December 2010. I start ‘Day X-3’ in the occupation at UCL, where young men are fashioning makeshift armour for their arms and shins out of cardboard. Sleeping on the floor I find Chris, a school student from Norwich who has ‘just turned up’ for the demonstration. He doesn’t know anybody at UCL, but they have let him stay the night. ‘I’m from the lower middle class, you could say. Not poor enough to get a grant under the new system so, though I was hoping to go to university, I really might not go.’
Lingering at the entrance to the occupation are four young boys from a nearby Camden estate: three black, one white. They are still wearing school uniform trousers, though they have swapped blazers for hoodies and face masks. They avoid my gaze. They smoke. When I catch the eye of one, he snickers wildly, staring into the distance. Though there are hours to go, they’re twitching in anticipation of the violence to come.
At 2 p.m. about 40,000 people set out peacefully in the biting cold, marching from the University of London’s Senate House to Parliament Square. At the Square they deviate from the agreed route, break through a line of cops who try half-heartedly to baton them, and tear down the six-foot metal fences protecting the grassy centre.
Then they dance. The hippy in charge of the sound system is from an eco-farm and has, he tells me, been trying to play ‘politically right-on reggae’. However, a new crowd—in which the oldest person is maybe seventeen—takes over the crucial jack plug. A young black girl inserts this plug into her Blackberry (iPhones are out for this demographic) and pumps out the dubstep. Or what sounds to me like dubstep.
Young men, mainly black, grab each other around the head and form a circular dance to the digital beat—lit, as dusk gathers, by the distinctly analog glow of a bench they have set on fire.
While a good half of the marchers are undergraduates from the most militant college occupations—UCL, SOAS, Leeds, Sussex—the key phenomenon, politically, is the presence of youth: banlieue-style youth from places like Croydon and Peckham, or the council estates of Camden, Islington and Hackney.
Meanwhile, the pushing and shoving at the police line has turned into fighting. There are of course the anarchist, Black Bloc types, there are the socialist left groups—but the main offensive actions taken to break through police lines are by small groups of young men dressed in the hip-hop fashions of working-class estates.
Some of them will appear a few days later in the News of the World, their mugshots released by the Met: a black kid in a Russian fur hat; other young black boys in hoodies. Exhilarated eyes, very few bothering to mask up.
As it gets dark, there are just two lines of riot police and about thirty yards between the students and the parliament building. The Met has adopted a first-ditch-equals-last-ditch defence: Britain’s only full-time riot squad, the Territorial Support Group, is all that’s preventing the youth from clambering over the medieval walls of Westminster.
Inside parliament, MPs are debating the fee increase. Outside, getting nowhere with the TSG, the students change direction. They swarm up Victoria Street, which leads away from parliament, pushing back a line of mounted police and breaking through police attempts to form a cordon. But then, in successive charges, both the mounted police and the riot squads fight back. There is now toe-to-toe confrontation.
Heavy objects land among the police, amid a much larger volume of paint, fireworks and flash-bangs. At one point the horses are unable to cope, and a policeman falls off his mount, getting dragged away on a stretcher by colleagues.
A girl steps through a break in the police line and gets batoned. She crumples to the ground, where the police continue beating her. Afterwards she stays there, inert for a long, long time, so that the press photographers in their crash helmets stop shooting and cluster around her. She doesn’t speak. Her face is screwed up, disbelief mingled with terror.
At the point of the wedge, alongside the estate youth, are the self-styled ‘Book Bloc’. They’ve gone into battle in green helmets with mattress-sized mockups of book covers: Endgame, by Samuel Beckett; Negative Dialectics by Theodore Adorno; Debord, of course; and—for levity—the tales of an unruly school-kid, Just William by Richmal Crompton. They’ve copied this tactic from a group of Italian students, who are at the same moment lobbing firebombs into the side-streets of Rome.
Soon the books-cum-shields are torn out of their hands, and it is metal and bone and Kevlar that is making that clunk-clunk sound. Together with the constant strobe of camera flashes and the throb of the dubstep —or what sounds like dubstep—it’s become like a macabre outdoor nightclub.
For the police this is an ‘only just’ moment: a couple of officers get knocked to the ground and the students break through. Reinforcements arrive: dismounted motorcycle cops, many without helmets but wielding long batons. One runs straight at me, face snarling. But he’s aiming for someone else. Clunk.
I decide to get out. There’s one of the Fleet Street photographers covered in green paint; his Nikon’s covered in paint too: irreparable. He shows it off to the others. It’s like shift work, because as we’re pulling out others are going in. The journos are clad in black, like many of the protesters, and we smile at each other as if this is somehow funny.
On the east corner of Parliament Square, people climb up to smash the windows of the HM Revenue and Customs building. On the west side they scale the façade of the Supreme Court, smash the leaded windows and push lighted materials inside. On the wall, someone sprays Debord’s aphorism: ‘Be Realistic—Demand the Impossible’.
Outside a pub there is a line of injured protesters being triaged by ambulance crews. Everybody has a head wound and a white bandage. And now the kettling’s started. Some will end up trapped for hours in the freezing cold. Those who can escape go back to the student occupations to discuss where the campaign goes next.
By nightfall a student called Alfie Meadows is undergoing brain surgery after allegedly being batoned by police. Television footage shows another student—Jody Mclntyre, who has cerebral palsy—being dragged from his wheelchair by an irate policeman, who’s being restrained by his own colleagues. Elsewhere, in the West End, a breakaway group has surrounded a vintage Rolls Royce carrying Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall to a function at the Palladium Theatre. As the protesters rock the car to and fro and throw paint bombs at it, somebody leans through the open window and prods Camilla with a stick. The royal protection squad, it emerges later, were on the point of drawing their guns.
A few hours later, after I’ve blogged all this under the headline ‘The Dubstep Rebellion’, some protesters make vigorous representations to me via Twitter: they present a detailed playlist of the tracks blasted out in Parliament Square, which proves the music was not dubstep but grime.4 It was the Grime Rebellion, doh.
Grime is music seen as so dangerous that it’s effectively banned in the clubs teenagers frequent, and its performers shunned by all but pirate radio stations. Grime is hip-hop with a Cockney accent and a dirty bass-line; its most important instrument is the cracked-vowel voice of the London street kid. The same kind of voice that is now heard gabbling with rage on the evening news: ‘We’re from the slums of London, yeah, and how do they expect us to pay uni fees—of nine thousand pounds? And the maintenance allowance: that’s what’s keeping us in college. What’s stopping us from doing drug deals on the streets anymore? Nothing.’5
This, it turns out, is the most prescient statement made that day.
At six o’clock the next evening, with the Met police chief, Paul Stephenson, facing calls for his resignation over the breakdown of law and order, I return to the scene of the battle. Whitehall and Parliament Square are still strewn with rubble and missiles;
