Dan Kieran

by I Fought the Law- A Riotous Romp in Search of British Democracy (epub)

  As we got to the bottom of the bridge it was clear that the two officers had been lying. Pedestrians were walking both ways across the bridge. The road itself was closed, but only to traffic. As we approached, the two mendacious policemen stood in the middle of the road to block us from walking anywhere other than the pavement. So we all walked on among the pedestrians, who looked bewildered by the blank banners, while Mark began shouting, ‘Freedom of speech! We demand the right to protest be reinstated! Stand up for your right to speak! Don’t be silenced by the government!’ Once on the bridge we were inside the exclusion zone and clearly breaking the law. I suddenly felt much less confident, and a palpable fear began to take hold as I saw the scale of the police presence surrounding the square.

  I spotted Henry Porter on the sidelines halfway across the bridge. He looked surprised that I had recognized him, but came over to say hello. I asked him about the story in that day’s Observer. ‘Well, it’s not every day you get an email from the Prime Minister, I must confess,’ he remarked. We spoke for a moment and agreed that frightening though the legislation and the erosion of our civil liberties were, public apathy was the real source of terror. I told him about the half-hearted attempt by the police to stop us getting to Parliament Square and he shook his head in disgust. Then I turned to introduce Mark, but he had strayed off the pavement and into the road, holding one half of an enormous blank white banner. The policeman told him he couldn’t walk in the road because of public safety, but other pedestrians were milling about freely in the aftermath of the marathon. Mark complained that he had the same right to walk in the road as everyone else, but the policeman - a dead ringer for the actor Ross Kemp, bizarrely - manhandled him back on to the pavement. Mark shouted at him and tried to get back on the road, but Mark being Mark, as they tangled with each other, neither giving an inch, he kept whispering ‘I’m really sorry about this, mate, I didn’t mean to shout at you like that.’

  A few minutes later we had all made it safely on to Parliament Square where the picnickers had set up a tea and cake stand and a few banners. There were three police vans filled with bored officers and about twenty others walking around the square looking at us with disdain. I began to feel very, very nervous. Perhaps they had decided to arrest us after all. I stood there, waiting for the moment of truth, then Jeff the anarchist walked over. He had helped Sian, Dave, Esther and the other picnickers set up the table with afternoon tea and cakes (with more illegal icing). I had taken off my coat by this point to prepare for the match. Jeff grinned. ‘Ah, the police have been looking for you,’ he said. ‘They came up earlier and asked us if we were planning on having a cricket match. They’re on the lookout for protesters in cricket whites.’ Later I spoke to Sian who had spent some time asking the police on the perimeter about ‘what a girl had to do to get arrested’ only for them to reply, ‘We’re too busy watching the cricket to make any arrests,’ before adding, ‘The state of the wickct is a disgrace. You should have a word with the groundsman.’

  Dave and Esther unfurled the picnickers’ enormous ‘Freedom to Protest’ banner and walked around the square with it while we played cricket. We were clearly staging an illegal demonstration. There were thirty of us by now, with banners, some blank and some bearing slogans, and of course there were the cakes with their revolutionary icing. If there was any doubt that a political protest was taking place it was blown away when someone in a Tony Blair mask set fire to a replica of the Magna Carta while Mark made a loud speech about the contempt the government was showing for the British people. His voice boomed across the square and was clearly audible to the police, and by now we had attracted quite a crowd. Mark continued to berate Parliament and Tony Blair for their ‘blatant, unwarranted attack on our civil liberties’. It was clear to anyone with eyes and ears that we were demonstrating well within the exclusion zone and we had made no attempt to apply for permission from the police before doing so. But they still didn’t budge. They made their presence felt by wandering around the square with grim faces and clipboards, but at no point did any of them tell us that what we were doing was illegal or advise us to move on. There was by this stage at least one policeman for every couple of protesters, and a second helicopter was hovering overhead, so arresting us all wouldn’t have been difficult. There were plenty of vans to take us to the cells, but still they made no attempt to detain anyone. Clearly the police were not taking the Serious and Organised Crime and Police Act seriously at all.

  The cricket match was a great success. Everyone joined in and the sight of people playing cricket didn’t seem out of place in Parliament Square, though a few bedraggled marathon runners seemed surprised. It was all good fun, despite the fact that a guy who looked like the singer Willie Nelson seriously hogged the bat and seemed determined to hit the ball over Big Ben. Then Ed bowled him with a nice ofF-break that Ashley Giles could only dream of. The police, meanwhile, began to move away, leaving only a handful to keep an eye on our demonstration as it came to a close.

  Around seven p.m. things began to wind down and we packed everything away before heading off for a drink in the pub. I was mildly irritated that after we’d gone to the trouble of organizing the demonstration the police had decided to ignore the law, but if I’m honest I was actually rather relieved.

  You may think that we should have taken comfort in the fact that we weren’t arrested. After all, surely you can’t have it both ways. You can’t complain that something is illegal on the one hand and then on the other complain when you don’t get arrested for doing it. But surely it’s unhealthy in a democracy for the police to have the power to decide which people it will allow to protest illegally by turning a blind eye to the new law and which it will refuse permission to by implementing the new law by the book. If the police do get to pick and choose which protests they allow to go ahead then they, by definition, have become politicized. If you live in a country ‘controlled by political police supervising the citizen’s activities’ then you are living in a country that is defined by the dictionary as a ‘police state’. Even if that sounds overly dramatic, it’s hard to argue that it’s not a very thin end of the same terrifying wedge. Personally, I don’t see how it is possible to argue that giving the police the power to pick and choose like this means that they are anything but political, and that afternoon they were certainly supervising our activities.

  It had been an eventful and illuminating, if not entirely successful, day. I’d hit a few boundaries in Parliament Square, and not many people can say that. My bowling was pretty impressive too. I even managed a three-wicket maiden in my first over. Watch out, Freddie. But I had completely failed in my objective to get arrested on St George’s Day for playing cricket.

  Towards the end of the day, Dave and his daughter Esther came over to console me. Esther, who was an old hand at this protest business despite being a seventeen-year-old slip of a thing, said, ‘Never mind, Dan, maybe you’ll get arrested next time,’ as though being arrested was a rite of passage. I imagined them both standing outside Bow Street Magistrates Court at some point in the future cheering ‘Dan lost his cherry!’ like that scene from Goodfellas when the teenage Henry Hill emerges into a cheering crowd of Mafiosi.

  I like to think it wasn’t a complete disaster, but the point of the day was to protest about the exclusion zone and try to reclaim our national day around the principles of liberty and national pride, and I’m not sure we managed it. Especially when Dave decided to burn one of our St George’s flags. I was livid, gripped with rage. Not gripped enough to go over and say anything aggressive to him, mind you. Mark saw the look of horror on my face and pointed out that liberty meant being able to burn the flag of St George on St George’s Day in Parliament Square if that was what you wanted to do. Which, of course, was the whole point of us being there. So perhaps it did prove my point after all, despite leaving a rather nasty taste in my mouth. A few hours later, on the train home, I realized that perhaps for the first time in my life I had indeed experienced t
he true taste of liberty.

  The alternative St George’s Day celebration Mark and I organized did get mentioned in the press, in Vanity Fair of all places,38 but our tabloid and broadsheet trap had failed. A month later, when Mark and I set off on another adventure, we weren’t fussed about the media after coming to the conclusion that it’s enough just to keep doing things yourself if you think they have value. Validation from the press is not required if you are doing something you believe in. One day the press will catch up. So this time we just organized something lower key, although it proved to be much harder physical work.

  In the meantime, things had changed in Parliament Square. In May, the High Court decided that, like everybody else, Brian Haw should be held accountable to SOCPA’s exclusion zone so he had to apply for his place opposite Westminster. He got permission, but they restricted his protest to three metres instead of running the entire width of the square. The night the police came to remove the rest of his banners was something to behold according to those who witnessed it. To prevent any unsightly disturbance, seventy-eight police officers came in the middle of the night at a cost of £28,000 to the taxpayer just to move some posters and banners. It was another example of the heavy-handed police treatment of protesters that is becoming the norm in Britain today. Brian, of course, wasn’t going anywhere. He was still barking at people every now and then and throwing his weight around but no-one could ever question his dedication, especially when he reached the five-year anniversary of his vigil.

  It was 14 June, the day before the 791st anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta, and Mark and I were going on our thirty-five-mile pilgrimage from Runnymede to Downing Street, where Mark would don his Blair mask and once again set fire to a copy of the Magna Carta. I arrived in Egham at ten on a cloudy and humid Wednesday morning. I walked down to the hotel that sat on the banks of the Thames and the M25, and before long Mark pulled up in his battered blue car a quarter of a mile from Magna Carta Island, our starting point. ‘All right, bro?’ he enquired while sliding all manner of general driving junk off the passenger scat. ‘Sorry about the mess, this car’s been doubling up as my home.’

  I hadn’t seen him for a while and he was in a slightly low mood. His application to train as a citizenship teacher had been turned down and he was feeling mildly depressed. I was far angrier about the news, though. If someone like Mark can get turned down for training to tcach children about citizenship then we are well and truly fucked. I’m sorry to swear, but I have never met anyone who takes their sense of citizenship more seriously than Mark. North London’s Metropolitan University should be ashamed of themselves. And as for their selection policy ... Jesus wept. They should be stripped of their right to teach citizenship. Do they even know what it means?

  We drove down into the hotel car park and got ourselves together. Mark had an enormous rucksack filled with his tent, clothes, a stove and all sorts of paraphernalia. Mine was packed on a somewhat smaller scale: I had a bit of fruit, some water, a spare change of clothes and a couple of thin books to read in the cells if we got arrested.

  We had to arrive at Downing Street by four p.m. the following day to meet Rikki, a cameraman and reporter for Indymedia, so, straight away, we set off in high spirits along the river towards Staines. It proved to be hard going for someone who had done no training or preparation whatsoever. I was wearing a pair of old trainers because I’d decided the most comfortable shoes I owned would be the most sensible kind of footwear. I was wrong. They were full of holes and ripped to shreds from overuse.

  After a few hours we had managed to wind our way to a pub called the Thames Court. My feet were already aching. One pint and a cheeseburger later we set off towards Hampton Court, the planned place for dinner.

  Along the way we talked about Mark’s political ideas. All his energy was being focused on an attempt to push for a new constitution. He was already planning to organize a conference to develop ideas for exactly what should be put into it. He wanted people to come and explain what mattered to them. He wasn’t content with some kind of bill of rights because he wanted action for a sustainable future to be written into it and a blueprint for a new way of life to be pulled together. I admired his vision but didn’t envy where a road like that could take him.

  The river began to smell in the heat as we fought on towards Hampton Court. After six hours of walking our legs and feet were in agony. Eventually the palace loomed on the horizon, but my spirits had fallen so low that I was openly suggesting we get a cab back to my flat and return to Hampton by train the following morning. ‘No way,’ said Mark. Then he spotted something. ‘Look, it’s a sign!’ It was nice to see coincidence lending us a hand once more (after King Arthur I’d vowed never to ignore such coincidences again). A few hundred yards away was a pub called The Albion that welcomed us with empty sofas, luscious beer and enormous plates overflowing with bangers and mash. Big screens were showing Tunisia v. Saudi Arabia. We’d just missed Spain v. Ukraine, which was the only match I’d missed of the World Cup so far. Still, pilgrimages of political significance have to take priority over the more obscure matches of football’s premier international tournament. In fact, I have to confess that the reason for our four p.m. deadline at Downing Street the following day was actually football-related: if we didn’t get arrested it would mean we’d be able to watch England’s second group match against Trinidad and Tobago.

  Mark then got a call from a friend of his called Mark Kemp, who was keen to join us for that night’s camping and the second leg of the walk the following day. He was also a campaigner. Twelve years earlier he’d been stabbed twenty times by a paranoid schizophrenic while working as a doorman in Tooting. His attacker was found guilty of attempted murder in court one at the Old Bailey and sent to Broadmoor. Ten years later he absconded during a visit to Springfield Hospital in Tooting. Mark K only found out that his attacker had escaped back into his community when a Daily Mirror journalist rang him to ask how he felt about it. Ever since that day he had been campaigning for victims to be given a warning when their attackers were due for release from prison or if they escaped. He had even set up his own twenty-four-hour victim support helpline, which was his own mobile phone number.

  Mark K was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after the attack, and within five minutes of his arrival at the pub it was clear to me that the events and their aftermath had left an indelible imprint on his personality. He was obsessive about how he had been let down and constantly ignored, telling his story over and over again while explaining his desire to fight for justice for victims and victims’ rights. ‘It’s basic checks, that’s all I’m asking for. Basic checks. If they’d carried out basic checks he would never have escaped and I wouldn’t have had to go through this nightmare.’

  To be brutally honest I was scared of him — a cruel and cowardly thing to say, but it was how I felt at the time. Ever since Mark told me about him earlier in the day I had been expecting some kind of urban Ray Mears. Mark K sometimes wore a Kevlar anti-stab jacket, and Mark thought he occasionally carried a knife for his own protection. I felt unsettled at the prospect of camping along the Thames with someone who carried a knife and had been diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic, but Mark patted me on the back while he was buying a round of drinks and told me not to worry. Mark K was also carrying an enormous rucksack filled with three different first-aid kits, including a stethoscope. He had more medical equipment than an ambulance. ‘I know how fragile the human body is so I have everything we need in case we get into any difficulty,’ he explained, which didn’t do my sense of trepidation any good.

  However, Mark K also had a DVD player in his rucksack so that we could watch a film in the tent, and soon proved himself to be as generous a person as I have ever met, offering to buy the drinks and to give us anything he had in his enormous bag if he thought we might want or need it. I quickly realized that he was just someone else I had met on my journey who had been let down and ignored. After chatting with hi
m for an hour I got past my initial cowardly reaction and appreciated the fact that here was someone with more courage than I could fathom, for the catalogue of his mistreatment hadn’t ended after his attacker’s release. When he was at a particularly low ebb he went to a hospital to ask for help, the hospital responded by confusing him with his attacker because they were both called Mark, thought his numerous scars were evidence of self-mutilation, diagnosed Munchausen’s Syndrome and decided to section him and pump him full of drugs. It beggars belief. How he was still standing I’ll never know. Somehow he’d kept his sense of humour: he chuckled as he told me his story. I cursed myself for not recognizing the way my fear of the unknown had caused me to feel patronizing towards him earlier.

  Mark K turned out to be something of an amateur squat finder - the Robin Hood of the squatting world, if you will. He would walk the streets looking for habitable and empty buildings before breaking in to them, fixing new locks and putting up a Section 6 (the document that tells the police that the building is being used as a home to prevent them from being able to come in and immediately evict the occupants). He would then ring anyone he knew who was homeless and give them a set of keys before going off and doing the same thing somewhere else. He was an ethical squatter, if such a thing can exist, so if anyone mistreated a building he had ‘opened’, by removing piping or doing anything to damage it, he would ‘evict’ them himself. ‘I’m in the business of finding people decent homes if they are homeless, but I won’t have them damaging perfectly good property,’ he said. In fact, that day he was late joining us because he had removed the locks and taken down the Section 6 on a squat he had given over to two Polish immigrants because they ‘drank twelve bottles of cider in one day and started trying to remove the copper pipes to sell’. Once the locks had been removed he kicked them out. It’s interesting to learn about and see in action the morality of people who have been sidelined and spat out by society. I certainly didn’t have a moral objection to his giving some of the Duke of Westminster’s empty houses to people who had nowhere to live. One couple he gave a home to were a middle-class family with a toddler who simply couldn’t afford to get their foot on the property ladder. It was the kind of story you’d read about in the Sunday supplement property pages, or see on Tonight with Trevor McDonald. Oh, OK. So I made that last bit up.