What happened at the Cenotaph

When Black Lives Matter protesters marched through Westminster on Sunday, the now familiar chants echoed precisely those of the original American movement, formed in 2013, seven years ago, which has been at the vanguard of public outcry against the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis: “Black lives matter!”; “No justice, no peace / No racist police”; “Silence is compliance”; “Say his name / George Floyd”; “Stop the killing!”

This was a youthful protest. As I watched at the scene it was clear that the majority of those marching were no older than their early 20s, with an overwhelming presence of outraged teenagers, cooped up until recently in their homes for months due to government lockdown measures. Many of those present may not even remember clearly the killing of Mark Duggan in 2011, that sparked the riots that year and are cited now as an example of injustice.

Most of the slogans adorning the thousands of placards and banners that were carried through the streets, slung around statues in Parliament Square and tied in their hundreds to public railings, were about historic British injustices. Only a minority referred to the injustice of Floyd’s killing in the United States.

The majority called for an end to racism more broadly, to the killing of innocent black people, and the need to challenge white privilege and white supremacy. Verbally abusive protesters booed at and harangued largely silent and unmoving police officers, clearly under strict instructions to remain as pacific as possible so that hostilities might be calmed. The individual police officers themselves appeared to be identified as the enemy – whether as legitimised perpetrators of violence against ethnic minorities or symbolic manifestations of the state. Or perhaps the more violent members of the crowd just needed a target to throw things at.

Along Victoria Street protesters confronted regular police, demanding to know why there had been any intervention by the law at all. One officer explained carefully and patiently that it is not that he disagrees with the principle of Black Lives Matter, but that protests need to be controlled and that there is a need to ensure social distancing. The policeman in question spent some minutes in explanatory conversation.

The Cenotaph remained unstained by graffiti at this time – unlike the scenes of defacement witnessed on Saturday and what followed later on Sunday – but the memorial was covered in cardboard BLM placards. Triumphant marchers posed on the monument for selfies to be posted on Instagram, presumably to proclaim the symbolic triumph of the movement.

When I asked officers why the Cenotaph was not being protected – at some points over the weekend perimeters had been formed around the Churchill statue in Parliament Square – an officer replied “Good question”. When pressed, it emerged that which battles to pick was determined by a decision from “command”. “If it was up to us we’d do something about it”.

Police armed in riot gear formed a human barrier under the arches of Treasury Passage on Whitehall where, as the evening drew on, tensions ran high. Large backup units jogged in formation to their strategic posts in case the situation escalated. The smell of marijuana was ubiquitous – smokers were unchallenged, naturally.

The objective of the crowd’s front line at Treasury Passage remained unclear. Crowds were clearly angered by the apparently intimidating display of force; the riot police by virtue of their function became targeted as a manifestation of state power. With riot police only deployed due to the high levels of disorder amongst the protesters in the first place, the stand-off was paradoxical.

A large minority of the protesters were white, almost entirely students or teenagers. This was the white bourgeoisie belting out “Shame on you!” at black police officers. 

Along Horse Guards, two teenage girls on bicycles circled in the middle of the road, as police relieved of their shifts sipped cups of tea from a refreshment stand, looking on. “NO RACIST POLICE!” they yelled, and got no response. A group of black teenagers, unsure of how involved they wished to become, noted the site of riot police squads assembled along Whitehall. A young man remonstrated with a more militant friend, “Do you want to end up in a gulag? Because that’s where we’re going today!”

During the last five years, five people have been killed by British law enforcement. Three were Usman Khan, perpetrator of the London Bridge terror attack, Sudesh Amman, after a killing spree in Streatham, and Hassan Yahya, shot in Westminster after challenging police with knives. The only case in which the shooting has been speculated to be a mistake was of Sean Fitzgerald in Coventry, Wiltshire, in an “intelligence-led” operation about which there is little information in the public domain. He was white. 

Obviously the police were anxious to avoid the deployment of mounted police, and the negative symbolic imagery this can convey when filmed and posted online. No horses were deployed on Sunday. It was a mounted police officer who suffered a collapsed lung, broken rib and shattered collarbone at the hands of rioters on Saturday. One can only imagine the response if such injury had been inflicted on a protester. Extreme restraint was the order of the day on Sunday. 

The atmosphere was surreal, spurred on by social media it seemed as though the protestors believed they were in America. “The UK is not innocent!” proclaimed numerous placards.

Of course racism exists in Britain. But the raw data on police brutality in the last decade – let alone extrajudicial killing of black Britons – simply isn’t there.

For protesters so young, the emphasis was on slogans laden with theory. “White supremacy is terrorism”, proclaimed one sign with Chomskyan flair. “White silence enforces structural violence”, read another. The metaphysical concept of “structural violence”, in which complicity in an unjust social order is to be regarded as morally equal to physical violence against the oppressed class, has its origins in Marxist and subsequently Foucauldian social theory.

The cries of impoverished black Britons, tired of their disenfranchisement and a lack of economic opportunity, blended with humanities students spotting an opportunity to air the jargonistic tools of political analysis that teachers have bestowed upon them.

In spite of the explicit targeting of the symbols of historic British state power – statues of statesmen; uniformed police – the weekend protests had an air of chaotic aimlessness. There was frustration, but with who exactly? There were demands for change. What change? The rule of “white privilege” was declared to be over with the ascendancy of “black power”. How will this be manifested in real life?

As the Metropolitan police officers returned home to their families on Sunday night, battered, bruised and in several cases more seriously injured, some of them will have wondered what great oppression they are guilty of as they try to keep the peace. After the streets cleared, as they left their posts, stepping over the specks of spattered blood on the ground in Treasury Passage, they could be thankful, at least, that no-one had been killed.