unreal

I’m all for Laurie Penny, who writes for the New Statesman and also the Guardian. She’s a damn fine writer, who has been rightly shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. Her recent piece for the New Statesman, ‘Inside the Whitehall kettle’, is a good example of her excellent ability with words. Indeed, the person who tipped me off to read it was none other than Tim Etchells, whose capacity to produce brilliant compilations of words in the form of books, poetry, drama, live art, dance and more knows no bounds. If Tim is recommending something, it must be pretty good.

So it is with some reluctance that I am going to criticise Penny’s piece on the Whitehall kettle – not for her vivid descriptions, nor her political views. She is absolutely right to write that on Thursday, ‘the children of Britain made their decision, and we should be bloody proud of them today’. Too right. I am proud, and inspired. But please don’t tell me that they – and you, Penny – survived a ‘warzone’. You did not. And to suggest you did is a mistake.

Alluding to war, I fear, plays into the hands of those who would wish to suggest (as Polly Toynbee has done) that the students’ anger and the students’ rage is ‘quite low’ in the ‘pecking order of pain’. Toynbee is wrong: the students’ rage is entirely appropriate. However, those of us who support them, and who hope for more protests and resistance, must not fall into the trap of exaggeration. If we start suggesting that our battles here are in any way comparable with, for example, the hideous violence of war – such as that which continues day after day in parts of Iraq or eastern Congo, to name just two conflicts currently raging in this world – we open ourselves up to ridicule.

Being kettled is unpleasant, especially in sub-zero temperatures. I have been kettled twice in my life, the most recent occasion in the sub-zero temperatures of January 2009, when many of us marched to the Israeli embassy in London. There were children on that demonstration too, and the police showed significant aggression. I was frightened. I wanted to get out. I feared a stampede and I feared police brutality. But under no circumstances did I feel the same levels of fear that I experienced while working in Angola, during the civil war, nor indeed during the short period of time I spent in Ivory Coast during that country’s civil war. And I would wager that people trying to survive real wars in the world right now, would give up a lot to get the hell out of their daily danger and enter the relative safety of a Whitehall kettle.

Penny’s piece is, for the most part, brilliant. But it does remind me a little of the kind of work for which many western foreign correspondents are often (wrongly) admired. Descriptions of, say, a feeding centre in a West African state like Niger will be threaded through with biblical images in a bid to emphasise the reporter’s real live brush with (their imagining of) hell.

Perhaps my picking holes in Penny’s piece is misguided. After all, I have much bigger complaints to make about those journalists and sub-editors who seem to delight in describing the demonstrations as riots. The Daily Mail is falling over itself with propaganda, as suggested in this URL and the caption to the third photograph in that piece, and also in this headline. The Independent seems happy to join the lazy language brigade and the Beeb too. But Penny is on the same side as me. We need to have these discussions as we go along, making sure we get our arguments as right and as tight as we can.

Which brings me on to the mounted police, and whether they did or did not ‘charge’ the crowd. Take a look at this video to get an idea of what went on. This morning, on Radio 4′s Today, Meredydd Hughes, the Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police, gave his opinion on the matter. He says, I note, that ‘anybody who knows anything about, um, equestrian activities will see perhaps a trot followed by walking horses…’.

As it happens, I do know a little bit about equestrian activities having spent several years of my early life shovelling shit and riding, for several hours a day, pretty large horses. Looking at the video, it does seem that the horses do trot and walk as he says. However, I can also vouch for the fact that a large horse only need swing its hindquarters into an adult to be able to knock someone over, or at least knock them off their balance. Such an animal need only lift a front leg quickly and unexpectedly to hurt or intimidate someone, especially someone who is unfamiliar with equestrian activities. Therefore, a line of large horses, fired up and trotting quickly at a crowd is, without a doubt, potentially very dangerous. When you are standing on the ground, facing this line of heavy-boned four-legged animals, you feel you are being charged at. Because you are! The horses don’t have to canter or gallop to squash someone. Again, I know a bit about this, because I had my pelvis broken in three different places by a horse that fell on me from a standstill. It wasn’t even trotting, Chief Constable Hughes.

Penny mentions the horses in her piece, and refers to them as ‘armoured’. But I don’t think that a plastic visor protecting the front of a horse’s head is exactly what I’d call armoured. They do not have heavy protective blankets around their bodies as, for example, those worn by most horses in contemporary bullrings. For sure, the police horses are frightening. Their riders – who are armed – are also frightening. We shouldn’t have to say something about them that is not strictly true. It weakens us at a time when we need all the strength we’ve got.

None of this is to undermine the main point of Penny’s report. For me, what her piece is about is the power of the state. As I said to Mr J on Thursday night, ‘We may not have police with AKs patrolling our streets. We may not get threatening phone calls in which our family members are mentioned, to frighten us into a corner. But in Britain, if you challenge the system and threaten the politicians and the establishment, the power of the state and its access to the use of force becomes very suddenly very visible indeed.’

What the students did was brave – and I hope they keep doing it, and I hope we all get out to join them, every week, on and on, until we win this critical fight. But let’s not pretend we are at war. For we are not (yet). And I, for one, am glad of that.