We decided not to go back to the bank. Stevo’s cynicism flag was being hoisted up and I was wanting a pint so we wandered over to the Globe Pub on London Wall. At the bar I inadvertantly pushed in front of some large fella who, in response to my apology, said, ‘s’orite comrad’
I thought he was taking the piss at first. Not that I was about to complain, this was a monster of a man. His sincerity was confirmed when he pointed at the sky television all the bankers were looking at, playing a 5 second loop of a man bleeding a lot after being hit on the head by a police. 
‘Just been in there’ said the man, who’s name I never asked but whom I shall call Barry from here on in, ‘gave some of the filth a go n’all’, said Barry.
An allusion to his involvement in a Tottenham Hooligan gang and his eyeing of ‘them cunts sat on the table over there’. Was enough to make me skulk back over to Stevo.
Of course we were the only ‘comrades’ in the pub full of bankers so it didn’t take him long for him to come over. ‘So which firm are you with?’ was his first question.
‘Firm’
I think I look as little like I belong to ‘a firm’ as anyone you’re likely to meet. Except maybe Stevo. Maybe it was just because of my Northern accent. Maybe it was because I didn’t have trees in my hair. I know sweet fuck all about football so pointed that out to him. This fella, according to the image, could be a footsoldier for the BNP. The left, let’s face it, has become increasingly craven over the last twenty years when it comes to physical confrontation. Despite the rolling news image above our heads the majority of protestors just do not look like that. They have dreadlocks and were mostly raising their hands to show non-violence as the police rushed them.
I wish I’d filmed Barry but was frankly afraid to even mention it considering what he was telling us. I liked him, he was really friendly and oddly principled, but he was here today for a fight and he was making no secret of it. He’d been down to the ‘peaceful one’ on Saturday but today was different. Any second I was expecting him to do a Begbie and go for a table of dressed down suits, but we spoke for a while. I wanted to know how he got into leftist politics, given his tendency for violence is more usually exploited by the right wing. Barry was a Union Man (I’ll keep his job to myself just in case I’ve fluked getting his name right). He’d been involved in the Poll Tax Riots and the Mayday Riots in 2000 and had a very clear sense that it was us against them, and he had the right idea, by and large, about who ‘them’ were. His penchant for hitting policemen was just an added bonus but his real enemies were the bosses, the exploiters, the corrupt politicians. My world view is so blinkered that I can’t understand why those aren’t everyone’s enemies.
Barry was inspired by his grandfather, a former Irish Republican who drilled what was once the socialist ethic behind the IRA into his grandson. I imagine he drilled the acceptability of using violence for political means into him too. And it stuck.
You can make what you like of this brief description of Barry. There’s no doubt that violence by and large plays into the hands of those who want to demonise protestors and I’d never suggest it as an effective tactic. But what about when the ‘protectors’, the police, are the one’s inciting or even instigating the violence? I can say first hand now that I know it happens. And when it does it doesn’t matter what the papers are going to say about it the next day, I’ll tell the truth, if I end up in a situation like that I think I’d want Barry, rather than Swampy, stood next to me.
I’d had a text that the climate camp had been set up outside the climate exchange building so we went up there next. The camp was very small. A trio of cambridge footlights types were spreading the word through ‘comedy’ then declared we could all learn more through a game of top trumps in a little while. Stevo and I chuckled and went back to the pub. Stevo had had enough. He couldn’t understand why so many of the protestors didn’t just dress like ‘ordinary’ folk, that way they’d be taken more seriously by other ordinary folk and could achieve more. He had a point. Some of the protestors quite studiously dress themselves to look like woodstock hangovers, the same blanket and all. Of course the cameras gravitate towards them because their painted face obviously makes them look more credible. I have to wonder how this identification through uniform is any different from a Nathan Barley type with flip flops on his ears? It costs less but it’s the same misguided obsession with appearance that says more about the person, on camera, than the words that might be coming out of their mouth.In the end if you wear a uniform you seperate yourself from anyone not wearing the uniform.
Stevo went home but I decided to hang around a while longer. I went back up to the climate camp and in the intervening half hour it had spread all along the road outside the carbon exchange centre. 
There were hundreds of tents, a compost toilet, bicycle powered sound systems playing for avant garde dancers who were soon (mercifully) joined by others, people just having fun. 
Vegetarian food was being served on camping stoves and workshops were taking place up and down the street. Sure the Workers Climate Control workshop was attended by a group whose last job was probably their work experience at a cat sanctuary but fuck it, something was happening. I’m not entirely sure what was happening. But something was happening. A little drink had been flowing, but I saw nothing but people digging the ludicrous hope that they could save the world before it’s too late.
I hung around for a while then wandered back down to the Bank of England area where someone penned in was busy dying. Someone who’s death had been exploited by the Daily Mail and the campaigners within a day, before anyone actually knew what he was doing there (as of writing I still don’t know. Rumours and counter rumours suggest the police may have attacked the man or that he wasn’t in the pen at all).
I started flagging so thought I’d get back to the climate camp with a bottle of wine and have a dance. Unfortunately by the time I got back there the police were piling out of riot vans and had begun penning in the camp area. Increasingly agitated police began pushing back a growing crowd of people stuck outside the line. As dusk fell more joined the crowd which generally remained upbeat, playing music and singing. A couple of tents sprung up on this side of the line as people waited, presumably, for the police to open the camp up but they didn’t. I began talking to an Italian fella called Marco, a veteran of the Genoa demonstrations in 2001 where a protestor was killed by police. I spoke to several people who had been there and at other demos and was left with the impression that the police in Italy and Germany were much more brutal than our British police, despite how they were behaving today. Marco said he still occasionally wakes up with bad dreams after what happened at Genoa. Both of us lamented that we weren’t inside the camp which was applying the tactic of having as much fun as was possible which must have been winding the police up who, by now, will have been bored out of their tiny little minds.
It all seemed like fun until we saw the occasional person being brought out by police medics with wounds to their head. 
The police were apparently hitting people near their line according to the odd person who managed to get out. We were simply having a party of our own joined by people from elsewhere increasingly liquored up and pissed off at the police who eventually brought up another line of riot clad colleagues to face in our direction. A group conducted a small sit down protest in the road blocking the traffic for a while which was redirected after a long cue tailed back up the road. I got to thinking how many of the police must have sympathised with the protestors. At the end of the day the campers here were not violent at all. The vast majority of people were just hippies and the cambridge footlights. Barry would not have come down here. Yet you can see in this clip the police surge at the protestors, most of whom are just holding up their hands to show they are not fighting back. (this was at the other end of the road to where I was. Note than unlike the footage you might have seen outside RBS there are next to no news cameramen here)
Some of these police must know the knife edge the climate of the world is balanced on or, more personally, some of them must be struggling with paying over inflated mortgages. Those of the latter must in fact be quite grateful as they’ll be getting some overtime to help pay for it. Anyway I didn’t bother asking them how they felt. I can understand they were ‘just doing their jobs’ but the message from on high seemed to have been ‘behave like cunts’ and that’s exactly what all the police were behaving like, which accelerated when they began to push us down Bishopsgate. You couldn’t say they weren’t taunted, but who really taunted who first? It’s unusual how perfectly normal people tearing up road bollards and throwing them at police feels on a day like this. But this sort of thing wasn’t going to be left alone and though the crowd wasn’t huge the police went in hard in their push. Just around the time my camera battery went dead.
I was largely just chatting with Marco throughout who was calmly wheeling his bike down the road with each police charge. At some point he asked me to look after it while he went off for a piss down a sidestreet and the police chose this moment to push again leading to my hairiest moment. I moved down a parallel side street with a handful of other people followed by shouting police with a barking dog for each of us. I wasn’t remotely confrontational yet they came at us for a while and I honestly think they and their dogs would have torn shit out of me had they been inclined to come any further. Fortunately they stopped after a few hundred yards and returned to their main line. Marco was street wise enough to figure where I’d go. You could tell he’d done this sort of thing before.
And that was the end of that. I wandered round the streets with Marco for a little while searching for a pub then realised that I really should get back to Stevo’s before it got too late so said my goodbyes. We planned on meeting up the next day but it didn’t happen so if you’re out there reading this Marco, take care, it was fun.
And it was. It was fun, at least until the police started getting a hard on for hitting hippies.
I got up fairly early on Thursday to get down to the demo outside the Excel Centre where the various dignitaries were meeting to decide how best to pretend that the system collapsing around our ears can carry on as usual. I’d got my hopes up that it was somehow going to be bigger than the day before but when I arrived there were no more than a hundred or so people split into a few different camps. Ethiopians and Congolese banged drums and shouted at the police who were outnumbering the protesters at this point and a small pocket from the Stop the War Coalition were there chanting, ‘what do we want?’, ‘jobs not bombs!’, ‘When do we want it?’, ‘Now!’
My utopic vision would have no bombs or jobs. At least pointless drone like jobs anyway, so I was immediately disconnected from their vision. I hung around for a couple of hours. The crowds gradually grew but not by the expected amounts and we were nowhere near the Excel Centre. The dignitaries wouldn’t have heard us even if we’d turned the volume up to 11. It was interesting to see some anarchists square up to a BNP member they recognised who was filming the crowd, but by and large it just felt like standing in a disused car park with a lot of people I didn’t know. When an obnoxious, cockney fella who was making a documentary started talking to me I decided to leave. I’d heard activity was taking place back in the city and intended going there but on the way had an attack of pessimism so decided to go to the Tate Modern instead.
The late Bob Wilson said the joy of art lies in trying to get others to see things from our point of view, see the world from the same reality tunnel as he put it. The artist tries to do this through seduction. ‘There are rapists in the intellectual world,’ Bob said, ‘and they become politicians, the seducers become artists’
I subscribe to this view but I must admit that I haven’t a clue what reality the seducers of contemporary art are trying to get me to see. If it is a reflection of a society then it’s effective as the majority of it is as vacuous and as empty as the system that has created it. But if I go back a little further to the impressionists, the surrealists, the early expressionists something was happening there. I’m not exactly sure what that something was but, for me, there was definitely something happening.
So the marchers of the last few days. The thousands on the street saying ‘please, please see it our way’ – were we seducers or rapists?
The demand is for political action but politicians force and the demonstrators don’t – they demonstrate. And these demonstrators with their knots in their hair, their pedal bike sound systems, their avant garde dance, horns, whistles, drums and guitars, their costumes and their banners, are not forcing. They are saying ‘you don’t have to do it like that – you can do it like this’. What that ‘it’ is you couldn’t rightly say with clarity but it is something. It’s definitely something. And perhaps with all the scrawled words, printed pamphlets and chants it doesn’t really matter anyway. Marshall Mcluhan was well known for inventing the phrase ‘the medium is the message’ by which he meant (for want of not pontificating too loudly like the man in the movie line in Annie Hall) the content of a medium is not as important, in terms of it’s social influence, as the medium itself. That social influence can take place over a long time, disguised in large part by the content itself. So, if all the banners and the noise were the content of this art form what exactly was the medium?
I’m not going to answer that question. Not least because to do so would require me to lower my cynicism defence mechanism and I couldn’t possibly be having that. I think I’ll just leave it for you to figure out.
For me my day at this demo was over. I wandered around the creative overflow of the 20th Century, missing being back home, so I decided to cut my cultural outing short and went to find a gift to bring back up north. I went to put my thruppence worth back into the stumbling economic horse that pretty soon no amount of flogging will ever get back up again.
I went shopping.
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