[Campaignforrealdemocracy] Fences Down Now ?

[Mark Barrett]

Dear All

A Facebook group will go up soon to start a viral campaign to ensure the
fences come down soon - please can people suggest slogan ideas for the FB
group?
Simon Moore has started a little list, but we're not quite there yet..

Something short and to the point, catchy & Diggers / Land Enclosures
related?

Ideally campaign will both get rid of the barriers so we can hold our rally
there on the 9th Oct, as well as advertise it

Up the revolution

Mark
www.democracyrally.org

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/sep/15/democracy-village-what-happened-next

*Democracy Village: what happened next?*

Despite Boris Johnson's best efforts, a small army of protesters are still
camped outside Westminster. So are they a symbol of Britain's healthy
democracy – or just a pointless nuisance?

   - *Andy Beckett* <http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/andybeckett>


   - The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian>, Wednesday 15
   September 2010
   - Article history<http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/sep/15/democracy-village-what-happened-next#history-link-box>

[image: democracy village] Democracy Village peace protesters exploit a
legal loophole by camping out on the Westminster council-owned pavement.
Photograph: Teri Pengilley for the Guardian

There are mice in Parliament Square. They come out after dark: quick and fat
and seemingly fearless, as they dart across the narrow pavements of possibly
the world's most famous traffic island while, inches away, the last of the
London <http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/london> rush hour thunders past. Kate
gets an uncharacteristically dreamy look when she talks about them. "They
run," she says, "up and down my tent poles."

Since May, Kate has been living in the square in a small tent without a
flysheet. "When it rained yesterday I had a little bit of a leak," she says.
Kate is 27, thin and pale, despite these months of camping in one of the
capital's most shadeless corners. Her tent sits directly on the pavement.
But she seems surprisingly content. Until May she was just one of London's
drifting homeless; now she has a purpose.

Behind her tent and along the square's eastern pavement, directly facing the
houses of parliament, are large hand-painted banners: "End Afghanistan
Corporate War", "Bring Our Soldiers Home Alive", "Don't Attack Iran/Syria",
"Democracy Village: ON STRIKE for Peace", "24 Hour Ongoing Frontline
Picket". Slogans of this sort have been a fixture in the square for almost a
decade, ever since the anti-war protester Brian Haw set up camp here in
2001. Haw is in the square still, a few yards away, often sitting as still
as a statue, well on his way to becoming a national institution – or even an
international one: the subject of a Japanese documentary, the Most Inspiring
Political Figure of 2007 according to Channel 4, the subject of a Turner
prize-winning work by the artist Mark Wallinger.

Yet the protest <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/protest> that Kate belongs
to is not so revered. During its four-and-a-half months of existence,
Democracy Village has been called "nauseating" by the mayor of London, Boris
Johnson <http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/boris>; "squalid" by the leader
of Westminster council, Colin Barrow; "a malignant infection" by the Labour
MP Tom Harris; a "threat to public health" and an opportunistic piece of
"free camping" by the Times; and both an exercise in "self-regard" and
"self-righteousness" and "a wino's Glastonbury" by the columnist Tom
Sutcliffe in the usually liberal – and anti-war – Independent.

Even Haw has condemned Democracy Village. "All their activities have been
deliberately unreasonable, even depraved and outrageous," he wrote on his
website in July. "Drink, drugs, threats, avarice, violence, disgusting
behaviour, are the hallmarks of Democracy Village." The protest, he went on,
was led by an "alleged agent provocateur", with the unspoken implication
that it had been created by the British government in order to discredit
him.

Eight weeks ago, after a protracted legal struggle that went all the way to
the high court, Johnson had the then few dozen Democracy Village activists
evicted<http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jun/29/parliament-square-protesters-eviction-order>from
the grassy central portion of the square. Fifty bailiffs and 80
policemen were involved in the operation, which took place at 1am, and the
protesters, caught slightly cold, put up limited resistance: a few locked
themselves to the rickety metal structures they had erected, but were
quickly pulled off and manhandled away. A truckload of metal fencing was
erected around the grass, which over the summer, to much outrage from
politicians and the press, had in patches been completely worn away.
Round-the-clock security guards were installed behind this barrier to
prevent any re-occupation of the land. Barrow commented that he was
"relieved this dreadful blight of Parliament Square has finally come to an
end".

Except that it hasn't. Immediately after the eviction, many of the Democracy
Village activists melted away, but a minority, Kate among them, simply moved
a few yards from the grass to the pavement and set themselves up next to
Haw. And there they have stayed, studiously ignored or glared at by him, but
gradually building up a new encampment until, by yesterday, there were 15 or
16 tents in a ragged line all along the eastern side of the square and
curling round to the south. There are also two tall, walk-in wooden
cabinets, almost like scoreboxes on a rural cricket ground, where the
Democracy Village protesters lock their valuables; a padded office chair for
them to rest in when not handing out leaflets and talking to passersby; and
wooden pallets, liberated from builders' skips, to keep most of the tents
off the damp ground.

"Boris Johnson's made himself look like an idiot," says Luke, one of the
protesters. "He's moved us about two inches." Luke is 22, tanned and lanky
and pretty sure of himself. He has a mattress in his tent, and his
possessions all neatly tucked away on either side. "Before I was here, I was
homeless for seven years, just wasting away in a hostel with alcoholics and
crackheads." He sits comfortably cross-legged on the pavement, smoking a
roll-up, as if he were at some idyllic rural pop festival, while the traffic
shoots by just behind his back. "The only downside of being here," he goes
on, "is the carbon monoxide."

An older, slightly more guarded protester, who gives his name as Chrysalis,
says: "We're more in the public eye now, being on the pavement. We're more
approachable." The fencing keeping them off the grass is actually perfect
for securing banners and tents to. Even the security guards, heavy-set men
who mostly sit looking bored on the benches on the square's leafier, less
windswept side, are, Kate says, "actually a really nice group of lads". Luke
adds: "We jump over the fence all the time, just to prove to Boris that we
can."

The mayor's press office describes the current encampment delicately as "an
ongoing situation". Some MPs are more robust. "It is a total farce," an
unnamed former Labour minister told the London Evening Standard recently.
"It [the protest] is as big an eyesore as it ever was." The Conservative MP
Malcolm Rifkind told the paper that the coalition government should draw up
legislation to remove it. In July 2009, even before Democracy Village
appeared in the square alongside Haw, David Cameron told Sky News: "I am all
in favour of free speech . . . But I think there are moments when our
Parliament Square does look a pretty poor place, with shanty town tents and
the rest of it . . . My argument is: 'Enough is enough'."

Yet turning such rhetoric into action may continue to prove difficult. The
square, which was created in 1868 from a graveyard and a patchwork of
demolished buildings, is a small maze of jurisdictions. Its core of grass,
paving and beleaguered old plane trees, strictly called Parliament Square
Garden, is part of the royal parks, but managed by the Greater London
Authority (GLA), which consists of the mayor and the London Assembly. The
garden is covered by an array of fussy bylaws: "No person shall . . . wash
or dry any piece of clothing or fabric" or "use any kite or model aircraft";
"written permission is required" to "exhibit any notice", "camp, or erect .
. . any structure", or "give a public speech". Well before Democracy
Village, some of these bylaws had been broken or tested to the limit by
protesters from Haw to Tamil nationalists to an ex-soldier, James Matthews,
who was sentenced to 30 days in prison in 2000 for adding a green mohican
made of turf to the square's statue of Winston Churchill during an
anti-capitalist march.

The square's pavements, meanwhile, are another matter. Along the south and
east side, where the Democracy Villagers are now gathered, they are the
responsibility of Westminster council. The council does not currently have
"the necessary powers", says Barrow, to remove the demonstrators. And nor
does the Metropolitan police: "Officers," says a spokesman, cannot "remove
tents or any similar structures from [this] public highway". So few
passersby use this part of the square, put off by the traffic and the lack
of pedestrian crossings, that it is hard to accuse protesters of obstructing
it.

You might think that security concerns offer the authorities a better excuse
for moving them on. Over recent decades, Westminster has become a
near-fortress of blocked-off roads, 20ft fences, anti-truck bomb barriers,
CCTV and armed police officers. In 2005, the Blair government's infamously
draconian Serious Organised Crime and Police Act included sections to
tightly regulate protests within a mile-wide "designated area" around the
Palace of Westminster, including Parliament Square. "A person seeking
authorisation for a demonstration," the act says, "must give written notice"
to the police; and protesters must not cause "a security risk" or
"disruption to the life of the community". Haw had to fight a long legal
battle against the act in order to continue his anti-war vigil. Other
Westminster demonstrators have been convicted under the legislation: for
reading out the names of British soldiers killed in Iraq, even for holding a
tea party on the Parliament Square lawn.

However, the sheer complexity of the overlapping laws and authorities means
that protesters can continue to chance their arm and hope to find a
loophole. So it was this May Day, when the founders of Democracy Village
detached themselves from the day's traditional leftwing festivities in the
capital and occupied Parliament Square.

At first, there were just a dozen scattered tents and a plan to stay for the
six days until the general election. The national media initially ignored
the camp. On election night, as taxis full of journalists and politicians
raced round the square heading for interviews and parties, I found a few
protesters sitting, ignored, round a brazier on the cold grass. But they
stayed, and grew in numbers and ambition: banners went up about Afghanistan
and the Greek crisis, about climate change and the consequences of the
banking meltdown. The campers set up a kitchen and compost toilets, and
planted a "Peace Garden", an oak tree and strawberry plants. Once the fever
of the hung parliament had passed, reporters came to visit in numbers.
Suitably dramatic quotes were provided: "We've got two governments now,
their one and our one," Chris Knight, one of the leading lights of Democracy
Village, told the Times. "This is genuinely the beginning of a revolution."

The villagers jeered the Queen as she arrived for the state opening of
parliament. They climbed scaffolding on Westminster Abbey, on the other side
of the square, to unfurl an anti-war banner. They staged a sit-down outside
Downing Street. They set up a website; declared their support for the
British Airways strikers; had militant letters published in newspapers.

Despite the fury that Democracy Village began to arouse – outsiders mess
with parliament's protocol and planting arrangements at their peril – it was
not hard to view it more sympathetically. Why not an ongoing protest about
Britain's economic and foreign policies right next to the places where the
key decisions and votes on them were taken? As Tony Benn, one of the camp's
few prominent supporters, put it in July, "Turning Parliament Square into a
Democracy Village . . . exactly sums up my view of [the square's] role."

The intolerance towards the village from Conservative politicians in
particular sits ill with the coalition's loud talk of restoring civil
liberties after Labour's supposedly authoritarian rule. In 2006 Boris
Johnson, then a loose-tongued Tory MP rather than mayor of London, wrote in
the Daily Telegraph that protests in Parliament Square such as Haw's, while
they "spoiled the look of the place", also reminded people "across the world
[that] Britain still stands for a certain idea of liberty".

Then again, Democracy Village's openness and unruliness did have their
disadvantages. Gradually, says Maria Gallastegui, a veteran peace
campaigner, "we were overrun by homeless people. Democracy Village became a
place to come for shelter, for food. It became like an old sanctuary
ground." For the original, politically committed residents, the camp became,
she says, "unmanageable". The communal cooking utensils were stolen, and the
kitchen had to be shut down. Drinkers settled in. "It degenerated into a Mad
Max environment," says Quentin Cross, a slight, softly spoken Irishman and
another longstanding resident. "I was beaten up several times. People were
being ripped off."

Yet Gallastegui and the other remaining villagers insist that many of the
negative press stories about the camp were exaggerated and politically
motivated. In fact, they say, the protest's genuine activists regularly
moved their tents to minimise harm to the grass, carefully collected and
removed their rubbish, and quickly stopped using the smelly compost toilets
in favour of nearby public lavatories. As for Haw's allegation that
Gallastegui is an agent provocateur – she and her comrades roll their eyes.
Until last year, she was part of his protest, before, as he puts it on his
website, "she withdrew . . . by mutual consent".

The current incarnation of Democracy Village certainly feels genuine. "No
alcohol zone," says a notice taped to a lamp-post. Instead, the half-dozen
activists who are there at any one time drink tea and keep the pavement tidy
around their tents. "We're having to run this as a tight ship now," says
Gallastegui, who is older than the other, mostly male protesters, and seems
to be in charge of daily operations. Before the original camp was evicted,
she says, without alerting the GLA or Westminster council she contacted the
police to obtain authorisation to move the protest on to the pavement. The
names of the activists involved, the number of tents, the positioning of
those tents so as not to block the pavement – all these have been agreed
with the police.

On a mild autumn evening, Gallastegui has just got back from one of the
protesters' daily "food runs" with a carrier bag of sandwiches and a thermos
of hot water donated by a friendly cafe. Central London is a relatively easy
place for a savvy protester to live on the street: the villagers also know
which nearby council day centres for the homeless offer the chance of a
shower and the use of a computer. And camping in Parliament Square, for all
the noise and pollution, has its compensations; looking up from her tent at
the golden, floodlit spikes and towers of the Palace of Westminster across
the road, Kate says, "For all the bureaucracy that goes on in there, it's a
beautiful building".

But hostility towards the protest regularly re-asserts itself. Sometimes,
passing drivers throw abuse and bottles. At pub closing time, people come to
argue with the villagers, and sometimes to kick and upend their tents.
Tonight, a posh-looking young man holding a half-empty pint of lager comes
over to tell the campers that their actions are "illegal". The campers tell
him that they have police permission while his public drinking does not. He
wanders off. And then there is the traffic, which never properly quietens:
the villagers say they have learned to sleep through most of it, but never
the sirens.

After a few hours out here, even on a warmish night, a chill begins to seep
through your clothes. Most of the protesters wear fleeces and hiking boots,
but cocky young Luke is in a long-sleeved T-shirt. "My brother would
probably be laughing at me, living in a tent out here," he says. Then he
suddenly turns sober. "My brother was killed in Afghanistan: 1st Para. When
I hit 15."

I ask him if he thinks the protest is having a political effect. "I'm so out
of touch with radio and TV, I don't really know." Gallastegui is more
upbeat. The camp's anti-war message, she says, is increasingly in tune with
public opinion as the Afghan situation worsens. But then she too turns
downbeat: "I've been here for four years, and I need to move on. Well, I'm
in two minds . . . this takes all your time. Away from here, I could be
doing more writing, more networking."

Yet even if Democracy Village soon disappears from Parliament Square,
whether because of its activists' exhaustion or shifting priorities, or the
coming of winter, or some cunning initiative by the authorities, a precedent
has been established. The square has become a kind of new Speaker's Corner,
not like the old one, tucked away and basically toothless on the edge of
Hyde Park, with an audience of tourists and shoppers, but right at the
centre of British power.

Already, beside Haw and Democracy Village, other protests, currently about
the alleged world dominance of the freemasons and the rights of fathers, are
beginning to establish small encampments and jostle for space on the
pavement. All these demonstrators may get an opportunity to spread out
further. Thanks to the recent wet weather, the Parliament Square grass has
quickly grown back, thick and lush. The security fence around it, the GLA
acknowledges, is ugly and excludes the public. It will soon have to come
down.

*Some names have been changed*

Related
18 Jul 2010

Democracy Village set to be
demolished<http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jul/18/democracy-village-demolished>
2 Jul 2010

Parliament Square protesters win eviction
reprieve<http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jul/02/parliament-square-protesters-eviction-reprieve>
3 Jun 2010

Boris Johnson starts legal action to remove Parliament Square peace
protesters<http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jun/03/boris-johnson-parliament-square-peace-protesters>
25 May 2010

Police and London mayor crack down on Parliament Square
protest<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/25/crackdown-parliament-square-protests>
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