A sad day for British democracy.

(image via scepticisle)


I'm actually in tears. Boris Johnson, the Tories in Westminster Council and the centre-right coalition have managed to do what nine years of new Labour anti-civil-liberties wrangling didn't have the guts to do. They've sent in the police and they've taken away Brian Haw.

Brian Haw's anti-war protest - a tent, some placards and a whole lot of brazen peacenik courage - has been pitched directly outside the houses of parliament for almost nine years. Embarrassing the executive. Reminding them of their complicity in an illegal war. Reminding the people of the possibility of resistance. Labour tried everything they could think of to get rid of him, dragging him through the courts, even setting up a whole new law to ban protest in parliament square without prior approval specifically designed to oust him. They never could. Under the new centre-right regime, however, there's no such faffing about with legal precedent and squabbling over human rights. Today, the Mayor ordered the stormtroopers in to handcuff Brian Haw and drag him away, and now, after nine years, he's gone.

That's what the right does, in government. No lengthy, drawn-out hypocrytical bollocks about decorum and protest, no legislating you out of existence bit by heartbreaking bit. Just this. You are a nasty protestor. We do not like you, or your messy ideas about justice and freedom. You are spoiling our nice clean lawn. We are sending large men to remove you.

I am twenty-three, and have been politically active for about as long as Brian Haw's protest has been standing. Nearly all of my significant political memories involve Haw, from rainy pickets over the HFE bill in 2008 to cheering as the crowd of nearly two million marched past his tents on the big anti-war demo in 2003, back when I was sixteen and had only just begun to realise how terribly wrong the world was, and the power of personal resistance.

Years later, as a parliamentary intern, I passed Haw's protest every morning and evening as I crossed the street into the Houses of Parliament. And every time, I felt glad to see it, sometimes a lonely one-tent display facing down the glowering edifice of Big Ben and the commons, sometimes a larger gathering, as thousands of well-wishers and supporters travelled from all over the world to meet Brian and join his demonstration. It made me feel proud, every day, to know that whatever faff was going down in parliament, I still lived in a country where citizens had some right to protest, some right to face down the entitlement and warmongering of the state without fear of their lives and livelihoods, even if it was just one little tent and some placards against centuries of privilege and pride. It made me feel proud, every day. Johnson is using the excuse that Haw's protest detracted from the majesty of Parliament Square, but I considered Brian Haw as much a symbol of the political inheritance of my generation as the Commons. And now he's gone.

Some of us on the left were always convinced that the Tories would be worse than Labour on civil liberties. We did say. But today 'I told you so' tastes of nothing but bile. This is a tragedy, a travesty, and nothing more. Mr Haw, we salute you. The state may want to forget your protest and the grassroots resistance it symbolised. We never will.

'Just a couple of black eyes, maybe a cracked rib. Nothing you didn't get on the Rugby field.'

Oh yes, the tapes are out, oh yes, yes, YES.

Hang on, my gloating liberal gonads have oozed a little. I'll put a towel down.

As I was saying: the tapes are out.

You know, those tapes, the tapes from 1990 that seem to suggest that the current Mayor of London is willing to break the law in order to help Darius Guppy (Darius. Guppy), his chum from Eton and Oxford, arrange an assault on a journalist who had got his blood up.

Dispatches has excerpts. Go, listen to them. Listen to the current Mayor of London offer to give Guppy that journalist's number. Listen to the current Mayor try to ascertain just how badly his friend is going to beat this guy up.

They've got the tapes out, they've finally got them out. Gods bless the internet.

Scenes from Turnpike Lane station...

An hour ago, on emerging from the bowels of the Picadilly line as is my wont at half six on a Thursday, I was dismayed to see a wall of armoured police surrounding a pair of electronic weapons-detecting barriers through which the good residents of Wood Green were being made to walk. So I took it upon myself to engage a couple of members of Her Majesty's Constabulary in conversation.

'Why are the scanners up again?'

'It's a deterrent. You know, knife crime. You watch the news, don't you?'

'So what are they for?'

'Well, to see if anyone's carrying a knife.'

'Is it against the law to refuse to go through, then? Say, what would happen if I just walked right round the edge?'

'Well, you're not exactly carrying a knife, are you?!' Sner sner, oi lads look at the sweet little white girl in her cardie trying to be clever.

I tried a different tack. 'So, how do these barriers tell if you're carrying a knife rather than just, say, any old metal?'

'They don't. They're quite neanderthal really. They just flash red when someone's got metal.'

'But hang on. The lights are flashing red for every other person. Why aren't you stopping all those people?'

'Well...' indulgent little police-officer smile turns into get-rid-of-this-member-of-the-public grin 'look, we just use our judgement - say, if someone like your good self set off the buzzers, well,' looks me up and down 'you're clearly not the sort of person to be carrying a knife, are you?'

'So what sort of people would you stop and search, then?'

'Well, you watch the news.'

'Of course I watch the news. What sort of people would you stop?'

'You know, the sort of people who commit crimes. You watch the news.'

'You haven't answered my question.'

'Are you a journalist?'

'Absolutely.'

'My colleagues and I aren't trained for this. Bugger off and call the press office and go through those barriers while you're about it.'

Stunned, I marched through the ancient plastic barriers, the metal buckles on my boots winking.

And the lights flashed red.

And nobody stopped me.

Oh, god.

Did anyone else feel like staying in bed this weekend? Did anyone else struggle with basic tasks like shaving and making the tea? Did anyone hesitate before opening the papers or firing up the net?
It was so fragile. Just for a little while longer, we could pretend that it had all been a dreadful booze-fuelled nightmare and all we needed was a quiet day with the curtains closed and we'd be fine. But it's Monday morning, now, and the Tories have still got the councils. There's still a fucking BNP member on the London Assembly. And by 140,000 votes, smug Tory clown Alexander Boris Johnson is now Duke of London and spoilt Prince of the underground. We start this clammy May week in a country that has lurched drunkenly to the right: get the resolve from the cupboard. It's going to be one hell of a hangover.

Look at him. Look at his terrible pink face. On the BBC's post-victory interview, the BNP's second-choice candidate began to reveal his true colours. No more the bumbling, Bertie Wooster-esque gaffe-happy clown, oh no. Someone's been training him. Only his eyes and mouth moved, lizardlike, apart from occasional forays into the tantrumish rage of a small toddler when the BBC interviewer asked if he could call him 'Boris'.

He was obtuse, he interrupted, was massively self-satisfied and oozed privilege. He repeated over and over again 'how much he had wanted to win,' and now that the Blond has squealed and cajoled us into giving him what he wanted, we're about to find out if he really has any useful policies beyond 'Boris for Mayor'.

The BNP back the Blond for some very good reasons: he is uncomplicatedly racist, a misognyist, a snob, an elitist and a hard-line right-winger who supported the Iraq war from bloodshed to bloodshed and condemns gay marriage in the press. His reactionary and disgusting views are indulged because apparently he's a cheeky old diamond in the rough, a people's politician who's not afraid to speak his mind. Festering bollocks to that one. Those who remember Enoch Powell and his rivers of blood will recall that just because someone's openly racist and sexist does not mean they're not a swindling, duplicitous bigot.

Enough of this. We KNOW all this. What we don't know yet is what we're going to do about it. We've got years of struggle ahead of us without the reassurance of the Labour back benchers when we criticise our government. We may not have a decent and dignified left-wing politician in charge of the capital. We may be terrified at the prospect of our country slipping slowly and inexorably towards the right, but this is what happens when people lose faith in democracy. We use it to self-sabotage, to elect bigoted leaders greedy for control and we roll over to call the fuckers 'uncle'. And it's not that they don't believe in equality, of course, but some politicians - politicians like Boris - believe that some animals are more equal than others.

On this clutch of islands, we do not stand and applaud when party leaders enter the room, but Alexander Boris De Pfeffel Johnson, who has Prime Ministerial ambitions, almost certainly sees himself as that sort of politician. He wants to be in charge, and his own power is his highest political ideal. I remain on bloody tenterhooks to see what the hell he's going to do with that power now he's got it, but for whatever it's worth, be assured that my comrades and I will be keeping a very close eye on City Hall over the coming months. Look forward to exciting and relevant new blogs, city-wide activism in the face of the Forward Intelligence Team's bullying, anti-capitalist drunken ranting and possibly an album of radical folk songs. Goshdemnit, but we're going down shouting.