Free Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere by Paul Mason Page B

march sets off, with a clear half million on the streets, it has turned into the biggest trade-union demo for more than thirty years.
    Among the marchers, you can see what the new mood created by the student movement and UK Uncut has achieved. ‘Where’s Ed Miliband?’ representatives from a special needs school—students and teachers linked arm-in-arm—ask me. ‘We don’t trust him! He needs to get his act together. It’s the bankers, the profit system. The big companies should stop evading tax!’ There’s a festive atmosphere. The schoolkids are singing a re-scripted version of ’I Will Survive’.
    But at Piccadilly Circus, the edges of the demo are swarming with youths dressed like members of the anarchist Black Bloc. Really young kids: buzzing with the newness of it all, some change from their normal clothes into black hoodies and scarves right there in front of the police. The police begin to talk urgently into their walkie-talkies.
    A veteran riot photographer texts me with the time and place where it will kick off: Regent Street, a vast curve of nineteenth-century architecture and luxury retail. When I get there, it’s deserted. In the distance I can make out a tight phalanx of black-clad protesters, about 400 strong, filling the width of the street. They tramp forward, masked, some carrying the red-and-black flags of anarcho-syndicalism. This, one of them tells me later, is the biggest Black Bloc ever assembled in the UK. And though there are certainly numerous anarchists from Europe here, it is the students and school students from December who have really swelled the numbers.
    They veer off into a side-street and start lobbing paint, billiard balls and smoke flares at various boutique shops: Victorinox gets it, so does an art gallery. There are only about twenty police around, none in riot gear. In a futile gesture, they try to protect the Victorinox shop, receiving the full barrage of paint, bottles and—according to the Met’s later report—an acid-filled light bulb.
    It’s mayhem. And it is clear the police tactic is not to deploy fully and fight the protesters. For the next few hours the Black Bloc will roam around the West End, attacking shops, breaking into groups, running away, re-forming—with a Genoa-style, ‘fluffy’ contingent of nonviolent direct action people trailing along behind.
    I stop some of the latter: the women are dressed in multicoloured wigs, faces painted, tinsel in their hair, bare midriffs; the men are longhaired, thin, and non-aggressive. Why are they doing this?
    Boy: ‘Because Top Shop’s owner hasn’t paid billions of pounds of tax.’
    Girl (off her head): ‘We’re just dancing with flowers. We’re protesting in favour of beauty, against all this fucking shit in the window. We don’t want to spend all our money on clothes.’
    Boy: ‘… and because capitalism is a damn lie. That’s why we’re throwing stuff at these fucking shop fronts.’
    I buttonhole a second group, students; two young men and a woman. One of the guys, wearing a hipster low-neck t-shirt and a plaid duffle coat:
    We’re sick with the government in general. For decades nobody legitimately can tell the truth; the nature of the hierarchy means only the imbeciles, the suck-ups, only the scumbags ever get to the top. So to truly be free is for everyone to take our part and decide for our freedom.
    This is weird English but that’s exactly how he says it, and he is not drunk or foreign, just furious. ‘We need to all get together and create a community. All government is just an infrastructure, when we get government out of our vision we can start from the ground up, without corruption.’
    At Oxford Circus a thirty-foot Trojan Horse made of wicker is wheeled in by protesters and goes up in flames. The police do nothing, because at this point there are none in