Anarchy in the UK, a personal view This is my account of the anarchy in the UK festival that took place in London in October of 1994. The first thing to emphasise about anarchy in the UK festival is it's positive points. It gave us a good opportunity to meet anarchists from many other countries, and to exchange on an informal level ideas and our experiences. For people from Ireland which lacks any historical tradition of anarchism or any sizeable organisation it was heartening to see thousands of people who called themselves anarchists. The good side was almost incidental to the event however. The cultural end of things appeared to go off well but the political end was always seconds away from complete disaster. It was organised only in the most minimum fashion, space had been booked for meetings and one or two speakers obtained but beyond that things were chaotic. There was no organised translation which meant comrades who were not fluent in English were completely left out. A squat had also been opened to provide accommodation for the week. This was the organisers fault, the main individual behind it, Ian Bone seemed to play no part in maintaining things, just paying the occasional royal visit to venues. (He would stroll in, wave at a few people and leave). To us it seemed that only four or five or the organisers made any effort to hold things together, the rest vanished early on. This meant the international rally was held together by one guy who was running around trying to line up speakers and start a collection while chairing the meeting at the same time. Most of the workshops never happened. The events promised in the advance publicity for the most part, never occurred. We expected this going over and most organised anarchists in Britain expected it. This led to the decision by all the national organisations to boycott the event altogether. This was a mistake as they lost the opportunity to address those attending the festival and it also made it difficult to make use of the venue that were organised for a concrete purpose. To talk about the events we attended The anarchist bookfair, an annual event which the festival was coinciding with was very successful. Thousands attended this, the main hall and corridors were lined with stalls and their were meetings going on continuously. The meetings themselves, although promising were dry and often irrelevant to those that attended. There was one good meeting I caught the second half of with somebody from the French O.C.L. talking about his experiences of 1968 in Paris. I was told there were more people than ever at the bookfair, this was attributed to the festival. One worrying thing was that despite this huge attendance the national anarchist organisations in Britain can only claim a combined membership of less than 200. I presume at least some of the thousands that attended are involved in local groups but its clear that a lot of potential is being wasted in terms of making a national impact. On the Sunday the only event that caught my interest was the "Levitation of parliament". As a joke event connected with a week of serious meetings and activity this would have been fun. The problem was the week was scattered with meetings that had nothing to do with anarchism, including religious ones on magic and paganism. As a result I'm unsure whether this event was meant to be a media grabbing wind up or not. Also in this context it had the harmful effect of re-inforcing the stereo-type of anarchists as oddball nutters. A lot of people turned up for this, probably up to a thousand. This was quite funny as the police were unprepared for such number and initially only 8-10 cops were to be seen. They panicked at the sight of the growing crowd and called for re-inforcements so that over the next hour many vans arrived, sirens howling until we had a line of police facing us. A helicopter and a few horses also arrived. This ended with the burning of USA and British flags and then everyone drifted off. On Monday I was helping in the organising of a workshop on using the internet (the global computer network). Fastbreeder BBS and Spunk Press had organised this, it attracted about 60 or so people. It was good as a practical session, giving people information that they could use when they went home. It was also good from a networking point of view as I got to meet many anarchists who I had previously only known through e-mail. it was also the first demonstration of the possibility of doing something serious and worthwhile with the week. That evening that was what was billed as an "International Anti-fascist Rally" in the LSE. I arrived a bit late for this, in the middle of a contribution from two French anarchists. There were two interesting speakers Larry O'Hara who talked about the connections between the fascists and M15 (British secret police) and Lorenzo Evins a black anarchist from the USA who talked about the need to combat racism and not just concentrate on fascism. Some New Age Travellers also spoke from the floor about the physical attacks they have been experiencing lately and appealing for help in finding out who was behind these attacks. A number of problems also arose at this even however that were to be repeated for all the major meetings. Their was no effective chairing so that some speakers were allowed to ramble on for as long as they liked, even if they were drunk. On a couple of occasion drunks were also allowed to interrupt from the floor, and a stupid dialogue then ensued between the speaker and the drunk over some personal matter which many of us could not understand. When it came to taking contributions from the floor at the end the chair did not see some people until he was shouted at by others for 'ignoring' them. These problems meant that the meeting lacked direction or focus and so came across as somewhat farcical. I spent Tuesday having informal meeting with different anarchists I had met so far. This activity was the most useful of the week. Other people reported that the various workshops they had read about in the brochure had not taken place. On Tuesday evening London Class War held a meeting in one of the festival venues but independent of the festival. They had been giving out a leaflet denouncing the festival during the week and predicting that far from shaking the world it would not even shake a bar table. The meeting started off well if very basic, with a concentration on the need for anarchists to be organised. However in response to questions one of the speakers went on a 20 minute macho rant were he tried to convince the audience that the test of being working class was getting drunk and getting into fights. He also claimed that he knew someone from a wealthy background who become working class by going out with a skinhead women and getting I love Britain tattooed on his arm! Despite the promising start it appeared this meeting had also become infected with the bizarre atmosphere of the week. On Wednesday and Thursday we attempted to go to workshops that had been advertised in the program. These were to be held in the Cool Tan a large squatted building near Brixton tube station. Only two of these actually took place and apparently many of the workshops advertised never happened. One that did take place was an impromptu one on 'organising the rest of the week'. Organisation had more or less collapsed at this stage, none of the organisers for instance turned up for this. The reason the workshops had not taken place it transpired was that space and topics had been booked but no arrangements made to find someone to lead off or facilitate the discussion! On Thursday we decided the best thing to do was to arrange a series of meetings ourselves in the Cool Tan for the Friday so we spent Thursday producing and distributing posters to advertise these. On Thursday evening I spoke at the International rally which was terribly organised. Only one speaker (Lorenzo) had been got in advance and all but one of the organisers had abandoned the meeting. The remaining guy was running around trying to arrange speakers and a collection as well as chairing. He was putting on a great effort but its impossible for one person to hold together a meeting of that size (200+ people) and it also appeared he lacked experience of chairing as he was unable to deal with the constant interruptions of a couple of drunks from the floor. Earlier on Thursday evening there had been a picket of Brixton police station against the killing of a Black man by the police earlier in the week. (He had 'fallen' from the balcony of a flat being raided by immigration police). Well over 100 anarchists turned up for this, many of them masked up, some even wearing balaclavias. The picket was somewhat farcical being almost completely white despite being in the centre of Brixton a London suburb where many Blacks live (and that was the front-line of the inner city riots in 1981). It had been called by the trotskyist Socialist Workers Party. About 12 of there members marched around in a circle in the centre of the picket chanting 'No Justice, No peace', obviously somewhat freaked by the surrounding mass of anarchists. On Friday we turned up to find the room we were to hold the meeting in had no lighting, no windows and no electricity. It had a couple of punks asleep in the middle of the floor. So after waking them up and explaining that a meeting was starting in bout five minutes we wandered around and managed to dig up enough mats and chairs for people to sit in, a long piece of cable and a bare light bulb with some clear plastic struck around half of it. It looked OK if not beautiful by the end. We gave two talks, one on the IRA cease-fire and the other on what sort of organisations anarchists need. We followed this up by a workshop in which everyone talked of their experiences in campaigns and how anarchists could reach out and work alongside other people. About 40 people turned up to one or all of these sessions and considering the haphazard arrangements everything went very well. It also proved that despite appearances there were a number of well motivated and serious people at the conference, they were just hard to find in the general bedlam. The police The week started with a minimal police presence, I suspect they knew of the chaotic and confused nature of the organisation of the festival and so expected no one to turn up. So the first reports were just of them being places where you would expect them, like the squat opened to provide accommodations for people from outside London. All this was to change over the course of the week. On Sunday 23rd the event happened which started to get the police worried. This strangely enough was the 'levitation of parliament'!! but it was obvious the police had grossly underestimated the numbers that would attend. I arrived on time at 2:00 by which there were about 100 anarchists and 8 police. Over the next hour the crowd grew and the cops panicked calling in re-inforcements which arrived sirens howling. Soon we were faced with about 200 police including a circling helicopter and some riot horses. Everything was peaceful however, the high point being an attempt to pull down one of the union jacks so it could be burnt. In the end the flag burning went ahead with ones people had brought themselves, including a union jack and a stars and stripes. On Monday 24th about 200 people took part in an occupation of part of the M11 road under construction around London. There has been a long running campaign against this. The security guards got rough with a few protesters breaking cameras and ripping clothes but there were no serious injuries or arrests that I heard of. On Wednesday 26th I took part at a meeting to discuss the poor organisation of events to date. At this I was told that the cops were now taking photos of everyone entering or leaving the accommodation squat. The excuse for this was the death of an Italian anarchist there the previous night, various rumours attributed this to suicide or a drugs overdose. They had also taken to randomly stopping and searching people leaving any of the venues on their own. Later that evening I was waiting for a meeting outside one of the venues (Conway hall). It's on one corner of a square which has a park in the middle. A full cop van repeatedly circled the park with all the cops staring out the window at those of us outside the door. Saturday was when things got out of hand. There was a CND march in London that day and the organisers of the festival suggested as many anarchists as possible show up to march as a block in the march. On Friday evening the Police had gone on local TV to say anarchists were planning a riot in the city centre the next day and that shoppers should stay away. I turned up early to find about 2000 marchers assembling including maybe 150 anarchists. There were also 25 riot horses, cops on the tube station roof with riot gear, cops on all the overlooking office block with cameras, lines of cops blocking every visible road junction and bizarrly two police launches on the river. As the march started I joined the rest of the anarchists around three black flags towards the centre of the march. Some had masked up because of the cameras but the atmosphere was non-hostile, we were partially intermingled with CND pensioners and children. Some of the CND crowd had been made nervous by the police scare stories of the night before but by the time we set off they were happily chatting to us. As the march proceeded we passed about 20 cops frisking two anarchists against a wall. Some people wanted to try and rescue them but we were so obviously outnumbered that most just kept walking. Seconds later we passed a spot where about 200 police were assembled on each side of the road in padded jackets, boots and wearing gloves. As we reached this spot the cops on the left started to walk through the march, as if they were crossing the road. As they got to midway however they started grabbing any marchers who looked like an anarchist i.e. punks, crustys, people masked up or those carrying flags. There were so many cops they had lifted about 100 people straight off. 12-15 German anarchists realising what was happening linked arms. The cops from the right rushed in, punching them in the stomach until they let go and dragged them off too. This was the only resistance put up due both to the surprise nature of the attack and the fact we were outnumbered at least two to one. One grey haired old women from CND did punch a cop but they ignored her. Those of us who had escaped arrest continued on in shocked silence, there was little we could do except choose to get arrested as well. The police had shut down every tube station on the way into Trafalgar square. Every road was blocked by a double line of police, normally with more polices videoing the marchers from the top of a van. A helicopter circled the march. Trafalgar square was completely ringed with police, every road off it had a triple line of police across it, with a line of vans behind them. The entrance to the park at one end had several ambulances, backed up with their doors open. At this stage there were no more than 20-30 anarchists left. Leaving the march I passed line after line of full cop vans, one line consisting of 26 vans. Somebody had indeed been planning a riot! I walked to the London greenpeace bookfair in Conway hall about 2 miles away. As we approached it we noticed another 6 police vans parked down a side street. When we got there we discovered an ad-hoc defence campaign was being set up and that police vans were outside all of the festival venues. Of the 100 or so hauled off from the march most were just held (and searched) till the march got out of sight. Some 30 were arrested and of these only two were charged (one for assault!!!) and the other for possessing a knife. They were released after several hours. Of course as an anarchist I expect this sort of behaviour from the police. I've also nothing against people defending themselves from or having a go at the police providing in doing so they have the general support of those around them (i.e. I'm not into a small group provoking a riot to get other people heads bashed). I've written this account both for the information it contains and for those who see the police as a neutral body following some sort of rules of fair play. Was there anything we could have done to stop the arrests. Probably not, we were massively outnumbered, they were about 3000 police along the route of the march, outnumbering the anarchist contingent at about 20 to 1. They had 2ft+ truncheons, padded clothes, horses, riot shields, helicopters, vans (they drove these at speed through crowds during the Poll Tax riot) and presumably plastic bullets if they wanted them. As the arrests show we had nothing that even they could consider a weapon (I'd guess the knife was of the Swiss army variety rather than a two foot machete). Those who attempted non violent resistance were beaten up feet from me. Even if the rest of the march had come to our aid we were still outnumbered and many of the marchers were young children or pensioners. This time the police had us cold. The march was the last event of the festival I attended and really it was typical of it. The week was characterised by lack of organisation and communication. For the most part those that had come from other countries were left out in the cold by the organisers with one or two exceptions. Because of the boycott by most of the British anarchist groups there was almost no voice other that the counter culture there. I suspect for anyone for whom the week was their first exposure to anarchism it was a disaster. The impression you would be left with was of drunken lunatics into looking different but incapable of organising a piss up in a brewery. One member of the Solidarity Federation I met asked me if thought the conference would put British anarchism back ten or fifteen years. On the other hand it was an opportunity to meet a lot of motivated people many of whom were involved locally in activity. There were opportunities to address many people at the major meetings and even set up your own fringe meetings. We did this with some success considering their were only two of us there. That perhaps is the main tragedy of the week, despite the sloppy organisation a lot of it could have been turned around into a political event rather than a theatre of the absurd. But none of the British organisations tried to do this. The fact that they were unwilling or unable to do so suggests that they are just as much ghettoised as the organisers of the event, just in a different ghetto. Andrew Flood Andrew Flood anflood@macollamh.ucd.ie Phone: 706(2389)