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I Dissect a Riot
Like the Giant Himalayan lily, Bristol riots bloom every ten years or so. Last time, in April 2011, it was centred on Stokes Croft, where incidents around a squat and the new Tesco opposite formed the centre of a tangled tale I did my second-hand best to chronicle at the time, at least to the extent of collecting links, most of which tended to show the mendacity of the police, who propagated fairy stories about petrol bombs to retrospectively justify their own violence.
Last summer, of course, we had the little incident with Colston's statue, when (to give due credit) the police behaved extremely well, deciding on their own initiative that they'd rather sacrifice the bronze bonce of a slave trader than the living noggins of any actual Bristolians. (This decision appears to have infuriated the Home Secretary.) However, things have reverted to type over the last few days.
I see that Boris Johnson, who is trying to pass a bill to ban protests, has condemned the protests that the bill provoked (shocker!), and that his cry has been enthusiastically taken up by the press, soi-disant Opposition, etc. And why wouldn't they, you ask? After all, the protesters broke police officers' arms, punctured lungs, and did all kinds of mayhem, as widely reported in the press the next day.
Oh, except that it turned out that this was a pack of lies. As Owen Jones has pointed out, it's pattern that has been repeated on a regular basis for the last forty years, from Orgreave to the Kingsnorth power station climate protests. Protestors are accused of violent behaviour, which a) justifies the violence of the police and b) takes up all the headlines, robbing their actual cause of publicity. Then, a few days or weeks later - or decades in some cases - it's quietly admitted that it was all bollocks.
I've no idea what happened at the protests over the last few days, since I was safely behind my front door about a kilometre away; but given the fascistic bent of the current government and the police's history of mendacity in such situations, why on earth would I trust their narrative?
Last summer, of course, we had the little incident with Colston's statue, when (to give due credit) the police behaved extremely well, deciding on their own initiative that they'd rather sacrifice the bronze bonce of a slave trader than the living noggins of any actual Bristolians. (This decision appears to have infuriated the Home Secretary.) However, things have reverted to type over the last few days.
I see that Boris Johnson, who is trying to pass a bill to ban protests, has condemned the protests that the bill provoked (shocker!), and that his cry has been enthusiastically taken up by the press, soi-disant Opposition, etc. And why wouldn't they, you ask? After all, the protesters broke police officers' arms, punctured lungs, and did all kinds of mayhem, as widely reported in the press the next day.
Oh, except that it turned out that this was a pack of lies. As Owen Jones has pointed out, it's pattern that has been repeated on a regular basis for the last forty years, from Orgreave to the Kingsnorth power station climate protests. Protestors are accused of violent behaviour, which a) justifies the violence of the police and b) takes up all the headlines, robbing their actual cause of publicity. Then, a few days or weeks later - or decades in some cases - it's quietly admitted that it was all bollocks.
I've no idea what happened at the protests over the last few days, since I was safely behind my front door about a kilometre away; but given the fascistic bent of the current government and the police's history of mendacity in such situations, why on earth would I trust their narrative?
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