Kettles, Troops and Students - What's going on in London RIGHT NOW.

They did it, again. Once again, it was the Metropolitan Police, once again it was in London. It was the national walkout day and thousands of students were marching in countless cities all over the United Kingdom. In London, a colorful and determined march (supported by all student organisation, with the exception of the notoriously brave-hearted NUS) made its way from Trafalgar square down to Whitehall. There, at about 1pm, it happened again. The Metropolitan Police, fearful of being blamed again for incompetence, kettled everyone in.

For those who didn’t know what kettle means, it would be enough to say that it is hardly a metaphor: multiple police lines block access around the march form every side, stopping anyone from joining or leaving it. This includes stopping anyone trying to bring in food, water or warm clothes, as well as anyone trying to leave because s/he is feeling unwell or needs the toilet. So, just like a big stock of cattle, about three thousand people were held in a state of ‘preventive detention’, freezing in the middle of the street (the temperature was almost zero degrees), forced to urinate inside their cage, left without food or water. 

I am writing this piece about five hours after the police closed the kettle. Finally, in an burst of compassion or of ultimate humiliation, they have sent inside a couple of portable toilets and a few bottles of water. Still, they haven’t opened the kettle. I almost forgot to mention that, in fact, they had left a little present inside the kettle. A police van was seemingly abandoned in the middle of the march, and locked in together with the thousands of temporary prisoners. The media couldn’t hope for anything better. If the shots of the cameras were bullets, very little would remain of that police van, which has been progressively vandalized by the cold, starving and angry crowd. Someone versed in theology would immediately spot the ironic similarity with that apple tree left by a vengeful God in the garden of eden. Touch it, and you will deserve all the pain that I am going to inflict upon you.

But this is not the only irony of the day. While the students are being ‘preventively disciplined’ by the Metropolitan Police, the latest edition of The Evening Standard is spreading across the city, carrying the headline ‘Attention! Troops in the classroom. / Ex-soldiers to be drafted in to improve discipline in schools’. Apparently, as well as giving back to teachers the Victorian right to use ‘reasonable force’ on their students, the government is now assigning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan to teach discipline to the British youth. Those soldiers who already have a degree, continues the Evening Standard, will be able to start teaching six weeks after coming back from the battlefield, while those without a degree will be paid by the State (that is, the taxpayers) to do a two-year training course, which goes under the name ‘Troops to Teachers’. This all sounds too funny not to be terrifying.

It will be interesting to see what will happen next. In the short term, we might witness new students’ protests, which will hopefully find new means of expressing their anger. As we learnt once again today, one big, compact march is an easy target for police tactics such as the kettle, which seems to have become a standard practice, despite it clearly verges on the abuse of human rights. It is likely that, in the next few days and weeks, students will come out with different types of action, perhaps closer to guerrilla tactics. Looking at the further future, on the other hand, we can’t but wonder what the encounter between angry and impoverished students and their new ‘veteran’ teachers will look like. Film-makers, writers and psychologists will have enough material to work on for years, as the maybe irrational, yet strongly motivated anger of the students will meet the post-traumatic stress disorders that veterans will bring back from Iraq and Afghanistan straight into the classrooms. 

What is certain, at this stage, is that for both sides, that of the students and that of the government, what is at stake now is much more than the cuts in public spending or the rise in education fees. Twenty years after the supposed end of history and of ideologies, today, more than ever, the struggle is between two ideological positions, two different visions of the world. This alone is a good enough reason for everyone to get involved in the fight, as much as possible. Elections might have never changed anything, as many of us have been thinking for a while now, but the twentieth century taught us that struggles like this one are such stuff as history is made on.

Federico Campagna

24 November 2010, London