“It’s not post-structuralist/It’s not post-modernist/It’s not the end of history like they promised/It’s the new age of the fist”.

Raucous Glasgow revolutionary and folk singer-songwriter Alistair Hulett left us the anthem for the oncoming year.
I was asked by a current affairs weekly during the summer what I reckoned on the riots that had wild-fired across London and flared out across the land. Somebody thought I’d have an insight on account of where I come from. I told them that hatred of the cops had to have been a factor and that I ranged myself on the side of the rioters. I had an impression the sentiment fell strangely on their ears.
Everywhere in the world, young working-class people are hostile to the police. But nowhere is this acknowledged in the media mainstream.
My insight hadn’t derived from Derry but from days in the mid-‘60s living in south-east London and working in a gang as the only one not born with the Bow Bells ringing in my ears. Monday morning conversation frequently focused on newspaper accounts of Millwall fans’ involvement in violence at the weekend. It was taken for granted in our company that the fault will have lain with the police.
At away games, typically, fans were surrounded by cops as they stepped off the train and herded towards the ground, kicked on the ankles, elbowed in the ribs, taunted and provoked all the way. Dare any fan throw a shape to hit back, batons would be drawn, heads cracked and fans snatched at random charged with public order crimes. The rags next morning would demand no more namby-pamby tactics from the police. Nobody on the job spoke of police as anything other than “the filth”.
All that remains of this now in the memory of the mainstream is that “Millwall fans used to be notorious for violence.”
It was evident in 2011 that the cops across the water remain a law unto themselves, only more so. Students, trades unionists, tax campaigners and protest demonstrators of one sort and another are routinely herded into cordoned-off spaces without regard for civil rights or the rule of law, “kettled” for hours, taunted, threatened, assaulted. Anyone who raises a hand in response is liable to be roughed up and railroaded into prison by police perjury and the mendacity of magistrates and judges. Depend on it, too, the only complaint from the majority of the media will be that the cops should have moved in sooner and hit harder.
If you are young and working-class you can expect to be stopped on “suss” as you mind your own business and splattered in the sarcasm which British police seem to specialise in. If you are black and caught on your own, there’s always a chance you’ll be killed by cops who know they’ll get away with it. Even if the killing sparks a righteous uprising, they know they’ll get away with it.
What’s changed since the ‘60s is that the categories of people the police are licenced to target have been extended to anyone whose politics, class or racial profile are deemed to deprive them of rights under the law.
The decisive shift in Britain in 2011 can best be detected not in opinion poll ratings or resignations on foot of the scandal de jour but in the vengeful law ’n’ order rampage since the summer in which, by the year’s end, more than 4,000 young people selected from the demonised demographic will have been dragged through the splintered doors of their homes, usually at dawn, for processing to prison by courts which have been explicitly told by politicians to ignore all precedents and sentencing guidelines and to show no mercy.
The football fans of the ‘60s were hated by the comfortable establishment for their spirit and gumption and unreadiness to be cowed. Now it’s fans of fundamental change who are made foremost the firing line.
The two million-strong strike against the theft of public sector pensions on November 30, the Occupy movement’s lightning rod for discontent in more than a dozen cities, the mass response of young people to the police killing of Mark Duggan in Tottenham in August, these can be seen as the convergence of streams of resistance. It is this which has unnerved the ruling class.
Their economy is collapsing, weighed down by thievery and greed and corroded by corruption. All of their remedies have this in common – that they won’t work. The source of the crisis lies not in the foolishness or mistakes of this or that minister or banking executive or even in the structure of relations with other currency zones. This is not a crisis affecting the capitalist system but a crisis of the system itself.
The only way forward they can see is by ransacking society to rob ever more resources from those with the least left to give, the meantime beefing up their boot-boys to batter any organised defence.
What they most fear now as the dark clouds gather is that the riots of the summer might have had the character of a rehearsal for the real thing.
What is a revolutionary, after all, but a rioter with a political purpose?
We are all in this together, and should wish our British neighbours well in the struggles of 2012.
In the new age of the fist we must clench ourselves to fight back.