ANARCHY RUINED THE RIOT
Lloyd Evans says that the May Day mob will
need a bit of sponsorship if it is to succeed in creating chaos next year
I AM writing this under a table, trembling with fear. Outside, hordes of armed revolutionaries are running amok, smashing windows, wrecking cars, beating up policemen, lynching journalists and slaughtering tourists with sharpened machetes. The skies are dark with hurled paving stones. West End theatres are on fire. The National Gallery is being looted. Anarchist commandos have ransacked St James's Palace and declared it an independent state. And now, from the ground floor, I can hear the doors of this club being breached. The untamed mob is loose in the lobby. They are out of control. They are baying for blood. There is nothing to stop them. They are coming for me.
Well, that's what I was hoping to write, anyway. The anarchists — damn them — failed to deliver. In fact, at 2 p.m. on May Day, I was lounging in the RAC Club restaurant enjoying a traditional fat-cat's feast of champagne and roast baby while, a few yards up the road, the World Bank was being picketed by a ragbag of anoraked malcontents armed with a megaphone and a couple of banners. 'You make misery,' they chanted at the plate-glass windows, 'we make history!' The rhyme summed up the day. Nearly there but not quite.
It had started so well. At noon I arrived in Trafalgar Square looking forward to a splendid afternoon of riot and mayhem. The annual day of chaos is now so firmly embedded in the spring calendar that the Daily Telegraph even prints a timetable of likely hotspots so that curious observers can take it in at their leisure. Beneath Nelson's column the protesters mustered, waving placards, blowing whistles and lolling about on the lions' bottoms drinking lager and smoking maggots of rolled hash. Everyone was glancing anxiously at the heavy clouds, and a chill wind rustled the costumes of those in fancy dress.
Women in Mary Poppins outfits scattered organic birdseed among the pigeons and posed helpfully for the photographers. Two teenage girls were handing out printed flyers: No Nukes' and 'Feed the Weed'. I asked one of them, Sarah, what she stood for exactly and she said, `Equalism. Free will. And opportunities around the globe.' It was the most coherent manifesto I would hear all day.
Hundreds of cyclists reached the square in carnival mood. Some wore death masks and biological warfare suits. Others came as clowns or fairies. One wore a natty black cape with plastic horns glued to his forehead. `I'm the Pope of Discord,' he told me. I asked him what he was demonstrating against. 'I'm just a drop in the ocean of resistance.' When I asked him to be specific, he embarked on a checklist of grievances: famine, pollution, bus lanes, global warming, BSE, Kyoto, police brutali ty, child slavery, the Tube strike . and so on. It felt to me like that dreaded moment in a restaurant when the waitress says, 'Would you like to hear today's specials?' I tried to listen but I was already half-asleep.
In the spirit of protest, I was dishing out pro-capitalist leaflets: 'Low tax! Big Macs!'; 'Take pity on the City'; 'Three cheers for de Beers'. I offered them round politely and the sworn enemies of profit smiled and said, 'Thank you.' They even accepted my leaflet purporting to be from the AntiLeaflet Alliance. 'Leaflets waste wood. DON'T TAKE THIS LEAFLET,' it urged. And underneath, 'To find out more about the Anti-Leaflet and Notepaper Alliance, please write, enclosing a large SAE, to the War on Wastepaper, 4 Horstkje Ave., Oslo 33 TJ Norway.' I gave away at least 100. A good day for woodpulp shares.
Outside Coutts in the Strand there was a tense stand-off between protesters and the law. In a show of strength, 200 uniformed tough-guys cordoned off the front of the building. But even the police were outnumbered by the press. News teams from around the world waited. Nothing hap pened. The clouds darkened. Icy rain sprinkled on to our heads. A skimpy vegan heard me joking with a fellow hack and barged in with, 'This is serious, you know? You people never tell the truth. Don't you read Chomsky? The I'm-all-right-Jack-society.' Her anger was palpable and I listened intently but she immediately began chirruping the catch-all chorus of grievances that I'd heard elsewhere. I found my attention wandering. 'Babies are dying!' she shouted. 'And people just shrug and go "Yeah, well". But right now. This minute. Children are starving to death.' I looked at her. 'Yeah, well,' I shrugged. She stormed off angrily.
Thick rain fell as I trudged through Soho towards the grand rallying point in Oxford Circus. The main body of the protest had walked straight into a police trap. They were held in a tight cordon for eight hours, unable to leave, while squalls of freezing drizzle sapped their will to resist. Overhead, like a tadpole stuck in the sky, a police helicopter grumbled all afternoon long. The mood was grim. Clusters of marchers squelched about trying to gather their spirits for a punch-up. Drunk on lager they hurled insults at the office workers who were gazing down at the stalemate from their balconies. A salsa band stomped up and down. People danced and whooped but in their hearts they knew what had happened. The revolution had been rained off.
I grew cautious about revealing that I was a journalist. The protesters weren't hostile, just tedious. 'What's wrong with capitalism?' I asked. They would look at me as if I'd said, 'What's wrong with genocide?' Invariably a seven-minute harangue would follow. I was told that the media had conspired to ruin the march. The low turnout was blamed on news reports that the police planned to use rubber bullets and tear-gas. In fact, the rioters ruined their own riot. By posting their plans on the Internet they handed the initiative to the police. Then their vanguard walked straight into a trap. Fragmented and leaderless, the rest were unable to gather in sufficient strength to generate anything more than sporadic damage. It was all a big disappointment.
Last year the guerrilla gardeners scored a memorable victory over the police. This year's match was a dismal nil-nil draw. Now that it's a regular fixture, let's hope the protesters can make it all worthwhile next year. They need better equipment, of course, better training and better planning. A properly encrypted communications system would help. And a chopper wouldn't go amiss either, provided they can find one that runs on solar power or fermented banana mash. A sponsorship deal must be possible. They have a distinctive product which is highly recognisable and enjoys saturation media coverage. The Federation of Master Builders might consider funding next year's bash. Or one of the big glass conglomerates. Come on, everyone. Think. Would it be too much to ask them to get a loan from the World Bank?
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