80s Throwback Government Says: Relax Don't Do It. When You Wanna Go Apeshit

In the weeks since the fantastic Millbank occupation it has become clear that the Police force will work with the Coalition government and their lackeys in the media to do anything necessary to intimidate those who are taking to the streets to protest against the agenda of cuts we were expected to lie back and take. This abject failure to understand the level of anger in the country is hardly surprising for a cabinet packed with more millionares than a FIFA World Cup Panel.

Glasgow demonstration on 24th November

The key tactics being used to intimidate this fledgling student movement are:

1. Backing the Police no matter what they do on demonstrations

Members of the Tories, Liberal Democrats and Labour were clambering over each other to condem the destruction of a rickety-looking police van that officers abandoned due to ‘fears for their safety.’ I  enjoy a good conspiracy theory as much as the next socialist but for this one there is some pretty concrete evidence that the police were in no danger when the van was abandoned in the middle of the street, ripe to be smashed then reported on hysterically by the media.

Nick Herbert: Captain Needa in Darth Cameron's cabinet.

It is unclear if the minister for police Nick Herbert is talking about the protestors or his boys in blue  bravely protecting the “general public” and old Tory favourite, property:

“If you know … that there is a group of people who are bent on violence… on intimidation, on breaking the law, any of us would think twice, wouldn’t we, about whether we wish to be associated with those people.”

The Tories were very quick to launch an investigation into the policing of Millbank when they felt the police were not strong enough against the students but when questioned about kettling schoolchildren in the cold for hours before charging at them on cavalry it was “an operational matter for police.”
There are cases currently going through the European courts about the legality of kettling itself, however it is fairly certain that charging school children with horses is illegal.

2. Smearing the radical student movement as a “small group of Anarchists”

This phrase has been trotted out again and again recently despite the vast majority of people I, and others in SSY, have spoken to being  largely in favour of the actions of  the 4000 people at Millbank Tower. Of course not everything that happened that day was  perfect but this has been dragged up too many times to bother going over again. Anarchist has become a byword for nutter thanks to our right-wing media that uses its vast resources to attack these legitimate forms of protest.

3. Writing off the protests as pointless

In an atrocious article in the Guardian, Deborah Orr (Lib Dem fangirl) calls for students to stop protesting. Orr claims that “scrutinising and rejecting” the cuts will be much more effective than mass mobilisations and civil disobedience. While she may be in a comfortable enough position to simply ignore the cuts the rest of us are going to be hit hard by the marketisation/destruction of public services as we know them. The implication is that the students are revolting purely because they have been told they’re going to be paying more money is grossly unfair. We have scrutinised and we ARE rejecting all cuts to public services and their marketisation. This rejection takes the form of mass protest and has already succeeded in forcing the Lib Dems to shit themselves.

4. Spying on Protestors

The police force has recently had to admit to using their stormtroopers Forward Intelligence Team (FIT) to spy on the uk Uncut group which has been at the forefront of making people aware of the scale of tax evasion in the UK through organising a series of protests targeting tax-dodging mammoth multi-national companies as SSY has previously reported. They have admitted what we already knew; they are gathering information on protestors through any means necessary to stop them from expressing their dissent. Back to our second least favourite Nick for some more, surely ironic, words: “We do not wish to see the politicisation of policing.” This is a massive lie as members of SSY have experienced first-hand.

If the police are doing this to convince the government that they should not be subjected to the same cuts as other organisations they will fail. What is clear is that until they join us in the struggle against the cuts, privitisation and marketisation of EVERYTHING we must stand up to their intimidation tactics by using our right to protest and resisting every attack this Government makes on the public sector.