all those areas, yes, of course we can rebalance the economy. But if financial services went tomorrow there’s nothing that’s going to step into its place.
You’ve got to bear in mind most of the artistic field is paid for by the financial business. For every well-off banker we’ve got a whole host of industries that are supplying him with things, including his tickets to the theatre and the players that stand on the stage and everybody else like that. If somebody is earning a lot of money, they keep an awful lot of people employed directly or indirectly. If you took that out, there’d be a lot of unemployment in many areas: service industries, the arts and the media. People always seem to forget the arts were really actually spun off, if you like, from the wealth of business in the old days. Particularly artists and that who used to be sponsored by or looked after by some rich benefactor. So it is an integrator. I don’t think you can just say, we can continue doing the arts to empty theatres.
I’m optimistic because I do think that the next upturn, when it comes, will be much more sustainable, because it will be built on much sounder foundations. And therefore if at the end of all this the City comes out of it retaining that degree of flexibility and innovation, if it is as attractive to outside people as it is today to come and work here, then one will be satisfied.
TOBY MURTHWAITE
Student
It’s the day of a large student demonstration against university fees. We meet in a pub on Chandos Street.
