LET'S ALL GET PISHED IN KELVINGROVE. INVITE YOUR PALS

Last Friday, as the rest of the country settled down to happy clappy street parties, boulevards decked out in union jacks and wall to wall television coverage of a fairytale wedding, a rather different story was unfolding in Glasgow.

The city hit the national headlines after a massive unauthorised party, which saw up to 10,000 mostly young people converge on Kelvingrove Park, descended into a riot after police waded in to shut down the event in the late afternoon. The party had been announced just a few days before through facebook, with the event page rapidly garnering thousands of attendees.

What had been billed as just an excuse to have a party in nice weather, playing on David Cameron’s advice to ‘go ahead and have’ parties and for local councils to ‘not interfere’, rapidly developed a political nature when Glasgow City Council issuing a panicked statement warning revellers to stay away from the ‘unsafe and unofficial’ event, the day before it was due to go ahead. Within hours, the ensuing media coverage had ensured the number attending the facebook event, set up by two teenagers, shot up to 15,000.

It was perhaps inevitable that with thousands of people drinking (heavily) in close proximity for most of an afternoon, and every young team in Glasgow in attendance, that fights might break out. Fears about a sectarian riot proved overblown though, with little evidence of religious tension, nor much sign of union jacks or pro-monarchy regalia for that matter either.

Mass disorder, however, was definitely not inevitable, and serious questions need to be asked about how the police responded to isolated incidents in the park. What’s not been made clear in the subsequent narrative presented by the police is that senior officers on the scene made a decision to try and clear the park around 5pm. This is before the alleged ‘riot’ kicked off. But soon after, the soundsystem was pulled,  the cops horse charged revellers, and then brazenly attempted to make a series of  arrests.

Over the week following the street party, the authorities in Glasgow have entered the throes of a moral panic, coming to the sudden realisation that young people can organise parties on the internet and there’s very little they can do about it. Their response has been characterised by a mix of lies, scare-tactics and sheer panic – promising to pursue the two teenage organisers for the supposed £40,000 clean-up bill, which then became a £25,000 bill, threatening the license of the nightclub which provided the soundsystem for the party, and massively overreacting to a rash of copycat events which have sprung up on facebook. As I write this, Kelvingrove Park is under lock and key for the first time in its 150 year history, due to a completely imaginary “mass waterfight” that the council  have seized upon in order to justify this show of strength from the authorities today. Throughout the day, the park’s fountain has been surrounded by metal fencing, while police and council officials have been posted outside the park’s numerous entrances. Even more hilariously, a joke event created earlier in the week – ‘Osama bin Laden’s Kelvingrove Street Party’ (event description: HE’S DEED. LET’S ALL GET PISHED IN KELVINGROVE. INVITE YOUR PALS), which gained 15,000 guests in just a few hours, sparked mass hysteria in the Scottish media. It was a joke event, and unsurprisingly Kelvingrove has bore witness to neither a mass waterfight nor an Osama bin Laden party today, despite the best efforts of the council to manufacture this threat.

BAN THIS SICK FILTH

Glasgow City Council’s vision for the city essentially amounts to one giant glorified shopping mall. SSY has extensively covered their attempts to gentrify, commercialise and “regenerate” the city, which more often than not amounts to running roughshod over the local populace in order to satisfy the needs of commercial interests – whether that’s demolishing the Buchanan Street steps, killing off the Barras market, demolishing centres for the disabled in order to accommodate car parks or attempting to drive all forms of political dissent out of the city centre. This is all being stepped up ahead of the unwanted and expensive Commonwealth Games, to be held in 2014.

It’s clear that mass unauthorised and, vitally, free parties in public parks do not fit into the council’s vision for the future of the city. Partying can be kept strictly to clubs and bars in the city centre, where  ”unacceptable levels of drunkenness” form part of a solid revenue stream to the authorities. Excessive policing and council bureaucracy can, to paraphrase the Prime Minister, get tae fuck. It’s our city. And it’s our park.