Several NEA activists were in London for the mid-week demo against the G8 summit on June
11th. The following is a first-hand account of the day?s events. ---- Well where to start?
First off none of our detachment were in the Beak St squat when the police attacked.
However reports quickly came in that people had been injured fairly badly, with police
tasering people and beating them mercilessly. ---- Meanwhile protesters began to gather in
two locations in the west end of London before coming together to form one bloc. Right
away the police moved in attacking us, prompting shouts of ?ACAB! The police protect the
rich!? amongst other militant chants. All this was taking place while tourists and
shoppers looked on with a lot of them approaching parts of the bloc to tell us they
thought the police were acting out of order before going back about their business.
Luckily most of the bloc managed to get around the police by splitting into smaller more
mobile groups, with big chain shops and other targets closing as the blocs approached. The
police meanwhile tried to keep up and occasionally got the better of us resulting in
arrests at various stages but most of the time we managed to evade them thanks to our
knowledge of the streets and back streets... oh and some cleverly placed easy to move road
works! Not much happened after this point with groups of protesters scattered about the
city in various blocs before occasionally getting together before splitting again to keep
the police guessing.
The second part of the day was the street party with protesters regrouping to rest and
enjoy ourselves while police watched. This went on for a while with groups joining from
around the city. Now this was meant to be the official end of the demo but we had other
ideas, we hadn?t forgotten our arrested comrades so we marched to take the fight to the
police, holding a demo on the doorstep of the copshop. The police at this point didn?t
seem to know what to do: if they kettled us, the police station was out of action as the
street was gridlocked with a mix of protesters and police vans, but if they didn?t kettle
us we could march again. In the end we made the choice for them as a group of young
Turkish comrades came up from their own demo in Trafalgar Square saying that they had
heard about our demo and wanted to help, so we gave the police a few more moments of abuse
then pressed onwards to the square to loud cheers of support from the waiting Turkish
crowd, who kindly translated their chants into English so we could join in.
Suddenly a cry went up ?To parliament!? So we marched again, lead by the Turkish bloc who
were now starting to pick up some of our chants as well as teaching us some of theirs.
When we finally reached Downing Street we were greeted by a Sikh protest group before
marching onwards. At this point sadly numbers were starting to get really thin (bearing in
mind this was now about ten hours into the protest). Also now we noticed we were being
followed by what seemed like half of the entire Met police force, so in the end we dispersed.
So all in all it was a very busy day and despite the arrests and the high levels of police
violence and brutality, we think we made our point: business as usual isn?t acceptable.
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» (en) Britain, North-East Anarchist Nee-Nar! #4 - Report from London anti-G8 Protest