Top notch reporting, really appreciated the links to publications in Liverpool and Sheffield. This post alone justifies a years subscription. You are building something important and powerful.
I was walking through Piccadilly Gardens about 11:30 on Saturday morning well before it all kicked off. There were a couple of dozen protesters compared to say couple of hundred police. I hung around the benches to listen in to some of the conversations there and see what was going on.
One of the regular Piccadilly Gardens crowd is a black guy of indeterminate origin - I guess in his mid thirties. He’s an alcoholic drug addict with lots of mental health problems. A couple of the protesters had got hold of him and draped him in some little, bunting type England flags, were taking photos of him and taunting him saying ‘Look, he’s English’ and laughing. Poor guy didn’t even know what day t was or what was going on. Police came and removed him out of harm’s way. This is worth remembering when videos appear of ‘The wrong people getting arrested’ Sometimes it’s better to remove the person rather than tackle the mob. He was not arrested. As far as I could tell he was just moved away and told to keep himself out of harms way
One of their number was talking about using Gandhi like tactics - meaning passive resistance. He was saying that five of their number beating up one guy plays badly on social media while one of their own group getting battered by 100 police looks great. Sage observation I thought, but you don’t have to be Gandhi to work that out and nobody appeared to be keen to to either passively resist or be the one beaten up by the police. A woman in a head scarf walked past and a couple of them remarked ‘Look at the state of that’
A smartly dressed elderly chap in chinos and short sleeved shirt who looked like he’s never been on a demo in his life was speaking to a tourist who was asking what was going on. He told him, wrongly, it was a demonstration against someone from Rwanda who had come over here and stabbed three girls to death. His detailed account of what happened was broadly correct except for the rather crucial bit of information that the assailant was not from Rwanda but rather his parents were. It is from this kind of disinformation seed, perhaps honestly believed, that large scale public order incidents flower and bloom. The tourist was unaware of this so took it entirely at face value. As they were speaking, one of the men who had draped the hapless homeless guy in England flags interjected “Murderers. They’re murderers. They come over here on boats and murder kids” The more sensible but entirely misinformed older chap tried to defuse this by asking the tourist where he was from. France, as it turned out. The chap then started saying how he had been reading about France and how they have a lot of problems with immigration too. The tourist then disclosed, perhaps unwisely, or at the very least naively, that he was originally from Lebanon. This seemed to baffle the younger group - I don’t think Lebanon was on their self-proscribed list of hated countries or nationalities. If it was I think things might have escalated quite quickly. Their narrow remit for the day appeared to be concentrated on women in head scarves and second generation Rwandans and anybody else they didn’t like the look of.
The elderly gentleman then said something nobody could have predicted: “Oh, I have a very good friend who is Lebanese. Do you know him?”
On that surreal note, I left them to get on with it and watched the violent highlights on social media later that day.
Top notch reporting, really appreciated the links to publications in Liverpool and Sheffield. This post alone justifies a years subscription. You are building something important and powerful.
Thank you Miranda.
I was walking through Piccadilly Gardens about 11:30 on Saturday morning well before it all kicked off. There were a couple of dozen protesters compared to say couple of hundred police. I hung around the benches to listen in to some of the conversations there and see what was going on.
One of the regular Piccadilly Gardens crowd is a black guy of indeterminate origin - I guess in his mid thirties. He’s an alcoholic drug addict with lots of mental health problems. A couple of the protesters had got hold of him and draped him in some little, bunting type England flags, were taking photos of him and taunting him saying ‘Look, he’s English’ and laughing. Poor guy didn’t even know what day t was or what was going on. Police came and removed him out of harm’s way. This is worth remembering when videos appear of ‘The wrong people getting arrested’ Sometimes it’s better to remove the person rather than tackle the mob. He was not arrested. As far as I could tell he was just moved away and told to keep himself out of harms way
One of their number was talking about using Gandhi like tactics - meaning passive resistance. He was saying that five of their number beating up one guy plays badly on social media while one of their own group getting battered by 100 police looks great. Sage observation I thought, but you don’t have to be Gandhi to work that out and nobody appeared to be keen to to either passively resist or be the one beaten up by the police. A woman in a head scarf walked past and a couple of them remarked ‘Look at the state of that’
A smartly dressed elderly chap in chinos and short sleeved shirt who looked like he’s never been on a demo in his life was speaking to a tourist who was asking what was going on. He told him, wrongly, it was a demonstration against someone from Rwanda who had come over here and stabbed three girls to death. His detailed account of what happened was broadly correct except for the rather crucial bit of information that the assailant was not from Rwanda but rather his parents were. It is from this kind of disinformation seed, perhaps honestly believed, that large scale public order incidents flower and bloom. The tourist was unaware of this so took it entirely at face value. As they were speaking, one of the men who had draped the hapless homeless guy in England flags interjected “Murderers. They’re murderers. They come over here on boats and murder kids” The more sensible but entirely misinformed older chap tried to defuse this by asking the tourist where he was from. France, as it turned out. The chap then started saying how he had been reading about France and how they have a lot of problems with immigration too. The tourist then disclosed, perhaps unwisely, or at the very least naively, that he was originally from Lebanon. This seemed to baffle the younger group - I don’t think Lebanon was on their self-proscribed list of hated countries or nationalities. If it was I think things might have escalated quite quickly. Their narrow remit for the day appeared to be concentrated on women in head scarves and second generation Rwandans and anybody else they didn’t like the look of.
The elderly gentleman then said something nobody could have predicted: “Oh, I have a very good friend who is Lebanese. Do you know him?”
On that surreal note, I left them to get on with it and watched the violent highlights on social media later that day.