UK students clash with police/ Prince Charles' car attacked

[MacCruiskeen]

Police terrorism: four-minute video on the link (I can't embed it):

Kettling video 'appalling', police watchdog panel chair says

Victoria Borwick encourages protesters at anti-student fees demonstration to make complaints against Metropolitan police after 'ghastly' incident

Shiv Malik, guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 22 December 2010 14.16 GMT

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/dec/2 ... e-watchdog

[...]

Footage recorded on a mobile phone by an Oxford University postgraduate student shows protesters shouting and screaming "there's no room" and "there's no space" as police try to push them back with riot shields.

Someone, believed to be a protester, can be heard shouting: "You're going to fucking kill someone tonight."

Towards the end of the film, shot near Westminster underground station a few hours before protesters were kettled on Westminster bridge, mounted officers can be seeing using their horses to push the crowd back further.

[...]

"We were pleading with the police on the front lines, saying 'there's no space, you are hurting people, people are in real pain'. There was a girl who couldn't breathe.

"We got no response. And if you didn't move, they'd kick you in the shins. It sounded like serious injuries were occurring because of the insanely small space they'd given us.

"The worst part wasn't in the video. The police knocked my phone out of my hands and they continued to move in tighter and tighter, and there was crying and screaming. I couldn't even hold the camera up because I couldn't lift my arms it was so tight," he added.

David Hough, a 51-year-old supply teacher who was also caught in up the kettle, said: "As at Hillsborough, people were being squashed against a solid object and they were saying 'I can't breathe'."

[...]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/dec/2 ... e-watchdog

Note: this was a separate "kettle" from the one on Westminster Bridge.

[vanlose kid]

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[AhabsOtherLeg]

Contrast this with the cop: "I'm an equal opportunity abuser, duh." Moron.

It's worse than you think. That's not a cop, but a professional journalist, with a regular column in a popular national newspaper (Daily Mail, of course). He gets paid around £1 million a year to be a ridiculous right-wing Troll, and to bully the most vulnerable people in our society (luckily, Jody's not one of those).

The article he did about Jody is so disgusting that I won't link to it, partly because the Mail gets revenue from page views. I won't reproduce it here either, because it's shit. A lot of people have felt forced to contact the IPCC (Independent Press Complaints Commission) about it, myself among them, and with any luck Littlejohn will end up as the social pariah he should always have been. Totally agree with the rest of your post - these kids are great, and they put my generation to shame. We are the thick, dull, cowardly and complacent ones, not them. It's people my age or older who refuse to enter into an honest debate with the students, because we are incapable of honest debate - we've got out of the habit.

So instead, we advocate an escalation of force. Call out the guard! Man the cannon! There are schoolkids and disabled people at the gates!

Maybe we'll be able to redeem ourselves when we come out to join them, with the TUC, early next year.

Mac and Vanlose, thanks for all the info you're bringing in.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

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The cops didn't seem to be enjoying that very much.

Not like our own Officer RG 313, who likes to keep things lighthearted, and always has a smile on his face.

[MacCruiskeen]

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Good to see the "book bloc" in Italy now too. If there's no escaping the Spectacle, then that's a clever détournement of the students' "violent" and "barbaric" media image. The cops look a bit nonplussed to be swinging their batons at the Great Works of the Western Canon. ("Aren't we defending civilization?")

The hard right are now trying very hard, and quite openly, to push an entire generation back into 19th-century penury and helplessness. It's textbook Shock Doctrine stuff, all over Europe.

Outright class warfare is not far away. I hope the unions will finally unite with the students and declare a General Strike - internationally coordinated.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Good to see the "book bloc" in Italy now too. If there's no escaping the Spectacle, then that's a clever détournement of the students' "violent" and "barbaric" media image. The cops look a bit nonplussed to be swinging their batons at the Great Works of the Western Canon. ("Aren't we defending civilization?")

I couldn't figure out why that guy had Decameron written on his shield. I thought maybe the Italians hated him as much as we do, and as much as we hate Berlusconi.

"Down With De Cameron!" A hands-across-the-ocean kind of thing.

EDIT: I doubt many of them cops know who Goethe is, but they might know Faust from the opera.