BY NORM DIXON
For weeks before May 1, British Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair, London's mayor Ken Livingstone, the Metropolitan Police and the Britain's capitalist mass media relentlessly demonised and criminalised people intending to peacefully protest against capitalism in London on May Day. The goal was three-fold: to frighten people into not protesting; to justify the pre-planned use of overwhelming force by the police to prevent a lawful protest; and to divert attention from the demonstrators' radical message.
Police warned they would be taking a "zero tolerance" and an "in your face" approach to the May Day protest and its organisers. A stream of lurid warnings about "anarchists", "eco-warriors" and "infiltrators" armed with "samurai swords" and machetes were issued by police and dutifully reported as fact by the press.
Scotland Yard announced to the press that it had sent letters to "ringleaders" who were "bent on violence and disruption" to remind them of their "legal responsibilities". Police warned that "trouble-makers" would be overtly followed by police with video cameras to remind them "that we know who they are and are on to them". Metropolitan Police chairperson Lord Harris warned that rubber bullets could be used.
On the eve of the protests, police provocatively filmed everybody who entered or left the protest convergence centre in South London. The Evening Standard published 24 photos of people that police claimed were wanted in relation to May Day "violence" last year, although none had been charged with any offence.
On April 25, the British Daily Telegraph reported that the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police John Stevens had urged "peaceful demonstrators" to stay away from London on May Day. He claimed that police intelligence indicated that Oxford Street, where demonstrators were to gather for the main rally, "could be the target of sustained criminality".
Mayor of London "Red Ken" Livingstone showed his true colours by backing the police commissioner. He urged people not to attend so that "ring-leaders" who "got away" last year could be identified by police. "This demonstration [will be] measured by whether they can engineer sufficient chaos that there will be images around the world of innocent bystanders with blood streaming down their heads", he said.
Prime Minister Blair, in his best Margaret Thatcher impersonation, on April 30 expressed his "absolute and total backing" for the planned police response. He said the protesters sought, "in the name of some spurious cause, to inflict fear, terror, violence and criminal damage ... It is not idealism, it is idiocy. It is not protest, it is crime pure and simple."
After a day of peaceful demonstrations throughout London on May 1, police at Oxford Circle implemented the repressive exercise that the weeks of propaganda had been designed to justify. At 2pm, as more than 3000 protesters gathered, 6000 police in full riot gear, as well as mounted police, surrounded the peaceful crowd and tightly hemmed them in. As well as protesters, tourists, office workers and reporters were trapped.
Once inside police lines, nobody was allowed to leave for up to seven hours. At about 3pm, it turned very cold and heavy rain began to fall. There were no toilets in the area and people were forced to relieve themselves on the stairs of the Oxford Circus tube station, which police had ordered closed.
The operation amounted to a mass detention without charge. Police loudspeakers regularly announced that, "You are being detained here to prevent a breach of the peace and criminal damage to property. You will be released in due course." One woman who asked police if she could leave to pick up her daughter from child care was told, "You should have thought of that before you came".
According to all reports from trapped mainstream journalists, the crowd remained good-natured despite their being held in what one protester described as the "Oxford Circus Internment Camp". The "violence" that did occur was the result of the crowd's frustration at being illegally confined. A few beer cans and shoes were thrown at police and several surges by large numbers of detainees were met with baton charges by police. The windows of three shops and six banks were broken. Around 90 people were formally arrested.
When police finally allowed protesters to leave at around 9pm, they were forced to depart through police line in single-file and submit to being photographed. Many were searched.
A group of 300 detainees intends to take legal action against the police for unlawful arrest. Civil liberties groups and several Labour MPs, including Tony Benn, condemned the undemocratic tactics of the police. On May 2, both Blair and Livingstone endorsed the mass detention of protesters.