There was some confusion when we reached Fetter Lane. The agreed demonstration route had us turning off the Strand and following the Lane up towards Holborn Circus, but some of the crowd had evidently hoped to reach St Pauls by the most direct route, and for a while there was a stand-off. The police were mystified for once. “Keep moving along please, we’re not kettling you,” one of them shouted.
On Fetter Lane we stopped again, this time involuntarily. A boy probably not out of his teens wearing a hoody and tracksuit bottoms, who with a couple of friends had climbed onto some scaffolding to look, shouted of the hold up: “We shouldn’t just wait here, we should go forward! Forward!” There was a general ‘Yeh!’ but no movement, and everybody waited for everybody else. “Whose streets? Our streets!” we chanted, while we waited for the police to let us walk through them.
The day before the march the Metropolitan Police had announced that they were using special powers under Section 12 and 14 of the Public Order Act to impose extra conditions on the demonstration. Anyone who left the agreed route, went within a hundred yards of Bank, or who stayed at the march endpoint for more than two hours would be committing a criminal offence and could be arrested. Protest in this country is now bound by the assumption that the police have a total right to determine its timing, place and manner.
At Holborn Circus the atmosphere had been ramped up. There were hundreds of police, most of them now in riot gear, and the windows of all the buildings around were full of office workers filming and taking pictures with their mobile phones. A fat man at a window above the branch of Natwest at the corner of Charterhouse Street was making ‘wanker’ gestures at us.
We chanted the now-familiar “no ifs, no buts, no education cuts”, which some people updated to “still no ifs,” and the call and response of “I say ‘Tory’, you say ‘scum’” was given an airing. A man behind me tried to raise the tone with “a spectre, is haunting, a spectre’s haunting Europe” as we crossed Holborn Viaduct and passed near to St Pauls – which was also out of bounds.
