An Inauspicious Start

I see little point explaining the set-up of the protest here.  It’s already been done several times on this website, so I’d only be wasting keystrokes.  Instead, I’ll move straight into the narrative.

The protest began inauspiciously enough.  All of us arrived a little late – all perfectly unavoidable, but late nonetheless.  This didn’t really matter, though.  We didn’t have a howling mob of intransigent libertarians waiting for us, so no-one was kept waiting.  Indeed, it would be rather hard for all of three protestors (yes, three!  Aren’t we good at drumming up support…) to hold each other up.  But still, an inauspicious start.

This floundering beginning was, ultimately, followed up by a long-drawn out flop of a protest.  It’s hardly surprising – it’s very difficult to draw much attention to yourself with only three protestors.  But the first problem we hit had nothing to do with that.  It was even worse than that.

We couldn’t work out where to protest.  We had ourselves, we had our nice, ironic leaflets, and we had our permission to protest.  We were ready to go out there and defend our rights through ridicule.  But we didn’t know where precisely we were allowed to ridicule.  On Friday night, Ali received a rather confusing missive from the Met informing him that they were placing, “no restrictions,” on the protest – before going on to say that he was allowed to protest on the, “East Side of Parliament Square and Millbank.”

So, we weren’t restricted – but we weren’t allowed out of the East Side of the Square, or of Millbank.  There is a gap of several hundred yards between the East of Parliament Square and Millbank.  This gap includes the centre of Parliament Square, Parliament itself and Westminster Abbey.  In short, it contains all of the bits where there are people.

I’m sorry, was that something about no restrictions?  Either they were trying to stall the protest by restricting it, or simply by confusing us.  Whichever it was, they hadn’t been very helpful so far – getting back to us the day before the protest, sending a bewildering letter, and generally restricting us.  But then again, I suppose that’s superficially what we were protesting about.  It’s what Ali wrote on the permission form.  Maybe they took us at face value, without the benefit of a glaringly sarcastic leaflet to guide them…

After a few moments heated debate – that is, amiable and confused dithering – the, “Crush Freedom,” protest group decided to strike out for Millbank.  So, across Parliament Square.  We had leaflets in our hands.  I do hope that doesn’t count as protest in the eyes of the police.  We wouldn’t want to break the law now, would we?

Of course, it turned out that Millbank was, by and large, completely empty.  On the way there, we passed the Home Office.  On an impulse, I dashed across the deserted road.  Wouldn’t it have been amusing to post a leaflet to Jacqui herself?  Oh, yes, hilarious.  Assuming, of course, that it wasn’t burned before reaching her for fear of being shot through with anthrax…

Unfortunately, the swine who designed the building failed to include a letter-box.  This ghastly oversight, compounded by the presence of sliding glass doors, made getting the leaflet to the erstwhile Chief Whip turned National Whip nigh-on-impossible.  For a moment, I considered nailing it to the flag-mast outside the building, a sort of latter-day Martin Luther for civil-liberties.  Minus the homophobia, religious fanaticism and the funny hat…

Of course, this scheme was also shelved when I realised none of us were in the habit of carrying a hammer and nails.  It’s probably just as well.  There’s always the risk that they’d take the flyer seriously and be inspired to crush yet more freedoms – or just arrest us as the sort of nutters who’re willing to post insolent notes to the Home Secretary.

A few buildings later, we found DEFRA.  They don’t have a letter-box either – these architects really ought to consider pretentious farts hoping to confuse the government when they design buildings – but they did have a set of railings.  In went a leaflet.  Of course, DEFRA have nothing to do with this protest, and Hilary Benn is immensely unlikely to get the flyer – but if he does…

Actually, if he does, I’m rather glad it’s the Fifth Way mentioned and not here.

Leaflets, Ladies and Laughter

But enough of this.  Millbank wasn’t really worth looking at – there were even less people than the thoroughly underpopulated East Side of Westminster Square.  Certainly, we didn’t shift any of the leaflets there – not to people, anyway.  We therefore moved onto Parliament Square itself, ending up a few yards away from the visitor’s entrance to the Houses of Parliament.

Of course, this was (I think?  That letter was so vague and so specific at the same time that I still don’t know) strictly illegal.  If we were taking those locational instructions seriously, then we were somewhere outside the permitted protest zone.  But, given that the protest was ostensibly for the protest ban zone, in order to demonstrate the beauty of free speech and the stupid superfluity of the law, breaking the restrictions placed on us added to the irony no end.  So we did it.

Well, that, and the fact that a policeman walked right in front of us while we were leafleting rather confirmed that they couldn’t care less about us.

The leafleting itself was largely uneventful.  As I’ve learned in the past waving buckets for charity, the general public has a lofty disdain for people on the street trying to attract their attention.  Actually, I’d know that even if I hadn’t leafleted or collected money.  I’m a member of the general public, I ignore them too.  Perhaps a tad hypocritical given that I know how frustrating it is for the waver – but there we go.  Would you do any differently?

The highlight of the actual protest was without a doubt when someone took the leaflets at face value.  A corpulent woman with an indistinguishable accent approached us, looking puzzled.  “What are you handing out leaflets for?” came the question, slightly strained in tone.  We handed her a leaflet.

They don’t take long to read.  It didn’t take long for her to look up, looking utterly puzzled…

“You’re protesting to…”

There was a bemused pause.  We hadn’t been ready for anyone to confront us.  What on earth were we going to say?  That we weren’t serious?  Explain it immediately?  Play it straight?

“We’re protesting against the right to protest,” filled in the ever-helpful R.E Vamp, stammering a little.  The woman’s wobbly draw dropped a little further.

“Why?”

Ah.  That one’s always the killer, isn’t it?  Irrational right-wing authoritarians who hold meetings like this in good faith can never answer it.  The lack of rationality tends to do that.

“They’re…uh…” R.E Vamp floundered, jaw flapping a little.  Poor him.  I should probably have chipped into help with an ad-lib fascistic rant about protecting the leaders, but I was having too hard a time keeping a straight face for that.  I’d have floundered like him because of that, no doubt.  So no need to make a fool of myself as well, when there was this fine entertainment laid out before me.  Was that too cruel?

“They’re…subversive.  Yes, subversive.”

I can’t recall if the woman actually said anything at this point, or whether she was just too confused to quite frame the words.  There was a hugely awkward pause for a moment.  The woman was completely aghast.  She really seemed to think we wanted to stop people protesting in Parliament Square.  Vamp coughed tentatively.

“We’re…not actually serious.”

The woman laughed nervously, as if a trio of madmen were gazing at her.  (Were they?  You decide, dear reader…)

“I rather hoped not…but…”

We explained the point of the protest, each trying to hold back the laughter I suspect.  The woman, meanwhile, laughed nervously again, scurrying away shortly after.  Out came the laughter…

In retrospect, I worry that more people might take the leaflets at face value.  The irony is pretty blatant to someone who knows about SOCPA, but given that about half of the leaflets we handed out were to tourists, not all of them might get it.  No doubt, there’s now a deeply confused family somewhere in downtown Tokyo that is convinced the UK is full of strange, quasi-fascistic youths out there to, “Crush Freedom.” (We shouted that after a few people we handed leaflet to).  Ah well.  Such is the price one pays for protesting outside parliament, no doubt.

Douglas makes a mistake

Our official protest finished at 12, so we went for a spot of light lunch and a (ruinously expensive) hot chocolate from the Café Nero by Westminster Tube.  As an aftermath, Ali and R.E Vamp decided that we should hand a leaflet to Brian Haw.  I followed at first, a little unwillingly.  I’m somewhat less in awe of the man than Vamp, and wasn’t sure I really felt the need to actually speak to him.  Of course, I deeply respect the conviction and courage he’s displayed in actually sitting out there for six and a half years – and I wholeheartedly support him against the government in his attempts to exercise the fundamental right to open his mouth.

I can’t help feeling, though, that when he opens his mouth, he doesn’t express an entirely rational view.  He’s always struck me as one of those on the anti-war left who’s so opposed to any conflict that he’ll ignore so many faults on the part of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban as to deny their sheer evil.  Fine, he wants to oppose the war.  I do too, because as I said in my article yesterday, I don’t think it works.

But what I don’t understand is how someone who opposes oppression, or murder, or tyranny, can ignore a brutally tyrannical regime like Ba’athist Iraq.  The Taliban and Ba’ath dictatorships were undeniably vile.  And yet there very rarely seems to be a word in the anti-war movement written against them.  It’s almost as if they hadn’t existed, so eager is the intransigent element of the pacifist movement to condemn the war.  In the Christmas Special of New Statesman, Haw wrote an article declaring solidarity with protestors against Mugabe in Zimbabwe.  How can he oppose Mugabe and yet ignore Hussein?

Of course, I’ve no idea if he ignores Saddam or not.  I’ve never heard him say a word against his dictatorship while he’s calling the Labour government one.  But for all I know, he could hate Hussein more than I could possibly imagine.

That’s not the point though.  I’m not trying to describe my considered reflections, but my feelings and fears at the time.  My fear was that he was sort of narrow-minded zealot who was so set in his view that war was evil that he hadn’t realised military dictatorship was too.

This seemed all but confirmed by a poster that caught my eye on the edge of the squat.  “STOP GENOCIDE IN IRAQ!!!” it said. (The triple punctuation may have done something to increase my ire.  If you can’t make a sentence emphatic without resorting to shallow punctuation mistakes, then rephrase it.  If you can’t rephrase it, then don’t say it as you’ll look so silly as to completely undermine yourself.)

The poster then went on to lambaste the government for committing genocide on the Iraqi people.  It conspicuously ignored the fact that Saddam did commit genocide – the Kurds didn’t even get a mention.  To my mind at the time, this seemed like rank hypocrisy.  I was almost disgusted by it.  So I couldn’t bring myself to go and speak to him after all.

On reflection, that was perhaps the most stupid mistake of the day.  I might have been completely unfounded in my assessment.  I should have gone and confronted him with it, and found out his attitude.  It might have been the most interesting thing to happen to me for a while.  But, of course, we all do stupid things occasionally – and that was my idiocy for the week there.  More fool me.

Reflections

On the whole, it’s best to treat yesterday as a learning process, I think.  Frankly, the protest was a bit of a flop.  There were only three of us.  We drew absolutely no attention to ourselves.  We only shifted about 100 leaflets.  We probably confused half of the people we gave them to.  We couldn’t even work out where we were meant to be.  All in all, we were virtually useless.

But it’s a start!  Without that flop, we’d have no idea what to do next time.  And I think we were able to draw some lessons out of it all, at least.  So, for anyone who wants to organise a protest and has as little idea as we did yesterday, a few tips:

• Organise.  This, I suspect, was our biggest failing.  It’s probably the reason we only had three people turn up – because we weren’t definite enough about dates, times and places until the very last minute, no-body thought it was worth turning up.  Picking Christmas was probably a bad idea too – far too many people are away for it to work.
• Get noticed.  We did this very poorly.  We didn’t make any noise.  We didn’t make people notice us.  We didn’t even have a banner.  People probably weren’t even aware that we were protestors.  Definitely needs attention in the future.
• Don’t be too nervous of the police: They should warn you before arresting you, it seems, as long as you’re not waving a gun about.  Even if they don’t, principle probably dictates that this shouldn’t be an issue.  Certainly, we couldn’t have afforded to be braver, I suspect.

So, a flop, but a fun one.

The Set-Up

The arrangement was fairly simple, or so I though: from 10AM to 12PM as many as we could attract would protest against the right to protest while having official permission to protest and saying that we should, at very least, keep this demand in place.

In the event it turned out that the Scribo Ergo Sum authors were the only ones there, myself included, and I turned up almost half an hour late as a consequence of getting to sleep at around quarter past six that morning but, this considered, I was in a surprisingly suitable state for the protest. It was cold but this only left things brisk.

Douglas I had already met in person, through a mutual friend, but meeting Ali was an introduction, at least in person. It was not the most extreme example possible but it remains strange to me that you can “Meet” somebody upon and via the internet yet never have seen them and never have heard their voice. This is an instance of futureshock, I imagine.

“Shall we protest, then?” I was asked. I replied in the affirmative and we got to work.

Baby Steps

The actual arrangement of the protest was rather tricky: the terms set by the approval were both meticulously precise and bafflingly vague. We ended up wandering around Westminster and leaving a leaflet through DEFRAs mailbox. Unfortunately the Home Office seemed to have no equivalent, presumably due to some cowardly fear of explosives being inserted into it. Whaever happened to real men?

Oh, right, Jacqui Smith is…Uh, moving on.

Eventually we found a crowded location which seemed to be beyond the boundary but devoid of many police, thus suitable. Unfortunately we later realised that it was immediately outside the guest entrance to the House of Commons and thus a police officer but thankfully this particular one seemed fully occupied with their role and thus left us unmolested.

We got through a surprising amount of the leaflets, in the event, albeit primarily to tourists. Which means we might well have convinced Japan but the number of English people we got them to is unclear.

How well the irony of the leaflets {which hopefully somebody more technologically literate can post a picture of} translated is also something which I am uncertain of but the people walking away seemed to be reading the literature we gave them so I am pleased enough.

That said it was very cold and many people ignored us entirely but that comes with the territory for winter and leafleteering in general, respectively. A policeman walked by on a few occasions but I managed to resist the urge to give him one.

The finest moment came when a maternal looking woman from an unknown foreign location stopped opposite from us and asked us what we were protesting about. I informed her that we were protesting against the right to protest and she seemed rather bemused, pausing for a short while to consider this before asking the obvious: ‘Why?’ This I found surprisingly hard to handle and eventually opted for: “They’re subversive”, doing my very best to keep a straight face and only barely managing it.

I also mentioned that they damage our society and handed her a leaflet.

This was read with a slightly concerned, slightly uncomprehending fashion and eventually she looked up and I told her that we were not exactly being entirely serious and she replied she had hoped as much.

After this exchange we did our best to rid ourselves of the rest of the leaflets before the time limit expired but did not stoop so low as to giving them out to the massive cluster of Americans congregating across the road from us. After this we went off for coffee and foods and then a meeting with a rather more tenacious, high-profile demonstator…

An Audience With Haw

We had seen the tents and posters, for they are hard to miss, in passing and decided to pay the arch-dissenter himself. Upon the approach a fit of nerves overtook us all and our noble editor hung back while Ali and I advanced.

Having seen him in various photographs, film footage and cartoons seeing him it was rather odd to view him up close and in the flesh. He was a good deal more weathered than the photographs of him taken a few years ago, as you would expect but I rather hadn’t.

I had rather anticipated it being a case of him holding court, the leftists of London congregating around him in rings and offering him their reverence and respect in return for his blessings and wisdom, an impression hardly dispelled by the sight of a middle aged woman cavorting around the area in a top hat. Upon arrival, however, it became clear that it was more a case of him and a few trusted allies {one of which gave him a supermarket sandwich} with everyone else regarded warily, as a gawper or potential threat. Asceticism reigned here and the ideal, not the man, was king.

My first question was how long he had been there {as it was a question which we had discussed amongst ourselves earlier} and he expressed disdain towards it, scoffing and tutting and wondering why I could not have asked a more original one {it later turned out that he had actually been there since June 2001, originally over sanctions} but things improved rapidly when I asked Ali to hand him the leaflet.

He is clearly a man not devoid of humour, despite his hard-boiled demeanor, and when we were approaching he was discussing his idea for a t-shirt poking fun at Gordon Brown {which the Fifth Way may well create and post upon Scribo Ergo Sum shortly} and he seemed to see the amusing side of the leaflet, although Ali took pains to make it perfectly clear that his intention was satirical, an act of great wisdom.

He seemed scornful, however, of our use of the word “Permission” when we described our difficulties arranging the event, arguing that since the authorities could not technically deny any request it was really “Approval” instead, and that under the Human Rights Act the Freedom of Expression was explicitly protected.

Taking legal advice from him might not be the best of ideas but he certainly had a well reasoned approached to the legal system. According to him such legislation was not for peaceful people but outlaws, a group which he implicitly distanced himself from. Considering his unshaven visage and his interaction with the police I found it hard to imagine a more suitable Platonic Ideal for an outlaw, but was polite enough to keep this observation to myself…

He was clearly, though, a man of principle and the embodiment of commitment to the cause. Despite having seven children and a wife he decided to spend his time waiting outside an institution that feels nothing but disdain and contempt for him to make a series of decisions that he is aware will never come.

Behind him was a rather revolting picture, barely distinguishable as human and in fact resembling some sad accident involving an omelette and tomato ketchup rather than anything even animal. I knew from a YouTube video that it was, in fact, a severely mutated child that most likely died shortly after the picture was taken. He claimed that this was a consequence of the use of spent uranium shelling in Afghanistan and that seems to be a likely allegation: the use of such ammunition results in a fine, radioactive dust that coats the surrounding area.

I once talked to a former soldier who had been exposed to it before seeing his health rapidly disintegrate, tests showing his blood to be heavily irradiated and his body suffering heavily from the exposure to these substances in almost every way possible. Worse still this form of weaponry is used in civilian areas and the settlement’s inhabitants are then not informed of the condition that their home has been left in. Given how much damage was done to an adult in peak, military appropriate physical condition I would hate to consider the effect of it upon a child within the womb.

I did not have to imagine it, though, it was in my face.

Although far harder to make into an amusing leaflet for any but the blackest of wits this seems as good a cause as any to include for our next protest.

I asked him the rather more pertinent question of when he was leaving, to conclude, his reply being that “I will leave when I’m told.” We looked rather surprised, at this, both presuming that this had already happened at least once. “But not by them.” Divine orders, I enquired? He stated that he would leave “When it ends, but it hasn’t even started.” he seemed slightly disdainful at the small numbers of people sleeping there, saying he wanted more and that “People need to wake up”.

He said that we were doing our part, though, although I have to say that I consider an hour and a half or so of aimless wandering and light leafleteering rather less strenuous than living on pavement for over six years.

Meeting Haw was an intense event, that alternated between incredibly awkward {for us, at least} and highly lucid. He mentioned his website so it only seems fair to link it here and hope that he checks his trackbacks on the hacked House of Commons wi-fi he presumably uses to update it:

http://www.parliament-square.org.uk/

Aftermath, wind-down

Afterwards we chatted politics on the green, then Ali left and gave me some bread since apparently they would not allow him to carry it into where he was headed. Thankfully the two loaves had cost him all of 30p.

In hindsight we should perhaps of been a good deal less cautious: a true activist sees the entire affair of protest as an inconvenience that they must endure to convince others and considers arrest to simply be yet another manifestation of the bother. Unfortunately a trio of polite middle class white boys are often not quite capable of emulating this attitude and this proved the case today. We distributed plenty but not all we had, and hardly caused a stir.

The amount of good we did was dubious but without having attempted anything we would have stood no chance at all. For an effort executed at short notice, on strictly limited funds and with the government not letting us know that it was even permitted {or authorised, as Haw would have it} until the night before the event it was certainly not a catastrophe and regardless of achievements was certainly an enjoyable day, well spent and certainly something that I intend to repeat.