I was on Shaftesbury Avenue and also in Old Compton Street between 6 and
9.30. I saw some groups charging against the police and a highly strategic
stand off between riot police and protestors (Old Compton Street: 8-9pm).
There was a certain degree of agro though I noticed that members of the
protestors were controlling the situation. Most of the violence I saw came
from guys aged about 16/ 17 bashing the side of police vans during a crowd
charge.

I tend to think that there was a great deal of strategic thinking re: the
occupation of the streets on both 'sides'.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Patrick McManus" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, May 02, 2002 9:02 PM
Subject: Re: FWD: MAY DAY: the usual BBC misinformation


> thanks for that report I was gulty not to be there at least the news was
not
> wholey
> about a certain jubilee brainwashing whimperings
> cheers patrickmcm
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Trevor Joyce <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Thursday, May 02, 2002 6:16 PM
> Subject: FWD: MAY DAY: the usual BBC misinformation
>
>
> > From:                   "K.M. Sutherland"
> > <[log in to unmask]>
> >
> > Talking with the Polish translator of Eugenius Dycki's work at CCCP
> > I was
> > a bit dismayed to find out that the only televised access to world
> > affairs
> > for Polish people is through BBC 1.  The national stations are
> > apparently
> > U.S. funded and blatantly pro-U.S. in all their reports.  Still, this
> > extreme privation at least saved them from having to watch BBC 2's
> > Newsnight program yesterday, in which the smug-as-ever Jeremy
> > Paxman
> > fronted a "debate" preceded by a -completely misleading account-
> > of what
> > happened in London yesterday.  For the benefit of listmembers who
> > weren't
> > there, I'll offer a brief description.
> >
> > 1. Newsnight focussed with the usual journalistic, casual humour on
> > protesters who had dressed up in carnival gear and who had
> > attached
> > themselves to a marginal or extremely focussed cause (The Cuban
> > five,
> > "cycle lanes" etc.).  These protesters were THE TINY MINORITY of
> > the
> > 10,000 or more who marched on Trafalgar Square.  In fact they were
> > so few
> > and far between that I saw only a handful all day, on the whole route
> > from
> > Clerkenwell Green to Trafalgar.  They make copy, of course.  Their
> > pictures are pretty and make the protests look whimsical, or
> > oppositional
> > in a merely celebratory manner.  On the cover of today's Daily Mail
> > and
> > Daily Telegraph (surprize surpize) there is a photo of a good looking
> > young woman with her face painted splashing about in the fountain
> > at
> > Trafalgar Square: I said to Andrea at the time how angry I was that
> > the
> > press would -inevitably- focus on her and her stupid friends, who
> > persisted in playing a ghetto blaster throughout all the speeches by
> > Politicans and representatives of a myriad political campaigns
> > (including
> > Dianne Abbott, Tony Benn, Jeremy Corbyn, the president of the
> > NUS, the
> > head of the Stop The War Colaition, the deputy president of the
> > National Fireworkers Union and representatives from Kurdish,
> > Colombian and
> > Palestinian resistance groups).  These kids were just -messing
> > around-,
> > using the mass rally as an excuse to show off in public without
> > danger of
> > being pestered by the police (who seemed particularly interested in
> > what
> > the deputy secretary of the Fireworkers Union had to say about
> > wages for
> > public sector workers).  The great majority, in fact almost ALL of the
> > protesters, didn't seem to think that May Day was about listening to
> > crap
> > dance music and taking ecstacy as a break from GCSE revision.
> > 10,000
> > people marched to Trafalgar from Clerkenwell in a great column,
> > united in
> > a stream of Socialist Worker and Socilat Alliance banners, chanting
> > all
> > the way a great chorus of slogans against the Israeli occupation,
> > against
> > war in Iraq, against Bush and Blair, and against the National Front in
> > France and Le Pen personally.  The physiognomy of this crowd was
> > completely various: there were old and young people, workers and
> > students,
> > black and white, party members and outraged citizens without any
> > party
> > affiliation.  It was a coherent, organized, powerful march.  The
> > speeches
> > in Trafalgar Square were addressed to this crowd.  The kids in
> > carnival
> > suits had nothing to do with it, except insofar as they stopped
> > occasionally to listen and brightened up the atomosphere somewhat.
> >
> > May Day was an INTERNATIONALIST, SOCIALIST mass protest
> > against U.S. and
> > British Imperialism.  Every journalist saw this VERY CLEARLY.
> > BBC 2
> > disgraces itself with its trivialization of a very important and just
> > protest.
> >
> > 2. One of the Newsnight "debators", an arrogant and stupid
> > spokeman for
> > the IMF and anything that whiffs of structural adjustment anywhere
> > in the
> > world, kept repeating how "insignificant" it was that "7,000" people
> > had
> > turned up (not "marched in an organized column").  A defender of the
> > privileges attained by the ruling elite through their reliance on
> > engineered voter apathy would -of course- say this.  The LEAST
> > apathetic
> > section of the national community is small enough to legitimate
> > general
> > apathy by comparative self-exposure.  The fewer there are who
> > really care
> > about world poverty and corporate imperialism, the less -that very care
> > itself- is something we can take seriously.  Apathy becomes by arranged
> > default the passive expression of -political sanity-.  But what
Newsnight
> > refused to say--what Jeremy Paxman could easily have said to this IMF
> > mouthpiece, had he been bothered--is that:
> >
> > (a) This was a -working day-; the turnout was obviously going to be
> > limited.
> >
> > (b) The reaction of working people on the route from Clerkenwell to
> > Trafalgar--including all types of workers, from construction labourers
on
> > scaffolding in Holborn to office workers behind high glass windows--was
> > WITHOUT EXCEPTION, so far as I personally could see, a COMPLETELY
POSITIVE
> > one.  We saw gestures and cheers of solidarity from dozens of people on
> > their lunch breaks or taking a moment out of work to watch us go by.
This
> > was a POPULAR SOCIALIST protest, not AT ALL a carnival of extremism and
> > anti-social mucking about.  I suppose that for a defender of corporate
> > interests it would take 50% of the voting population to spill out in
> > united opposition, or whatever percentage of the not-totally-apathetic
> > voting population is necessary to win an election, before a protest
would
> > become "significant".
> >
> > I'm sick of the miserable capitulation of the BBC to the Labour Party's
> > corporate-driven agenda.  A fair response would be -always to suspect a
> > cover-up unless you were there to see for yourself-.
> >
> > Exactly the same thing happened with Bush's ascendancy to the
> > throne in
> > Washington--literally hundreds of thousands of protesters flooded
> > into the
> > city, outnumbering by far the odd crowds of fur-jacketed Republican
> > tourists from the outreaches of the rural Midwest, and of course the
> > U.S.
> > media stifled almost all the reports of this.  Thank god (whomever)
> > that
> > our media hasn't yet fallen quite THAT low.
> >
> > Yet.
> >
> > K
>