Protest camp in Parliament Square

[luke]

i'm just listening to the radio, nick ferrari ( ex fox/sun ) interviewing some woman representing the camp ( she's doing really great ), and after she started talking about the destruction of iraq and afghanistan he said that was the same as the vegetable patch they've planted on parliament square and they're just as bad

and he keeps bringing up brian haw living on benefits, and allowing other people to keep repeating it, and yet he knows - he's had brian on his show - that brian doesn't receive any benefits.

Who lives in Democracy Village?
Parliament Square in London is full of protesters right now. Here's our guide to the activists' camp



Parliament square has been sprouting tents since activists turned it into a protest camp two weeks ago and renamed it Democracy Village. Now they claim they have been told to move on before the state opening of parliament next week. So who and what is down there?

1 Information desk, manned by Ryan, a student from London, who arrived at the camp two days ago. Leaflets are on show from the different groups on the site – apparently established by an anti-capitalist group called Election Meltdown. Ryan says he is worried about the war in Afghanistan.

2 Gareth Newnham, a land reformist, from the Kew Bridge eco-village where activists "took over a piece of land and encouraged the public to play an active role in what happened on it". He is now at the camp to promote a sustainable way of life.

3 (By red flags) John is a supporter of the All Union Communist party of Bolsheviks and part of the UK Korean friendship association, set up to defend North Korea. He is opposing the war in Afghanistan, and wants "a complete revolutionary change. This system has outlived itself."

4 Part of the vegetable patch – with peppers and sunflowers – created by guerilla gardener Richard Reynolds.

5 Peace garden with chair, bongos, strawberry plants, oak sapling and peace flag, created by activists and used for meetings.

6 Large white tent, where workshops and meetings are held and banners are made. Inside is Ann, an anarchist sympathiser.

7 Communications tent with internet connection and piano – said to have been brought by activists from Election Meltdown.

8 Toilets (bales of hay).

9 Homeless man who has joined the camp, talking to a woman on a day trip to the village.

Not pictured

Brian Haw, who has been living on Parliament Square since 2001, protesting against the war on terror.

[luke]

Parliament camp campaigner Brian Haw arrested

Two campaigners living in tents pitched on Parliament Square have been arrested for obstructing police.

Anti-war protester Brian Haw, who has been camping on the green since 2001, was held as police searched the "peace camp".

Another protester Barbara Tucker, who has been camping there, was also arrested.

Ms Tucker was heard saying on BBC London 94.9: "You can't arrest him (Mr Haw), you don't have a search order."

Mr Haw, of Redditch, Worcestershire, set up his camp in protest against sanctions on Iraq and then over the war.

In 2007, he won a legal battle to remain in place due to a drafting error in a new law banning unauthorised protests in Westminster.

Since the beginning of May several other tents and flags have cropped up on the green, which has been dubbed Democracy Village by campaigners, who include anti-war demonstrators, climate change activists, communists and anarchists, as well as some homeless people.

BBC London understands there has been pressure to remove the gathering ahead of the state opening of Parliament on Tuesday.

from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/8702526.stm

[faceless]

I was just watching some live news on the BBC and it seems the protestors have all been cleared out, though there were still a couple of those 'purple people' there. Of course, they're mainly clean-cut students so they're fine.

I think the protestors should think about getting onto crown land somewhere - a permanent camp at or very near each of the Royal properties would be a good thing.

[luke]

Dictators around the world must feel vindicated by Parliament Square eviction
It is healthy that the powerful be confronted with the victims of their failed policies


Parliament Square following the clearance of the peace camp

At the edge of Parliament Square, Winston Churchill squints – hunched and impervious and marble – over the gothic heart of British democracy. Usually, his only company is the smoggy traffic and snapping tourists. But, for the past three months, he has been joined by another symbol, and another style of democracy.

In May, a smattering of tents was set up on this diesel-tinted green by citizens protesting against the war in Afghanistan. When I first saw them they were a mixture of students and activists and professors, voicing the conviction of 70 per cent of British people that the war is unwinnable and should end. One of them, Maria Gallasetgui, said: "We have a responsibility to stand up to what they're doing. It's immoral." She added: "We support the troops, that's why we want to bring them home. They" – she pointed to Parliament – "are the ones sending them to die."

They held up signs with pictures of maimed Afghan children, and waved them at the MPs as they walked to work. The MPs invariably looked down and away and they hurried through Parliament's iron gates.

These protesters are needed: despite the clear will of the British and American people, the war is being escalated, with an increase in slaughtered civilians of 23 per cent in the past year.

As I looked out over this rag-tag of tents and posters, I realised that they didn't only express the will of the people here – they were expressing the will of the people we are invading and bombing. The International Council on Security and Development just conducted an opinion poll of ordinary Afghans in Kandahar and Helmand, the places where these MPs have sent a surge of troops. Some 70 per cent of them stand with the tents and camp-fires, saying the military operation is harming them and should stop.

So just a few metres from where the Prime Minister lives, people sat on an open green barbecuing food and sharing drinks and calling for that Prime Minister to be indicted for war crimes. They had daily meetings where they shared out the responsibilities, while every 15 minutes, Big Ben bonged.

In that first month, I saw a group of Chinese tourists staring at the camp in disbelief.

"This would never be allowed in China," one of them said to me. "Not anywhere. Never mind at the centre of power. This is what democracy really means."

As the months went on, the tent city developed and mutated each time I visited. More protesters arrived, with a more eclectic range of grievances. A man appeared announcing he was starving himself because the courts wouldn't let him see his children: he hasn't eaten for more than 20 days.

After hearing there was free food, a group of homeless people set up camp there too. (They are a harbinger: Shelter says David Cameron's current policies will lead to a "disastrous" increase in the number of homeless people.) Suddenly, MPs didn't only have to stare at the victims of their war – they also had to stare at the victims of their failed social policies.

That's how it should be. They should see it every day – the faces of the Afghan children we have caused the deaths of, and the faces of the mentally ill people we have left to rot on the streets. I can't think of a healthier sign in a democracy – that we don't allow our problems to be cleansed, China-style, from the sight of the powerful, but leave them there, in full view, demanding to be dealt with.

Yes, a few parts of it smelled. But waging war in Afghanistan, against the will of the people there and the people here, smells a lot worse. Yes, there were a few crazy people in the tents. But none was as crazy as the belief that we can win a land war in Afghanistan now, after nine years, with the population rapidly turning against us and pleading for a peace and reconciliation process. Freedom is not an "eyesore", as the London Mayor Boris Johnson claimed: citizens pressuring their government for justice are the most luscious sight in the world.

Very early on Tuesday morning, the police came to force the protesters out, after Johnson got a court order. So now there is a clean, clear lawn again. Repressive governments the world over have seen footage of protesters being cleared from the lawn of the Mother of Parliaments, and chuckled with vindication.

MPs will look out on a reassuringly empty space as they stroll in to make their decisions, with the public will unvoiced. And Winston Churchill stands alone once more, save for the tourists, and the traffic, and the false silence of a displaced citizenry.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-dictators-around-the-world-must-feel-vindicated-by-parliament-square-eviction-2031301.html

Ministers plan special law to force out protester Brian Haw
Home Secretary Theresa May is determined to shut legal loopholes that have allowed his anti-war encampment to continue for nine years in the historic square.

The minister does not want to stop protests taking place in the square opposite the gates to the House of Commons. But a senior source said: “Nobody wants to stop democratic protest outside the Commons but that does not mean allowing a permanent camp to take over a square that belongs to everybody, including people with different views to the protesters.”

It raises the likelihood of an Act of Parliament with special provisions to remove Mr Haw, who has been camped at the square night and day since 1991 surrounded by placards and a small group of supporters.

But such a move would be highly controversial and police sources think crowds of protesters could move into the square to resist any attempt to evict Mr Haw, who has become an iconic symbol for some peace protesters.

The Home Office is to take soundings from mayor Boris Johnson, Commons Speaker John Bercow, the Metropolitan police and Westminster Council before deciding how to act.

Previous attempts to evict Mr Haw have ended in farce at the courts - and the encampment was left strikingly untouched by the bailiffs who threw out the newer makeshift Democracy Village camp in the early hours.

Labour's 2005 Serious Organised Crime and Police Act had a clause written to remove campers from the square but Mr Haw's legal team won a ruling that his protest predated that Act and could not be stopped by it. Westminster Council tried to evict him for obstructing the pavements but his lawyers proved that passers-by were not blocked. In recent years, attempts to enforce the law have dwindled and his camp has been allowed to encroach on the grass of the square and to grow in size.

Mr Haw replied “no comment” when told about the moves. A divorced father of seven children, he began his one-man protest against sanctions on Iraq weeks before the 9/11 atrocities raised the prospect of an invasion. Over the years his camp has become a symbol of anti-war protest, backed by Left-wing politicians like Tony Benn. However, Mr Haw polled fewer than 300 votes when he stood in the general election.

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23858158-ministers-plan-special-law-to-force-out-protester-brian-haw.do

[faceless]

If people with 'different views to the protesters' are complaining then why don't they make a protest? Oh right yeah, they're too busy being arseholes to actually stand up for what they believe in. the thought of them sitting together with a few hundred other bitter little people would be funny though - they'd be fighting within hours, rioting by nightfall and resorting to cannibalism by daybreak.

[luke]

Democracy Village: what happened next?
Despite Boris Johnson's best efforts, a small army of protesters are still camped outside Westminster. So are they a symbol of Britain's healthy democracy – or just a pointless nuisance?


Democracy Village peace protesters exploit a legal loophole by camping out on the Westminster council-owned pavement.

There are mice in Parliament Square. They come out after dark: quick and fat and seemingly fearless, as they dart across the narrow pavements of possibly the world's most famous traffic island while, inches away, the last of the London rush hour thunders past. Kate gets an uncharacteristically dreamy look when she talks about them. "They run," she says, "up and down my tent poles."

Since May, Kate has been living in the square in a small tent without a flysheet. "When it rained yesterday I had a little bit of a leak," she says. Kate is 27, thin and pale, despite these months of camping in one of the capital's most shadeless corners. Her tent sits directly on the pavement. But she seems surprisingly content. Until May she was just one of London's drifting homeless; now she has a purpose.

Behind her tent and along the square's eastern pavement, directly facing the houses of parliament, are large hand-painted banners: "End Afghanistan Corporate War", "Bring Our Soldiers Home Alive", "Don't Attack Iran/Syria", "Democracy Village: ON STRIKE for Peace", "24 Hour Ongoing Frontline Picket". Slogans of this sort have been a fixture in the square for almost a decade, ever since the anti-war protester Brian Haw set up camp here in 2001. Haw is in the square still, a few yards away, often sitting as still as a statue, well on his way to becoming a national institution – or even an international one: the subject of a Japanese documentary, the Most Inspiring Political Figure of 2007 according to Channel 4, the subject of a Turner prize-winning work by the artist Mark Wallinger.

Yet the protest that Kate belongs to is not so revered. During its four-and-a-half months of existence, Democracy Village has been called "nauseating" by the mayor of London, Boris Johnson; "squalid" by the leader of Westminster council, Colin Barrow; "a malignant infection" by the Labour MP Tom Harris; a "threat to public health" and an opportunistic piece of "free camping" by the Times; and both an exercise in "self-regard" and "self-righteousness" and "a wino's Glastonbury" by the columnist Tom Sutcliffe in the usually liberal – and anti-war – Independent.

Even Haw has condemned Democracy Village. "All their activities have been deliberately unreasonable, even depraved and outrageous," he wrote on his website in July. "Drink, drugs, threats, avarice, violence, disgusting behaviour, are the hallmarks of Democracy Village." The protest, he went on, was led by an "alleged agent provocateur", with the unspoken implication that it had been created by the British government in order to discredit him.

Eight weeks ago, after a protracted legal struggle that went all the way to the high court, Johnson had the then few dozen Democracy Village activists evicted from the grassy central portion of the square. Fifty bailiffs and 80 policemen were involved in the operation, which took place at 1am, and the protesters, caught slightly cold, put up limited resistance: a few locked themselves to the rickety metal structures they had erected, but were quickly pulled off and manhandled away. A truckload of metal fencing was erected around the grass, which over the summer, to much outrage from politicians and the press, had in patches been completely worn away. Round-the-clock security guards were installed behind this barrier to prevent any re-occupation of the land. Barrow commented that he was "relieved this dreadful blight of Parliament Square has finally come to an end".

Except that it hasn't. Immediately after the eviction, many of the Democracy Village activists melted away, but a minority, Kate among them, simply moved a few yards from the grass to the pavement and set themselves up next to Haw. And there they have stayed, studiously ignored or glared at by him, but gradually building up a new encampment until, by yesterday, there were 15 or 16 tents in a ragged line all along the eastern side of the square and curling round to the south. There are also two tall, walk-in wooden cabinets, almost like scoreboxes on a rural cricket ground, where the Democracy Village protesters lock their valuables; a padded office chair for them to rest in when not handing out leaflets and talking to passersby; and wooden pallets, liberated from builders' skips, to keep most of the tents off the damp ground.

"Boris Johnson's made himself look like an idiot," says Luke, one of the protesters. "He's moved us about two inches." Luke is 22, tanned and lanky and pretty sure of himself. He has a mattress in his tent, and his possessions all neatly tucked away on either side. "Before I was here, I was homeless for seven years, just wasting away in a hostel with alcoholics and crackheads." He sits comfortably cross-legged on the pavement, smoking a roll-up, as if he were at some idyllic rural pop festival, while the traffic shoots by just behind his back. "The only downside of being here," he goes on, "is the carbon monoxide."

An older, slightly more guarded protester, who gives his name as Chrysalis, says: "We're more in the public eye now, being on the pavement. We're more approachable." The fencing keeping them off the grass is actually perfect for securing banners and tents to. Even the security guards, heavy-set men who mostly sit looking bored on the benches on the square's leafier, less windswept side, are, Kate says, "actually a really nice group of lads". Luke adds: "We jump over the fence all the time, just to prove to Boris that we can."

The mayor's press office describes the current encampment delicately as "an ongoing situation". Some MPs are more robust. "It is a total farce," an unnamed former Labour minister told the London Evening Standard recently. "It [the protest] is as big an eyesore as it ever was." The Conservative MP Malcolm Rifkind told the paper that the coalition government should draw up legislation to remove it. In July 2009, even before Democracy Village appeared in the square alongside Haw, David Cameron told Sky News: "I am all in favour of free speech . . . But I think there are moments when our Parliament Square does look a pretty poor place, with shanty town tents and the rest of it . . . My argument is: 'Enough is enough'."

Yet turning such rhetoric into action may continue to prove difficult. The square, which was created in 1868 from a graveyard and a patchwork of demolished buildings, is a small maze of jurisdictions. Its core of grass, paving and beleaguered old plane trees, strictly called Parliament Square Garden, is part of the royal parks, but managed by the Greater London Authority (GLA), which consists of the mayor and the London Assembly. The garden is covered by an array of fussy bylaws: "No person shall . . . wash or dry any piece of clothing or fabric" or "use any kite or model aircraft"; "written permission is required" to "exhibit any notice", "camp, or erect . . . any structure", or "give a public speech". Well before Democracy Village, some of these bylaws had been broken or tested to the limit by protesters from Haw to Tamil nationalists to an ex-soldier, James Matthews, who was sentenced to 30 days in prison in 2000 for adding a green mohican made of turf to the square's statue of Winston Churchill during an anti-capitalist march.

The square's pavements, meanwhile, are another matter. Along the south and east side, where the Democracy Villagers are now gathered, they are the responsibility of Westminster council. The council does not currently have "the necessary powers", says Barrow, to remove the demonstrators. And nor does the Metropolitan police: "Officers," says a spokesman, cannot "remove tents or any similar structures from [this] public highway". So few passersby use this part of the square, put off by the traffic and the lack of pedestrian crossings, that it is hard to accuse protesters of obstructing it.

You might think that security concerns offer the authorities a better excuse for moving them on. Over recent decades, Westminster has become a near-fortress of blocked-off roads, 20ft fences, anti-truck bomb barriers, CCTV and armed police officers. In 2005, the Blair government's infamously draconian Serious Organised Crime and Police Act included sections to tightly regulate protests within a mile-wide "designated area" around the Palace of Westminster, including Parliament Square. "A person seeking authorisation for a demonstration," the act says, "must give written notice" to the police; and protesters must not cause "a security risk" or "disruption to the life of the community". Haw had to fight a long legal battle against the act in order to continue his anti-war vigil. Other Westminster demonstrators have been convicted under the legislation: for reading out the names of British soldiers killed in Iraq, even for holding a tea party on the Parliament Square lawn.

However, the sheer complexity of the overlapping laws and authorities means that protesters can continue to chance their arm and hope to find a loophole. So it was this May Day, when the founders of Democracy Village detached themselves from the day's traditional leftwing festivities in the capital and occupied Parliament Square.

At first, there were just a dozen scattered tents and a plan to stay for the six days until the general election. The national media initially ignored the camp. On election night, as taxis full of journalists and politicians raced round the square heading for interviews and parties, I found a few protesters sitting, ignored, round a brazier on the cold grass. But they stayed, and grew in numbers and ambition: banners went up about Afghanistan and the Greek crisis, about climate change and the consequences of the banking meltdown. The campers set up a kitchen and compost toilets, and planted a "Peace Garden", an oak tree and strawberry plants. Once the fever of the hung parliament had passed, reporters came to visit in numbers. Suitably dramatic quotes were provided: "We've got two governments now, their one and our one," Chris Knight, one of the leading lights of Democracy Village, told the Times. "This is genuinely the beginning of a revolution."

The villagers jeered the Queen as she arrived for the state opening of parliament. They climbed scaffolding on Westminster Abbey, on the other side of the square, to unfurl an anti-war banner. They staged a sit-down outside Downing Street. They set up a website; declared their support for the British Airways strikers; had militant letters published in newspapers.

Despite the fury that Democracy Village began to arouse – outsiders mess with parliament's protocol and planting arrangements at their peril – it was not hard to view it more sympathetically. Why not an ongoing protest about Britain's economic and foreign policies right next to the places where the key decisions and votes on them were taken? As Tony Benn, one of the camp's few prominent supporters, put it in July, "Turning Parliament Square into a Democracy Village . . . exactly sums up my view of [the square's] role."

The intolerance towards the village from Conservative politicians in particular sits ill with the coalition's loud talk of restoring civil liberties after Labour's supposedly authoritarian rule. In 2006 Boris Johnson, then a loose-tongued Tory MP rather than mayor of London, wrote in the Daily Telegraph that protests in Parliament Square such as Haw's, while they "spoiled the look of the place", also reminded people "across the world [that] Britain still stands for a certain idea of liberty".

Then again, Democracy Village's openness and unruliness did have their disadvantages. Gradually, says Maria Gallastegui, a veteran peace campaigner, "we were overrun by homeless people. Democracy Village became a place to come for shelter, for food. It became like an old sanctuary ground." For the original, politically committed residents, the camp became, she says, "unmanageable". The communal cooking utensils were stolen, and the kitchen had to be shut down. Drinkers settled in. "It degenerated into a Mad Max environment," says Quentin Cross, a slight, softly spoken Irishman and another longstanding resident. "I was beaten up several times. People were being ripped off."

Yet Gallastegui and the other remaining villagers insist that many of the negative press stories about the camp were exaggerated and politically motivated. In fact, they say, the protest's genuine activists regularly moved their tents to minimise harm to the grass, carefully collected and removed their rubbish, and quickly stopped using the smelly compost toilets in favour of nearby public lavatories. As for Haw's allegation that Gallastegui is an agent provocateur – she and her comrades roll their eyes. Until last year, she was part of his protest, before, as he puts it on his website, "she withdrew . . . by mutual consent".

The current incarnation of Democracy Village certainly feels genuine. "No alcohol zone," says a notice taped to a lamp-post. Instead, the half-dozen activists who are there at any one time drink tea and keep the pavement tidy around their tents. "We're having to run this as a tight ship now," says Gallastegui, who is older than the other, mostly male protesters, and seems to be in charge of daily operations. Before the original camp was evicted, she says, without alerting the GLA or Westminster council she contacted the police to obtain authorisation to move the protest on to the pavement. The names of the activists involved, the number of tents, the positioning of those tents so as not to block the pavement – all these have been agreed with the police.

On a mild autumn evening, Gallastegui has just got back from one of the protesters' daily "food runs" with a carrier bag of sandwiches and a thermos of hot water donated by a friendly cafe. Central London is a relatively easy place for a savvy protester to live on the street: the villagers also know which nearby council day centres for the homeless offer the chance of a shower and the use of a computer. And camping in Parliament Square, for all the noise and pollution, has its compensations; looking up from her tent at the golden, floodlit spikes and towers of the Palace of Westminster across the road, Kate says, "For all the bureaucracy that goes on in there, it's a beautiful building".

But hostility towards the protest regularly re-asserts itself. Sometimes, passing drivers throw abuse and bottles. At pub closing time, people come to argue with the villagers, and sometimes to kick and upend their tents. Tonight, a posh-looking young man holding a half-empty pint of lager comes over to tell the campers that their actions are "illegal". The campers tell him that they have police permission while his public drinking does not. He wanders off. And then there is the traffic, which never properly quietens: the villagers say they have learned to sleep through most of it, but never the sirens.

After a few hours out here, even on a warmish night, a chill begins to seep through your clothes. Most of the protesters wear fleeces and hiking boots, but cocky young Luke is in a long-sleeved T-shirt. "My brother would probably be laughing at me, living in a tent out here," he says. Then he suddenly turns sober. "My brother was killed in Afghanistan: 1st Para. When I hit 15."

I ask him if he thinks the protest is having a political effect. "I'm so out of touch with radio and TV, I don't really know." Gallastegui is more upbeat. The camp's anti-war message, she says, is increasingly in tune with public opinion as the Afghan situation worsens. But then she too turns downbeat: "I've been here for four years, and I need to move on. Well, I'm in two minds . . . this takes all your time. Away from here, I could be doing more writing, more networking."

Yet even if Democracy Village soon disappears from Parliament Square, whether because of its activists' exhaustion or shifting priorities, or the coming of winter, or some cunning initiative by the authorities, a precedent has been established. The square has become a kind of new Speaker's Corner, not like the old one, tucked away and basically toothless on the edge of Hyde Park, with an audience of tourists and shoppers, but right at the centre of British power.

Already, beside Haw and Democracy Village, other protests, currently about the alleged world dominance of the freemasons and the rights of fathers, are beginning to establish small encampments and jostle for space on the pavement. All these demonstrators may get an opportunity to spread out further. Thanks to the recent wet weather, the Parliament Square grass has quickly grown back, thick and lush. The security fence around it, the GLA acknowledges, is ugly and excludes the public. It will soon have to come down.