Former Met senior officer Brian Paddick has provided some worthwhile advice to his former colleagues about how to better control the next anti-cuts demo and prevent it from descending into headline grabbing violence.
He suggests quite rightly that prevention rather than reaction is the best remedy and those suspected of planning to turn a peaceful march into a riot should be required to show their faces and be thoroughly searched before hand, and, if necessary ‘taken out’ by being arrested.
These are the kind of tactics-together with more focused intelligence gathering-that have worked well in diminishing the kind of mindless punch-ups that used to be such a regular event among football hooligans.
But I would add a further suggestion. It should not be beyond the remit of the main organisers of future demonstrations – the TUC’s Brendan Barber , inter alia, please note – to put in place a much greater measure of self-policing or stewardship with the great majority of participants exercising their citizen’s right to identify and isolate the small groups of potential trouble makers at an early stage. A march attended by over a quarter of million peaceful protestors should be able to contain a group of less than three hundred lunatics and not simply stand by watching and waiting before public and private property is trashed and police officers brutally assaulted.
On the subject of intelligence, it does not take a rocket scientist to find evidence of what the violent fringe may be planning on any given day or indeed the loopy politics that informs their actions. Among the garbage littering parts of the West End after saturday’s demonstration were copies of the ‘anarchist paper’ Resistance. Its front page covers a split headline equating the rights on London’s streets with the demonstation in Cairo’s central square, where the movement to bring about a change of regime was hatched.
To equate one with the other is of course a travesty, an insult to the thousands of Egyptians who won the hearts and mind of law-abiding democrats around the globe through their non-violent action and spirit of resistance in the face of repression.
The ‘anarchists’ who broke through doors and windows and threw bottles of ammonia on Saturday may kid themselves into thinking they are on a cusp of a revolution in the UK but the reality is that they have more on common with fascist storm troops of the kind that Mosley used in London’ East End during the 1930’s and Mubarak used more recently at one point to try and break up democracy in Cairo’s square.
Good article Jimmy, but it’s a shame you didn’t highlight the other analogy made on Saturday, by a more prominent figure and on a far more sickening level. Miliband’s comparison between a campaign for greater public spending and desperate struggles for basic human rights was nothing short of despicable. Of course people care about their jobs, their local facilities and how much support the government is prepared to give them, but for a high profile political figure to belittle the anti-apartheid struggle, the civil rights movement and the sacrifices of the suffragettes in this manner was downright disgusting.