By nightfall a student called Alfie Meadows is undergoing brain surgery after allegedly being batoned by police. Television footage shows another student—Jody McIntyre, who has cerebral palsy— being dragged from his wheelchair by an irate policeman, who’s being restrained by his own colleagues. Elsewhere, in the West End, a breakaway group has surrounded a vintage Rolls Royce carrying Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall to a function at the Palladium Theatre. As the protesters rock the car to and fro and throw paint bombs at it, somebody leans through the open window and prods Camilla with a stick. The royal protection squad, it emerges later, were on the point of drawing their guns.
A few hours later, after I’ve blogged all this under the headline ‘The Dubstep Rebellion’, some protesters make vigorous representations to me via Twitter: they present a detailed playlist of the tracks blasted out in Parliament Square, which proves the music was not dubstep but grime.4 It was the Grime Rebellion, doh.
Grime is music seen as so dangerous that it’s effectively banned in the clubs teenagers frequent, and its performers shunned by all but pirate radio stations. Grime is hip-hop with a Cockney accent and a dirty bass-line; its most important instrument is the cracked-vowel voice of the London street kid. The same kind of voice that is now heard gabbling with rage on the evening news: ‘We’re from the slums of London, yeah, and how do they expect us to pay uni fees—of nine thousand pounds? And the maintenance allowance: that’s what’s keeping us in college. What’s stopping us from doing drug deals on the streets anymore? Nothing.’5
This, it turns out, is the most prescient statement made that day.
At six o’clock the next evening, with the Met police chief, Paul Stephenson, facing calls for his resignation over the breakdown of law and order, I return to the scene of the battle. Whitehall and Parliament Square are still strewn with rubble and missiles; boarded-up windows line the route and the atmosphere is tense, the police on edge.
Suddenly, out of the dark comes the sound of drumming and wailing. Seven or eight figures emerge, dressed in black and wearing elaborate crows’-head masks. They do a dance across three lanes of stalled traffic into the middle of Parliament Square and approach the statue of Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George. And they lay a black wreath.
‘We’re here to mourn the death of the Liberal Party,’ croaks the guy holding the drum, as he beats out a tocsin surrounded by the masked, mainly female, wailers. This goes on for about five minutes. At no point do they attempt to photograph, film or otherwise record the performance. It is purely gestural, vanishing into obscurity the moment it’s over. Though the area is swarming with police, none interferes.
‘We’re art students from Slade and Goldsmiths,’ explains the drummer. Why are they doing this? ‘We felt we had to.’ Did they, I ask, know about the teach-in at the National Gallery, at the height of last night’s riot?
‘Yes, that was us: the Hive Manifesto.’
The Hive Manifesto
A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of debt slaves refusing to pay. All the powers within Europe have entered into a holy alliance to regenerate a failing economy, to realise a lethal dream of returning to business as usual, and to level the education and culture, to transform the educational and cultural sectors into a consumer society success story.6
At 4:45 p.m. on Day X-3, while clashes raged around parliament, art students and their professors had invaded the National Gallery and staged a sit-in beneath Manet’s Execution of Maximilian. Earlier they had held an impromptu rave on Ai Weiwei’s pebble sculpture at the Tate Modern. After a couple of lecturers gave speeches about the meaning of modern art, the students began scribbling. They produced The Nomadic Hive Manifesto, a parody of Marx and Engels which quickly becomes a bullet-point list of exhortations for protesters to remain non-hierarchical and fluid, to communicate ‘using dancing and pheromones’.
The point about the Hive Manifesto is not that it is in any way a special literary document but that it sums up the change that people were feeling globally by late 2010, especially youth:
If you listen carefully, all that moaning, the sound that can be heard just behind the drone of everyday life, cars and the slurping of lattes, has become a little more urgent: a humming of dissatisfaction becomes dissent. The Holy Alliance fears that this noise has become a song on the lips of all?7
The art students had grasped that the fees protest would catalyze a far wider dissatisfaction with the effects of the economic crisis. The experience would show that refusal to cooperate with a system could be a more effective method of fighting it than an ordinary political campaign.
On the website Critical Legal Thinking, which published the Hive text, PhD student Rory Rowan surveyed the experience of kettling. Bearing in mind the tendency of kettling to provoke people into anger, and to provide a negative spectacle for the heliborne TV cameras, he suggested:
A form of protest is needed that places dispersal over concentration, mobility over stasis and perhaps even disruption over symbolism. If multiple smaller mobile groups were to simultaneously occupy key strategic sites and disrupt vital processes, the momentum of symbolical opposition could be maintained without the police being able to herd opposition toward spectacle.8
Now, once the vote in parliament was over and the student movement had demobilized, sections of the discontented public seemed to sense that the moment for such protests had arrived.
Tactics of the powerless
The first UK Uncut action took place on Wednesday, 27 October 2010, when about forty protesters occupied and closed down a Vodafone store in London’s Oxford Street. A mixture of old and young, they crime-taped the entrance, holding up banners claiming that Vodafone’s unpaid tax bill—reported to be £6 billion—was just short of the £7 billion of public spending cuts now being made. Three days later, on Saturday, 30 October, there were similar actions in fifteen UK cities. By 18 December the movement reached a peak, with actions in over seventy UK towns and cities.
The core activists were committed horizontalists who had learned their methods in the Climate Camp movement. They would occupy a store, create a narrative there (for example, declaring it to be a ‘library’ and handing out books), and then get thrown out—displaying enough resistance to sabotage the business operation, but not usually enough to get arrested.
Though it coincided with the student unrest, the most remarkable thing about Uncut was its spontaneous replication by groups with no connection to the students nor to the anarchist protesters. The spectacle of grandmothers sitting down in the Boots pharmacy of quiet provincial towns, arm-in-arm with their teenage granddaughters, alarmed public-order specialists because there was little or no sanction they could bring against it.
The think tank Policy Exchange convened a panel of law-and-order specialists to ask: ‘Do these actions portend a dangerous new trend towards the use of physical force? If so, what can and should be done to prevent this phenomenon becoming a regular feature of the national landscape?’9
Actually, the answer is: very little. Ewa Jasiewicz, a thirtysomething veteran of the anti-globalization movement, has been involved with UK Uncut from the start. An organizer for the Unite Union, she’s been jailed and deported twice from Israel, most recently during the Gaza Flotilla of May 2010, and helped to set up an oil workers’ union in Iraq after 2003. She is therefore used to being part of an activist minority, and interprets the recent adoption of radical tactics by large numbers of people as the result of a new feeling of powerlessness:
I feel like there is a lot of reaction to ‘the future’: there is a sense that the present is so bad, and conditions of austerity being imposed, pensions undermined, services undermined—that we can’t have any more of this. And if this is what the present is, what’s the future?
Social media, she believes, have been the key to turning what was once a niche, lifestyle form of protest into an accessible method for everybody else:
The anti-road movement of the late 1990s didn’t ask you to sign up to an ideology, just to put your body in the way of a JCB. The difference is that then, we didn’t have