These first videos were taken inside the protest outside the Department for Work and Pensions in the afternoon. It’s shaky, because I was pushed over a few times, but it rights itself here and there. There were fiery scenes, all right, and the police were pretty free with their hands:
More pushing from the police:
The protest began in Triton Square at Atos headquarters, then moved across town to the DWP’s Wesminster offices after a couple of hours. That’s where things began to kick off. There were hundreds of people present and things got pretty unpleasant. The lack of mainstream reporting of this protest seems extraordinary – as someone who was in the middle of it all day, I can tell you that it was well-attended and pretty full-on.
Outside the DWP, DPAC’s Adam Lotun tells protestors that people have entered the building with a list of demands for Maria Miller. He also announces his candidacy for the upcoming Corby byelection. That should be interesting – particularly for Labour:
This video is from earlier in the day outside Atos’ headquarters where people started yelling at police, security and a guy in a red tie who refused to answer questions about the company’s WCA record:
Short video from yesterday’s counter-Olympics protest with a few scenes to give you an idea of scale, etc. Doubtless, Locog is claiming you could have fit the whole thing in a phone booth, but I’d say it was a bit bigger than that.
The slightly shaky shots at the beginning are of people who very much appear to be soldiers looking down on the march from the top of a turret. Interesting times we’re living in here.
There were a lot of international journalists present, asking people why they were protesting. They were all wearing their Olympics accreditation cards. It was obvious in their minds at least, something was happening.
This blog will be taking a small break over Christmas and New Year. Still available for short-post abuse and interaction on twitter @hangbitch.
Before we go, though – a special mention for Dave, Gideon and the Boy Wonder Clegg for setting civilisation back 500 years in 2011. The coalition’s annihilation of local government grants has destroyed council-run services and leaves a whole class of people (ie – anyone who can’t pay for the services that councils once provided) adrift, and probably for dead in some cases.
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The losses
I’ve had the dubious privilege of seeing the coalition’s cuts handiwork up close this year, right around the country as I’ve talked to people dealing with the loss of vital local services. There’s a brief retrospective with excerpts from of some of those interviews below.
The service-provision remit for councils is (or has been) enormous. Not everyone will know that councils provide a very wide range of essential services, or that a great many of these services have disappeared, or have been compromised, as this year’s cuts have taken hold.
Councils provide adult social care (which this post focuses on) – a huge service which includes homecare for the elderly and people with disabilities, residential care for people in those groups, sheltered housing with onsite wardens for the elderly, daycentres for the elderly, daycentres for people with physical disabilities, learning disabilities and dementia, and services like meal on wheels. These services are disappearing at a time when the population is ageing.
Councils provide supported-living accommodation (staffed hostels) for people with severe mental health difficulties – these hostels are (or were – some have closed) essential for people who need somewhere to go when they leave hospital after treatment for severe mental illness (that group is growing, too). Without supported-living hostels, people will have fewer places to go, unless you count appalling, unstaffed B&Bs, or the side of the road.
The excerpts below are just a few takes from a few interviews by one journalist. The true scale of the devastation is enormous. Unfortunately, it’s just not been reported widely enough. Local government cuts have only been covered sporadically by the mainstream press. There have been stories about specific service closures here and there, and I understand that one film company is producing a piece on this year’s cuts at Stoke, but in general, the slaughter has taken place below the radar. That is in itself a kind of travesty. The death of this all-important layer of the public sector should near the top of any big media agenda, especially since there is worse to come. There are years of these cuts ahead. The impact on anyone who can’t afford to pay for services like care will be appalling.
Cambridgeshire: “I meet Tracy and Stuart Evenden – as I meet a lot of people these days – at a small anti-cuts protest outside a town hall in a bitter January wind. The Evendens are at this protest because they’re trying to fight a Cambridgeshire county council decision to reduce resources available to the special unit (called CSSC-EOTAS) that their 15-year-old son attends. They’re worried and they look it: tense, tired faces and a quivering chin and red eyes in Tracy’s case (which is probably the cold as well as the stress – she says she’s freezing).
“EOTAS caters for children who are unable to cope in the mainstream. Some have problems with their physical health, some with mental health and some with emotional health. The Evenden’s son attends EOTAS because he was bullied so viciously by students at his mainstream school that he started to go under. It seems that by the time he was 11, his terror was destroying the family. The move to the EOTAS unit, with its expert staff and supervision, pushed that horror into the past. Now, of course, it is back again. The council’s plan is to return these refugees from the mainstream to the mainstream.”
“In December, Shropshire council announced that it planned to close the centre as part of its austerity measures – an early decision which shocked service users, who thought that they were in the middle of consultation about the centre, rather than at the end of it. They had been told a decision about the centre’s future wouldn’t be made until January. Local campaigners have spent the six months since then trying to beat the council back, but the council still plans to shut the Grange at the end of July.
“[Centre user] Eddie Davies says… that for all the promises the council has made about replacing the Grange with a like-for-like service, he is losing half his support hours and has only been offered a group in a church as a replacement. He is an older man and had formed close friendships at the Grange. The thought of change does not appeal to him: “We won’t have the same groups that we did at the Grange.”
Video: Users at the Grange talk about the loss of their daycentre:
“I’m in a room in Gateshead with about 15 older women at a Personal Growth – Take Individual Steps session (known as PG Tips here at the Tyneside women’s health centre). I wouldn’t describe the group, or the session, as a touchy-feely waste of public money and focus, although I imagine George Osborne would without looking round the door.
“…A lot of the women in this room collect incapacity benefit – a means of drawing income which the Murdoch stable would have us believe is leapfrogging politics and pimping to top the list of pestilent ways to source a buck. Not that these women will be sourcing income through incapacity for long. Their days of drawing incapacity (and perhaps any) benefit are numbered. Incapacity is being phased out, along with any notion of genuine need. Everyone who collects incapacity is being assessed for fitness for work. They’re being moved to the smaller job seekers’ allowance, or to the employment support allowance if they’re deemed to need support to work. Some will be found ineligible for support altogether.
Nobody I’ve spoken to likes their chances. I’ve even met rightwingers who are worried about assessment. Only ten days ago, I interviewed a physically disabled woman called Mel Richards who felt that the coalition (which she generally supported) was wilfully failing to recognise people she referred to as “deserving poor.” She insisted that her good work record and national insurance contributions entitled her to support when illness struck (and was technically correct – incapacity benefit recipients must generally have paid national insurance).”
“…The centre has a daycentre for adults with disabilities, an accredited ESOL training programme, back-to-work support for people who are looking for jobs, computer classes, a youth club, a cafe with affordable meals and so on…[it’s a vital place for] people with learning and physical disabilities, worried locals whose cafes and takeaways are going bust in the slump [and need retraining], youth offenders who want work experience on projects (that were once) funded by council, discarded public sector workers who want to retrain for jobs that don’t exist….
“Between 400 to 800 people come through the doors of this centre in any given week. They prize it highly and need it badly, so naturally, it is due for closure. The centre is – perhaps ironically, or perhaps not, in these plotless times – a victim of its own popularity in a roundabout way. The loss of direct council funding isn’t the problem – the centre does not, as manager Amanda Buck tells me, rely on a council grant to keep and manage its buildings. It relies on room-hire income that it makes from community and council groups that rely on council funding. Those groups are losing their funding, which means the centre is losing a vital income stream.
“Nobody’s got the budget to hire the rooms out, so we’ve had a decrease in staff and a decrease in grants available to the facility – even though we’ve had a 38% increase in people requiring our services.”
“Lottery provided some funding for six years, but the centre trust doesn’t expect that funding to continue forever and is paying Amanda’s salary out of reserves. The government cut the Future Jobs Fund last year – that paid for a staff member and work placements for young people keen for employment…Middlesbrough has the worst jobless rate in the country (a prize it takes in a competitive field).”
Photos of service users at the Breckon Hill centre in Middlesbrough by deptfordvisions.com
“Lancashire county…is consulting parents of children with disabilities about plans to close some of the county’s short breaks units. The units give parents much-needed breaks from caring, and children a chance to socialise.
“The plans to close units could impact on families such as Colin and Jennifer Dalley’s. They have three daughters with learning disabilities and behavioural problems, all needing supervision and support. The youngest, Kirsty, 11, needs constant care and monitoring, because she has severe epilepsy. She has an adapted bed and bathroom.
The Dalleys are full-time carers, and they struggle with isolation and exhaustion. Both have been treated for depression over the years. They manage the children, the behavioural problems (their eldest is prone to aggressive outbursts), transport, equipment, relationships with social workers, endless correspondence with the council, journeys to and from school, doctors and so on. They’re also employers – they use direct payments to manage two carers who help the family before and after school, and take Kirsty out on weekends.
They get a break when Kirsty goes to a short break unit for overnight stays. Kirsty spends several nights a month at Maplewood House – a residential unit with adapted beds, bathrooms, a playroom, a sensory room and professional staff. With Kirsty at Maplewood, “you get to sleep”, says Colin. “You have a night when you’re not worried … because obviously, with her epilepsy, when she’s here, you’re always worried.” He says he accepts “some cuts have to happen”, but that he didn’t expect short breaks units to be targeted.”
“One elderly Lancashire parent of a severely disabled adult man uses a pseudonym in interviews because he’s concerned about [angering Lancashire county council if he complains about cuts].
“His son, who is now nearly 30, has cerebral palsy and needs round-the-clock care. He can’t move, or speak. He is fed through a stoma and tube.
“His care is organised through Lancashire council and the NHS. But adult social care at Lancashire is harder than ever to come by. This year, Lancashire tightened eligibility criteria for adult care. Only service users in the “substantial” or “critical” fair access to care bands are eligible for paid-for care now. People with “moderate” needs have to finance care themselves. The council is reassessing nearly 4000 people to decide which category they belong in. In September, council officers told me that the council had reviewed just 100 cases since July.
Everyone else waits in fear. The man with the pseudonym has been waiting for his son’s review – and to find out what services he can negotiate – for a year. He describes the council’s snail’s pace as “cuts by default. [The council] has learned not to just shut things. That gets bad publicity. Now, it is letting everything run down without actually closing anything.”
“Hammersmith and Fulham council’s cabinet [has] decided to close the 14-unit Tamworth hostel, make all staff redundant and sell the building. The council said alternative accommodation would be found for the hostel’s eight residents. The council’s rationale for closure was a Supporting People fund contribution towards a £300,000 austerity saving. Selling the building would be a nice little earner.
“Things aren’t looking as bright for those in the hostel, though. Inside, you find angry, soon-to-be-unemployed staff, concerned residents and a sort of muted, but palpable, sense of calamity…
“High-level supported-living housing is a unique service. Experienced staff monitor residents’ medication and keep and eye on drug and alcohol use. They arrange transfers, community activities and help residents organise appointments. The Tamworth hostel building is secure and always staffed. Many have worked here for years – a contribution that means little in our austerity age. Council reports dismiss their expertise and concerns: “Although there was some opposition to the proposal from the staff, the consultation did not present any strong arguments for keeping Tamworth open,” stated authors of the council’s March cabinet report on the closure. Spinning to reassure, the report’s authors insisted that Tamworth residents would be catered for: “evidence demonstrates that there is sufficient provision for the client group in the borough’s other mental health supported housing”.
“Visits to the hostel revealed a different narrative. It emerged that two of Tamworth’s residents were to be moved to accommodation out of the borough. One of Tamworth’s occupants still had nowhere to go. Aged 47, she has schizophrenia and is an alcoholic. She has been living at Tamworth for five years. Temporary accommodation had been discussed, but she felt she’d be vulnerable there. She’s physically small, often confused and unwell. People prey on her. She knows this because she’s lived in low-level support accommodation before. “People take my money from me, don’t they? I would hand it to them. They would take my money for drugs.”
“I meet Susan Gates [name changed], a furious Camden mental-health service user, at a packed and dismal public council “consultation” meeting in early October. I’ve been to a great many meetings and protests like this in the last year. This one’s in Kentish Town library.
Like many in the room, Susan is here to register her upset at Camden council plans to close and sell support centres for people with mental health difficulties, dementia, learning disabilities and sensory disabilities.
The council wants to use cash generated from sales to build a single building on a self-funding, mixed-use site (there’ll be private flats and business space for rent and sale) at Greenwood Place in Kentish Town…
Audience members like Susan are convinced that the council has already decided to close and sell their centres, even though councillors deny it. “We haven’t made any decisions!” council cabinet member for adult social care Pat Callaghan responds – a statement somewhat negated by the thick, glossy brochure that councillors circulate to promote their plans.
Susan is a long-time (about 14 years) user of Highgate – one of the threatened centres. It’s a small, staffed service which offers groups and social support for people with mental health difficulties. Susan suffers from severe depression. She is hospitalised during bad episodes. For her, Highgate is familiar, unthreatening and essential. “I couldn’t cope without it.”
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Those are just a few examples from this first year.
In 2012, I’ll be travelling around the country again to talk to service users and providers as budget cuts for the second year are made. It is not at all heartening to know that 2011 was just the start.
Legal observers being searched just after people were released from this evening’s kettle at Panton Street.
People had to leave their names and addresses with the police – if they didn’t, they were arrested. Pretty clear that these kettles are an information-gathering exercise. Kettle lasted for a couple of hours. Those of us with press cards were permitted to enter and leave without having to give personal details (although names appear on press cards).
Otherwise – a weird few hours. Probably about 50 protestors, 20 members of the press who were able to come and go freely and about 300 coppers who didn’t look old enough to be out. Seemed like someone somewhere was desperate to tag a “Jesus – look at these radicals” story onto the 6pm strike day news. Snore.
Videos from today’s ‘block the bill, block the bridge’ protest action on Westminster Bridge.
This was 1pm, when everyone lay down on the bridge.
And then this general assembly was held – a lot of discussion here about replicating the US occupations in the UK.
And then the US chant – “we are the 99%.” Not quite where the US occupations are yet, but a useful day all the same. What’s noticeable is that the crowds are changing – more family groups and a wider variety of ages. As more people lose their jobs, these protests can surely only grow.
A few thoughts on and from Cameron’s post-riot London masses:
The tone was set for the weekend, and probably for the rest of August, at about 5.30pm on Friday when I turned into forecourt of the Westminster museum and saw a group of five young men yelling and shrieking at two of London’s finest. One of the men – a fair-haired, heavyset guy of about 20 – was advancing on the two coppers, waving his arms and bawling “you should be ashamed!” and perhaps even “you should be fucking ashamed!” The men were red-faced and furious and at least one member of their group was bawling filth.
I thought I might as well wait around to watch the arrests. Only four days had passed since the riots and it seemed likely that swearing in a copper’s face and advancing on him would end in a night (at least) in captivity for someone. It certainly looked as though we were on when another couple of coppers moved in.
We weren’t. The men saw the incoming policemen, probably figured the new odds, and turned around to leave.
“Fucking unreal!” they bawled when I asked them what had happened. “They (the police) told us to get out. We weren’t even doing anything. They came up to us and told us to go on. Fucking unreal! UNREAL.”
They said that they’d been in Westminster Cathedral and that the police had closed in on their group as they left.
“They [the police] even asked the security guard if we’d been trouble [in the cathedral] and he said No. It is fucking outrageous. What the fuck are they doing?”
It was pretty clear what the police were doing. They were winding a group of young men up, then sending them down the road out of their minds with rage – a course of action which seems, on the whole, unlikely to make the world a safer place. It does, however, make the world a stupider place. Even Theresa May’s maths ought to guff out that result.
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Walking the dog through Deptford at 10pm, I saw the Met with its post-riot dick out: a flashing convoy of five or six large, black hummers and six or seven riot vans on a victory lap round New Cross, Lewisham and Peckham. It gave late-evening drinkers something to look at, I suppose. Aside from a couple of open-mouthed shopkeepers, my staffie and I and a few pub-goers were the only ones on hand for a police parade on Brookmill Road at that hour.
There was a better public gallery a few days later when the convoy crawled across Blackheath at around 5pm. You get big family groups, labrador-walkers, kite-flyers and boozed-up picnickers sprawling across the fields at that hour. Gangster Peckham and Lewisham (presumably the targets of these hummer trains) may have been sprawled out on the grass as well, I suppose. Everybody likes a picnic. I could hear people saying “What the fuck?” to each other as the convoy rumbled by. It was a pretty impressive convoy on first sighting. Harder to care the second time around, but we need these cues to remind us that we’re living in fear.
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If we don’t live in fear, we’ll live in anger and then we’ll make a genuine mess.
Across London, I interview a single mother who seems almost feeble with fury at her own dwindling status: her mantra, understandably, is “I don’t know what they expect me to do.”
She is in her 50s and on the brink of losing her (rented) flat and embarking on retirement (if she can ever afford to retire) without a home.
She left her reasonably well-off, emotionally abusive partner about ten years ago, because he was awful to her. He liked to withhold money and was manipulative, cold and cruel. He is, of course, still awful to her. He still has money and she still does not – she worked and works part-time so that she could raise their children. He punishes her for leaving him by denying her whatever he is entitled to deny her and leaving her dangling financially from month to month – he’s Cameron and family values at local level, if you will. Their children are still dependants – they’re all under 18. They stayed with her when she and her partner broke up. For the next decade or so, he paid the rent on a house for them all. She got a part-time, unskilled job (she earns about £600 a month) to make the rest of the ends meet.
Then suddenly – without discussion, or warning – her partner stopped paying her rent. Just like that. He said he didn’t need to pay any more, because the kids were living with him.
On paper, that was correct, but the reality was convoluted. The kids were living with their father some of the time – but they (particularly the oldest child) often turned up to live with their mother (the oldest child doesn’t always relate to dad and takes to the streets when they fight). The mother needs somewhere to house that child – and herself, which doesn’t count for much with many. She can’t afford the rent on her home on her small wage and her housing benefit entitlement won’t cover it. She isn’t a council housing priority, because she’s been meeting a private-sector rent. Family members have been paying the rent since her ex stopped the cheques and her children (ostensibly) have a home with their father. In the eyes of the state, she needs nothing.
She says she searched for properties on the council Locata database and was advised that her best hope was to move out of London. Moving out of London will solve her borough’s problem, but it’ll hardly solve hers. At her age: “I’m not going to get another job,” in, or out, of London. She needs to hang onto the one she has. She isn’t sure how long her family will be able to make up the rent for her. After that: “I don’t know what they expect me to do.” Shrug. She worked part-time all those years so that she could supervise her kids. The return on that? – no money, no home, a low-paid, low-skilled job and no prospects. I don’t know what they expect her to do, either. Die quietly, perhaps, like a good woman. That is our reward when we’re through.
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I watched looting in Peckham during the riots. On lower-key days, there is salvaging. On Saturday afternoons at Deptford market, past the Albany theatre, people leave unwanted items in piles on the ground for others to fossick through. There’s mounds of stuff across the pavement: whole and smashed crockery, broken mirrors, burst bags of nails and screws, books and magazines soaked through with rain, bags, stuffed toy body parts, wet comic books, beads, broken DVDs, old vinyls, pens, a child’s cricket bat, balls, chair parts, trolley wheels, candelabra and crushed boxes. There’s even a neckbone – part of a cow, or perhaps a sheep, gnawed through and dropped in the pile.
“People just bring it,” say the Lewisham refuse guys. They sit there in high-vis jackets with Love Lewisham (the name of Lewisham council’s environmental unit) printed on the back until it is time to sweep whatever’s left away.
Until then, people pick through the wet fragments. An old guy and I have a laugh over a flan dish we find – it’s in good condition, but useless, because neither of us can cook. “Put a takeaway in it and I’m interested,” he says. He finds two unbroken tea mugs and puts them in his bag with a few unbroken plates. I suppose our era would encourage us to see this exercise as a healthy recycling of unwanted goods – and maybe it is. It could also be a bunch of not-so-well-off people picking through a wet pile of crap. Certainly, nobody turns up in a Bentley.
I thought if there was going to be trouble, it would start outside the bus, not in it – so I was watching the streets and footpaths as the 436 bus went along Camberwell New Road, across Camberwell junction and into Peckham Road last night.
Just past Southwark Town Hall (one of many south London town halls which saw protests about horrendous service cuts earlier this year), a roar went up down the back of the bus – a group of about ten very young teenagers, seeming to scream and shout at each other and pushing and shoving at the back door. I couldn’t see all this sudden action from my seat, but I could hear it and see the angry faces. The kids were loud and their voices were hard and cold, and tension spread through the bus. There were young people outside the bus as well: at the time, I thought the kids inside the bus wanted to launch themselves at the kids outside. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, so couldn’t be sure. I could hear the fury.
The kids were cool and aggressive – very young, sweet-faced and chilling. Other people in the bus began to respond as the shouting got louder. Everyone stood up in their seats and started yelling at the driver to open the doors, to let the kids out. We could see that a bus had been set alight just in front of us – a double-decker (think it was a 36) – engulfed in thick orange flame. The smoke was high and wide – it looked pure soot and horrendous.
I was standing up myself by then, because it suddenly occurred to me that our bus might be set on fire while we were still in it. I don’t think that has happened anywhere – I just thought that it might at that point and I understood better why people were yelling at the driver about opening the doors. The driver opened the doors – and revealed another problem. Right next to the opened doors, kids were throwing masonry, I think, and bottles – I could see them moving along the bus and the people in front of me on the bus rearing back from the doors. The kids who’d been yelling down the back of the bus got off. They may have joined the kids on the side of the road – I’m not sure. Now, people were shouting at the driver to close the doors – they were only metres away from the kids throwing bottles and bricks on the street. There were no police near the bus and I had a fleeting sense that we might have to defend ourselves. We didn’t – the driver didn’t shut the doors, but the kids moved on.
The threat passed and after a while, people started to leave the bus and wander around in a bit of a daze. We were outside the Camberwell Arts College. Some people walked towards the college building. It seemed a reasonable place to hide if it came to that. Riot police started to arrive by the vanload. The double-decker bus in front of us was still in flames, but firefighters in the Peckham fire station, just to the right, were dragging hoses out of the station to put the fire out. I could see a row of riot police ahead of us at the top of Peckham High Street then. Buses were parked along and across the road, slung across the white line at angles. Some people didn’t seem to know what was happening across London, or what had happened in the bus – a woman came up to me and said “what is it? Can I go down there?” and I told her kids were rioting in London and that she should stay away from Peckham High Street for the moment.
We couldn’t go down the High Street anyway – the police stopped us and tried to make us leave down side roads, but nobody was keen to go. I know the police have been complaining about rubberneckers and people hanging round to watch disasters unfold, and that is in part what we were doing, but staying put had other merits – there seemed to be better safety in numbers, in the middle of the street with riot police and other people. I could see police gathering on the grass outside the estate next to the BP connect on the high road and evil plumes of smoke further down the road to the right, towards New Cross.
The crowd seemed divided about the violence. One woman – probably in her 40s – walked up and down the street yelling “Rise up! Rise up! You see those kids? [They’re doing that] because they have nothing! They have nothing!” Some agreed and clapped. Others shook their heads. The crowd was mixed – black, white, Asian, very young, middle-aged and ranging in affluence if you can tell by looking, which I can’t, generally. Some people appeared to be dressed for office jobs. Some were sitting on costly-looking bikes. Others were dressed casually. All sorts of people live in Peckham, Lewisham and Deptford – long timers, new affluents, small business owners, Canary Wharf commuters, people with money and people without. There were a lot of young people among the spectators – some stayed as spectators and some joined the rioting from time to time. I don’t know that mainstream commentators know what they are looking at. I didn’t know what I was looking at myself and I’ve lived in Deptford for years. Police on the line were talking to us – they said local stations didn’t have the numbers to cope and that they were having to bring other people in.
After about half an hour, the police said we could walk down Peckham High Street. That surprised me a little: I thought they’d keep it closed. They seemed to have a comedy copper in there – a burly, red-faced type who got behind us and started to drill us after a fashion. “Come on! Come on! Left! Right! Left! Right!” People started to laugh.
The damage to Peckham High Road was obvious right away. Bins had been kicked out of the ground and there were flattened boxes all over the road. The Burger King had been trashed – smashed glass, bent frames and rubbish across the ground (when I walked past the Burger King this morning, there were round red Burger King seats lying outside on the pavement and an atm had been ripped out of the wall. That must have happened later last night). The betting shop had been destroyed and council bins round the back, near the library, were on fire.
People were milling around the centre of Peckham then, listening to a huge guy with a beer – he was on the incoherent side from time to time, but very entertaining. “Fucking brilliant! Fucking brilliant! Kick a fucking window in. Look at that. Look at that. Kicks a fucking window in just to get a fucking burger! This is why I would never vote for them.” I couldn’t always understand what he was saying, but he had a congenial aspect. People were laughing.
Then I walked into it again, just like that. It was extraordinary how quickly you could move from an apparently safe pocket to the centre of aggressive action – a matter of metres in a matter of seconds. I walked down the road by Peckham Space and came out near the bus stop across the road from Peckham Bus garage. There were a lot of people standing round, hoping for a bus, perhaps, and then the footpaths were suddenly filled with very young people with their faces covered, walking fast, pushing past and running. They weren’t interested in the rest of us. They couldn’t see the rest of us. If they touched you, it was inadvertently as they rushed through.
They ran from the middle of the road and across the street and then surged towards the ABC pharmacy on Peckham High Road. The pharmacy windows had already been smashed: then a few people kicked them all the way in. Then, I heard a loud thumping – a heavy, brutal thudding: kids throwing bottles and bricks at the riot vans as they raced to the scene and parked. The police poured out and stood in a row across the street behind shields. I stood back against protected shop fronts – I didn’t want to stop a missile meant for a van. We (adults, teenagers, older people and coppers in their line) all stood together and watched as kids looted the pharmacy – pretty, grinning youngsters with eager faces staggering out of the wreckage carrying wide loads of hair dye, shampoo and – apparently – piles of toilet paper. This morning, I saw red dye bleeding across Peckham Road.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be heading back out to talk to people who will be dealing with the realities of council service cuts now that those cuts have been agreed.
On Monday, I’ll be talking to Lancashire parents of adult people with disabilities. They’re dealing with new charges for care and tightened eligibility criteria. One parent is particularly concerned about cuts to the charity groups which provide his son’s nursing care. Other parents are concerned about the council’s proposals to close care respite homes for children. They say their fight is not over yet.
I’ll also be talking to users of The Grange daycentre for people with disabilities in Shropshire. They are waiting to find out when their centre will be closed. And I’ll also be talking to a number of disabled users representation groups about actions they’re taking to challenge agreed council cuts. People say they refuse to accept their services are finished.