January 1997, slightly expanded October 1997

Having been in the riot at the demonstration against the Criminal Justice Bill in Hyde Park, London, on 9th October 1994, the next day I bought a copy of every national newspaper I could find. Not only did none of them tell the truth, they all told different stories from one another. And yet people will just read one newspaper and believe they have been told the truth. Even "our side" papers like The Guardian and The Independent (whose reporter Danny Penman was beaten up by three riot police), only got round to telling the truth later in the week. On the day after the demo, when it really counted, they were as bad as the rest.

Yesterday I went to Newbury for the rally marking the first anniversary of destruction work starting on the bypass road route. The rally was really good-natured and fluffy, and culminated in a mass invasion of the construction compound around the reprieved tree, Middle Oak. We ripped down some fence and occupied the area inside, and a lot of damage was done to contractor's property, but there was no real antagonism towards the police or the security guards. What we did was sabotage the machinery of death and destruction, and it mirrors the action of the Ploughshares women last year who broke into a British Aerospace factory in Lancashire and smashed up a Hawk jet being built for the repressive Indonesian government.

Today I bought all the national newspapers that reported the Newbury action. Again, not only did they not tell the truth (except maybe The Observer), they told different stories from one another. And they all pretend they are telling The Truth. Of course, my account is just one person's perspective. Like the journalists and everyone else there, I couldn't see everything that went on, but I don't pretend to. The reporting reminded me of the CJB riot stuff, so I got my shit together and dug out all the old clippings.

We all have a fairly solid conviction that the news is full of lies, but we know it in a vague and woolly way. Here was an example that shows specifics. Not only do the papers make clear measurable errors (like giving the police estimates of crowd sizes as facts), but there's something much subtler, yet far more important in the way the reports are written. It's difficult to pin down, it's in the choice of words used ("protesters", "crowd", "mob" or "thugs"?), it's in the order that the facts are given (how many start with descriptions of police injuries, yet none with those of protesters?), it's in the position within the newspaper (front page and the photo in the Daily Mail, 5 inches on page 7 of The Sun). These are all things that you can't quite make an official complaint about, but which give a real perceptible bias to the story.

The Newbury story was not as widely covered as the CJB riot. It involved less people, and it happened on a Saturday; Sunday papers are mostly written by Friday, leaving only a few small gaps for topical bits. Only one tabloid mentioned it (The Mirror, page 20), as Sunday tabloids carry almost no topical stuff at all. If you want press coverage for an action don't have it on a Saturday; the Sunday papers don't have room and it'll be stale and unusable by Monday. But this didn't matter at Newbury. Yesterday wasn't about press coverage, it was about us.

As always, the action at Newbury got blamed on a shady anonymous troublemaking few. This is bollocks. What happened yesterday was the will of everyone present. There were all kinds of people there, all cheering as the fence was torn down, the generators were trashed and the crane was climbed. Tess from Skyward Camp and a local retired woman were sitting together on the bonnet of a massive tipper truck when it was pointed out that the cab behind them was on fire. The woman next to me had two toddlers with her as we danced a giant hokey-cokey round Middle Oak. It was so beautiful milling around, with people hugging each other in reunion and triumph. It wasn't scary, it was fun. It wasn't volatile, it was purposeful. It wasn't a riot, it was a party.

Anyone brought up in a regimented hierarchical society is conditioned to have respect for the Powers That Be. With a mixture of the idea that They Wouldn't Make Laws For No Good Reason and a Fear Of Punishment, they give us a deference to authority, we are taught to obey the voice that wears a uniform.

This Fear Of Authority is the greatest force holding us back from realising our true power, our real capability for making things change. When a crowd realises there's a dozen of us for every one of them and decides to ignore the authority of the uniform, there's NOTHING they can do to stop us. This is what happened yesterday. We went for the fence and they couldn't stop us. We got to touch Middle Oak. Two hundred of us surrounded the tree singing 'Jerusalem', then did a massive celebratory hokey-cokey.

It was the most well focused and clear thinking crowd I've ever known. Nobody held back; of the 800 or so people there, only about 30 didn't come in to the compound. We moved almost as one from area to area, unafraid of security guards, unafraid of damaging the machinery, but with respect for people. I have no right to risk anyone's safety but my own. I have no interest in, desire for or tolerance of violence against people, and as far as I could see neither did the crowd. We went and sat on the diggers and tipper trucks. After a while we went for the giant crane. Security guards surrounded it, but there were so many more of us, we just prised them off, explaining that we'd won today and they should give up. A security guard next to me got knocked over, and protesters immediately helped him to his feet. I saw nobody antagonising the police or security. And the police, to their credit, didn't get scared and use truncheons. There were two injuries (both protesters), and police and protesters ensured that they got ambulances straight away. Despite the fact that one of the injured protesters had been deliberately trampled by a police horse, it was a peaceful gathering. It was a magnificent day.

One of the big lessons of the Newbury bypass campaign in 1996 has been to see the person inside the uniform. Security guards were quitting from Day 2, several coming to join the protest. At the Fairmile eviction in January '97, the last person down from the trees was Craig, a former Newbury security guard. Every security guard and every police officer is a potential protester. Individual police are not The Law, they are just its servants. As Lenny Bruce said back in the 60s, "that's another big problem, the people who can't separate the authority and the people who have the authority vested in them. You see that a lot on the demonstrations, they have the concept that The Law and Law Enforcement are one. They're demonstrating against the Police Department, actually against policemen". We know how ludicrous it is when people generalise about what protesters are like, and it is no less stupid for us to generalise about security guards and police. If we recognise their individuality, it makes it harder for them to deny ours. And so their team spirit, the Us Against Them thing, starts to crumble. They start to hear us.

I know human beings are individual, I know they can all shine and do the right thing given the chance. Antagonising, generalising and especially being violent all stifle that chance. A lot of people joined the police cos they thought it would help the community and the country. A lot joined out of the same feelings that makes us go on actions. You needn't have had too different a life for it to have been you in the blue jacket. In a very slightly different world in which we're all as well meaning as we are now, it might not have been Keith Blakelock who died that night in Tottenham. It might have been my father. It might have been you. Shouting insults doesn't make them realise they're being used against the nation's interest. I find it strange how people can be all right-on and anti-war, saying that soldiers are just pitiable tools of a corrupt system and it should be remembered that they're all sons and fathers, but that the pigs are a bunch of bastards who deserve everything they get. Yes, they are used brutally against us, but the whole basis of our outrage is that we know such behaviour is wrong. We believe in better ways, and we act on our beliefs. We have to rise above. As Martin Luther King said, "the problem with an eye for an eye is that everyone ends up blind". Surely we are the people who see the bigger picture, who see ourselves as part of a bigger web of life.

The magnificence of yesterday's action is twofold: Firstly that we were unafraid, and secondly that we were always focused against the road and the machines, not the people. There was a lot of destruction of property, but no riot. The BBC TV reporter said "this is not what the anti-roads movement needs". It was exactly what the anti-roads movement needs. It was spontaneous, it was decisive, it was effective. It was destructive, but think what it was destructive of. Think of the obscene, permanent damage that is being done by these machines. What we did was open and celebratory sabotage of what are quite literally instruments of death and destruction. Although perhaps on a smaller scale, it was as morally justified as disabling a Hawk jet, an apartheid riot police van or a train to Auschwitz. Standing outside the compound fence complaining makes no real difference. That's why the fence is there. Yes we were outside the law, but the law only allows protests that have no real effect. The people who make the laws are the same people who build the roads, hunt the foxes, sell the armaments, etc., so of course they won't allow effective protest. As soon as you start to affect anything you come up against armed policemen and razor wire. Asking nicely doesn't work. You have to shout loud or shut up. I can only live with myself doing one of these.

So we put sand in the fuel tanks of generators, took spanners to the motor of the crane. As we were leaving the site, a tipper truck on fire to my left and the crane on fire down to my right, there was one man standing straight in front of me, silhouetted against the bright billowing flames rolling up out of the portakabin. He stood in a X shape, his hands in victory V signs, shouting "YES!YES!YES!". It wasn't chaotic, there was a sense of purpose, of collective will, of carnival, celebration, strong magic, triumph of people power, of a small but very real piece of justice being done.

The state gets very nervous if people start getting bothered about things that it hasn't prescribed as bothersome. When we start to set our own agenda instead of reacting to what we're given, when we start to see choices outside of the ones we're told about, and especially when we start to do rather than say these things, they get worried. And the more popular support we get, the more worried they get. This is why they've never bothered with the traditional "revolutionary" groups, because there was never going to be any popular support for them. As long as they keep using their 19th century phraseology, idealising manual labourers as True Workers, yet vilifying white-collar workers (who often earn less) as Bourgeois Lackeys they are never going to win any popular support and can be safely left to bicker amongst themselves. But when there's a broad-based movement that is a growing threat to the orthodoxy they get edgy, and hence the police-orchestrated riots at most major demonstrations of recent years.

The pattern is alarmingly similar every time: near the end of a demonstration, the police change the plans (change the route of a march, close a sound system before time, lock the agreed exits), and seal off a portion of the dwindling crowd. Behind the normal uniformed officers, police in full riot gear seal off side streets and other exit routes. The crowd are hemmed in on three sides. Then the uniforms withdraw, leaving the advancing riot police to start a riot. At the march against the British National Party in Welling, they did it by beating a march organiser who was in the middle of a "don't be baited, keep calm" speech. At a Kurdish march in London they did it by shouting racist abuse. But far more disturbing than the violence of the individual officers involved is the marked similarity of the events. These tactics aren't decided by the officers we see, they are the orders from somewhere far higher up. This is the reason why, even ignoring the morality, violence against the police is stupid; they have better weapons, communications and armour, and they are a hierarchy, their orders come from people who never risk their own injury, and so no matter how many police get injured they'll send in squad after squad until they win.

And yet what kind of threat are we? We don't plant bombs, we don't kill anyone. It is only our ideas and our vision that we're putting forward, and so it must be this that scares them. Yes, there are occasional outbursts of individual violence, but these are very uncommon, and are certainly not a strategy. And yes, there are riots at some large gatherings, but these are invariably police provoked. As it says in the CJB riot eyewitness leaflet, "If you treated people in any public gathering like that, at a football match or even in a shopping centre, if you locked the doors and rounded them up into a small space with no exit using riot police, some dickhead will throw something at them. If they then charged in and seriously injured the people who just happened to be at the front, the crowd would get outraged, angry and increasingly violent, and there would be a riot. You could do that in any public gathering, any time, anywhere".

But if they're scared enough to round us up and beat us in the middle of London on national TV, if they're scared enough to spend millions on surveillance and infiltration, we must be touching a raw nerve, we must be doing something right. And so we must carry on. Their greatest weapon is our Fear Of Authority. Once we lose that, the next greatest is our Paranoia. If we're too scared of infiltrators to talk each other, they've won. Always think, "what's the worst that could happen if They knew this?", and usually you'll find it makes little difference. The depth of tunnels, positions of lock-ons, how many people are on site, it all makes no real difference, and they could find out a lot of that stuff by long-range surveillance anyway. Certain details need to be kept secret, but not many. Secrecy should be the exception rather than the rule. Our openness and trust of one another is one of the key things that sustains our energy and resilience, and is a clear sign of "us" having a better way of living than "them". Think back to not long ago when you first came on site and remember how important acceptance and trust are. We've enough to struggle against without everyone thinking that everyone else is a dodgy MI5 git. I know of one camp where someone new on site had seen a definite infiltrator on their way down, describing them as "a real dressing-up box hippy, no-one would really dress like that". It turned out to be an old friend and lovely fluffy activist.

And it's important to extend that openness to all but the most ridiculous of journalists. The reporters all have their biases, but don't forget that the same is true of the people who watch the TV and read the articles. I remember as a kid seeing the Greenham Common women in unfavourable reports and thinking, "no, I like what they're doing". I joined my local CND group, wrote to Greenham women in jail, and the seeds of my direct actioning were sown. Last week I got a call from a friend at the A30 protest who'd been in the pub all evening with a bloke from Inverness. He'd been a radical theorist for years and had decided now was the time to do something. He saw an article in the paper about Fairmile and hitched down the next day.

Once we've won the battle to get coverage, the next problem is being taken seriously. We face this problem on many fronts: underestimates of our numbers, trivial "lifestyle" questions, being portrayed as dangerous nutters, and belittling terminology (e.g. calling a tripod a "makeshift wigwam"). Journalists have to go in to a place they know nothing about and get an idea of it very quickly and make an interesting report. So of course they never have time to know what it's really like, and of course they'll ask questions based on the first things that occur to someone the first time they come on site. How do you go to the toilet up a tree? Who decides who does the cooking? What does your mum think? It won't help us very much by only having these stupid issues in print, but if we don't get press coverage then the entire direct action movement is going to be just the same couple of thousand people and won't grow into something with mass support. And without the energy that comes from mass support and new people, we will at best be a minor nuisance and at worst locked up with no-one to give a toss.

Try to have a few handy phrases or snappy slogans ready that encapsulate the real issues in as concise and complete a way as possible. Never mind that it feels unimaginative saying more or less the same words to reporter after reporter, they don't know that and as far as they're concerned this is them getting a good quote. If you say something to a journalist that'll look great in print, they'll print it. The journalist as an individual may or may not be a dickhead and they will almost certainly have blinkered vision, but they are invariably a microphone by which we can speak to thousands, even millions, of people. So don't let them use us, let us use them. If we're enthusiastic, informed and full of great quotes, they won't feel manipulated, they'll feel good cos they've got an interesting story which will impress their editor.

Don't write any of them off—the BBC TV reporter at Newbury was really anti-protest when the work started, but after a day talking to a load of us she was on our side from Day 2 (although of course she insists that she has no bias and just reports the objective truth). The most honest writing about Newbury was in the sodding Daily Telegraph. Even the Daily fucking Mail did some big positive articles on Newbury and Solsbury Hill once they were given an angle they thought nobody else had got. And yet Sky News, who are almost always really positive and give us loads of airtime, were turned away from a camp for not giving a donation. Yes, it'd be better if they did give something (and most will—after all, they're going to make money selling the story), but to turn down the chance of talking to millions for the sake of a tenner is just daft.

The place most of us first hear about direct action is the mainstream media. They're going to report us whether we like it or not, so we have to find ways to use them well. We can't afford to ignore the mainstream media, but neither can we afford to just leave it to them. This is why small press is so important. With zines and SchNEWS and Squall and so on, there's no advertisers or bosses to please, no shareholders to pander to, no writing something to fill the space, it's real free speech. And the fact that there are thousands of small publications protects that freedom—if there were just one big counterculture zine, it could be compromised or crushed by commerce and laws, whereas a thousand little zines constantly springing up out of nowhere is uncensorable and uncontainable. This stuff isn't written by writers who come to a protest, it's written by protesters who start to write. Even if we don't write in a technically clever-clever way, it's authentic, it's real. It's coming from people who won't just tell you what it means, they tell you what it's like. So this doesn't just win people's minds, it wins their hearts too. And only by winning hearts as well as minds do we get real commitment. To put yourself on the line, you have to believe rationally and emotionally. By writing stuff from the heart about what we know, we do involve people both ways, so we do pull them in.

As my friend Guy says, the real reason why so few people get involved in activist stuff is not apathy, but a complete lack of cultural references to even the possibility of activism. People get their options for their lives from role models and cultural symbols that they see every day, in both real life and depiction. The activist role models they see (Ghandi, Mandela, Martin Luther King, etc.) may be praised, but they're all "saints", impossible to emulate and so ultimately disempowering. By writing our own stuff, we show the link from person tutting at the TV to Mighty Tarzan Eco-Warrior, and so we make it possible for people to come and join in.

The big corporate media do a job that we can't, but zine culture does a job that the mainstreamers can't. We have to use both to get fullest effect. We have to use them, and we have to make our own press to keep inspiring people and keep it growing. Think how much bigger this whole thing is compared with two years ago, and with two years before that. We're strong and we're getting stronger. The future is ours. We won't let it be anything else.