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From: Kaptain Krusty
Category: Other stuff
Date: 04 May 2001
Mayday May First 2001- Oxford Circus London
The best way to prevent crime is to imprison everyone. It may however be criminal to detain innocent people.
News reports before the big day said that people should not protest, that the police might not use rubber bullets, that shops were going to be boarded up, that foreign anarchists were training to fight the police and smash up London, that the whole affair would cost the taxpayer a lot of money.
So of course I phoned up an activist friend and agreed a rendezvous on Waterloo Bridge. We hung around Trafalgar Square for a while looking for trouble. Police arrested people for standing on monuments whilst wearing scarves. Then a cry went up “they’re fighting on the Mall”
There they were in all their scruffy glory. A throng of malcontents pouring through boring old London. The police stood by calmly as we shouted our way past Eros and up Regent Street. The pigs seemed to know something we didn’t. They left alone a nutter trying to break a car with a flimsy piece of wood. The march stopped at Oxford Circus. We mobilephoned our friends to see if they could meet us there in a couple of hours, for the 4 o’clock rally.
We: vegetarians, football hooligans, socialist workers, drunken loonies, european anarchists, third world activists, homeless persons, marxists, gawpers, and tourists, were happy at first. Shouting, waiting for something to happen, proud to be occupying the centre of consumerism. But after an hour it dawned upon us that we were entirely surrounded by the full range of police: police photographers, police videoers, police horses, police cavalry, armoured police, police vans, police helicopters,normal police. They stood in a circle around us backed up by line after line of their troops.
During the seven hours we were detained under Section 60 ( the enabling the police to stop dissent law) we mostly did not attack, burn, or throw things at the police. The police took many photographs of us, and filmed us constantly. A small group of loonies did throw things, and fight, and make fires. But most of their violence was directed at each other or traffic lights.
From the rooftops of the big stores the police announced periodically with their big loudspeakers we were being detained to prevent damage to property. We would be released when we moved into the centre of Oxford Circus and when we calmed down.
At nine o’clock we were released. Not eating or drinking or pissing for seven hours had calmed us down. We walked through line after line of police. They took some more photos and we were free to go home and order a pizza.
Great job boys in blue! That night over and over again we saw the same window being broken.
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