In 1993/94, the No M11 Link Road Campaign in London’s East End, had audaciously captured a dozen or so front pages and acres of magazine article through its spirited defense against a hugely unpopular new road. The hugely expensive evictions of Wanstead’s 250 year old Sweet Chestnut tree and the Independent Free Area of Wanstonia (five squatted Edwardian houses) had become media sensations, capturing the imagination of millions of people. Attention started to shift towards the Criminal Justice Bill – the latest attempt to criminalise squatters, travelers, protesters and ravers, basically the entire counter culture.
On the morning of November 4 1994, the campaign was occupying Claremont Road, an entire row of Victorian houses at the Leyton end of the proposed route, and I was occupying a seat in Cafe Claremonte, waiting for one of Mo’s delicious toasted beanies, the speciality of the house. Big John arrived wearing his Guy Fawkes-style hat, and sat down, casually burying one of the two axes that he carried around into the floor. “Today, we’re going to sit on the roof of Westminster?” He announced.
They’d been up most of the night planning the action, as they had planned previous occupations of the then Transport Minister John MacGregor’s roof in North London, and the roof of the High Court. But despite those earlier successes, the idea that someone could just rock up one morning and simply take one of the most security conscious rooftops in the world, seemed completely farcical. As it turned out – Ealing comedy-style farcical.
An hour later, the campaign’s battered van pulled up on the pavement just above Oliver Cromwell’s statue at the House of Commons, and seven activists piled out. To the CCTV, they probably looked like a bunch of disheveled builders, parking momentarily to re-arrange their work tools. They met no resistance as they pressed home their element of surprise, creating an aluminium gang plank between the relatively low pavement wall and a 20 foot security fence that rose up from Cromwell Green deep below. Across they went, one by one, and down they dropped, parachute rolling into no man’s land and a guaranteed arrest The police soon became frantic, shut out by their own elaborate security system, and despite rugby tackling Jim at Cromwell’s feet, couldn’t prevent five others from shinning up a huge drain pipe and disappearing over the parapet some fifty feet up.
And then.. A miracle. One of the team spotted a rope, presumably left by cleaners, dangling all the way down from the parapet. As Big John had promised earlier at axe point, the campaign did indeed find itself sitting on the roof of Westminster, dwarfed by the clock-face of Big Ben, watching the first of several police snipers nervously taking up position nearby.
They unfurled a pink banner, saying ‘Defy the Criminal Justice Bill’, whose Act has now punished dissent and criminalised alternative lifestyles for well over two decades. The police often use the Aggravated Trespass law against peaceful protest, most recently at the DSEi arms fair in London.
Among the throng of delighted onlookers busy recording London’s newest attraction, a tourist quipped on national television, “Maybe it is too easy to reach the roof of the House of Commons.” And the late Tony Banks, who was then the MP for Leyton’s neighbouring borough of Newham, rubbed it in with his characteristic cockney vigour, “They know what they’re up to. And I think that they’ve done a good job.”
The job lasted all day. The five activists soaking up a steady chorus of approval from passing motorists. Only in the late afternoon did they start to come down, with the last occupier starting to come down at the stroke of midnight, into the arms of the police on Guy Fawkes day.(the day the CJB was to become law).
The activists managed to take their own prisoner. It seems that on the climb down, an extremely weathered gargoyle’s head snapped off and found it’s way into someone’s bag. As they do. And the police, who clearly didn’t find it amiss to find a nondescript lump of masonry in a tree-hugger’s bag, let it go. A plaster cast copy of which is currently held at the Museum of London, alongside the rest of the No M11 Link Road Campaign archive, in the adjacent bay to the Suffragette Movement archive.
But the original is out there somewhere, remaining the ultimate souvenir to the ultimate rooftop action.
With new laws coming out all the time to criminalise the people, it needs to be said that protest will never die. It will just evolve and take on new energy and tactics. The State will never accept that, never accept the fact that we’re not going anywhere, but always in their face on the issues that matter to us..
x
Music by Dreadzone: Fight the Power
Shot by Alison Butler
A sequence from the forthcoming documentary ‘The Lock ‘n’ Rollie Years – Part Two”
https://criminaljusticecourses.net/defying-the-criminal-justice-bill-nov-1994/
No comments:
Post a Comment