When I got home after being arrested and then bailed for attending the Palestine Action protest, I WhatsApped my family to reassure them that I was OK. I ended my message by saying that I felt overwhelmingly sad.
‘What is your sadness about? (you might have felt just furious… ),’ my brother asked.
To which I responded:
‘Most obviously, about the futility of us all in the face of systemic cruelty. But also a sense, sitting there with the others of this extraordinary horizontal sea of empathy, love and solidarity, which is so easily dammed and damned by vertical structures of power, capital and vanity’
I was tired and emotional (and this was before I started drinking) and left it at that. But the next day, the horizontal/vertical metaphor is still with me, so please indulge me in playing it out.
First, it is necessary to say that I was, of course, furious at the Labour Party’s proscription of Palestine Action. Two circles of despair currently haunt me and many others: the Palestinian genocide and the collapse of democracy. The proscription of Palestine Action as a ‘terrorist’ organisation brings these two circles together in an almost perfect Venn diagram. A third circle - that of climate breakdown - has obsessed me in recent years, and this too is present in the other two. An appalling ecocide accompanies the genocide, while the collapse of democracy is an intentional act of the carbon state, allowing corporatist power to overwhelm the rights of individuals in the face of the polycrisis. Joining the protest was therefore a simple decision for me, even knowing it would almost certainly lead to arrest. When a friend asked if I was nervous, I responded without hesitation: there is not fear when one stands on the side of right..
My fury stemmed from the Labour Party’s venal dissembling in pushing the proscription through parliament. Many others have covered this, but it bears repeating that even the government’s own lawyers accepted that only 3 of an estimated 385 PA actions could potentially meet the threshold of terrorism—and even those cases were debatable. The Home Office’s advice indicated that national security was not a central factor in the decision to proscribe. Yet this did not stop the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper from lying through her teeth when she declared to parliament that “The UK’s defence enterprise is vital to the nation’s national security and this Government will not tolerate those who put that security at risk.”
This fury is compounded by the government’s complicity in the genocide, not least through that ‘defence enterprise’ (aka arms industry) continuing to supply arms to Israel. Then there is this government’s violent assault on the human and democratic right to protest. We thought the Tories were bad on this count. This lot are worse, much worse. But, as I have written before, fury is not a productive foundation for building a better world, because one is trapped in the hold of the systems and values that create the fury.
As I sit down with a thousand of others, our backs turned to the disgraced ‘Mother of Parliaments’, fury dissolves. The very act of sitting down together, eyes turned downward, in silence, is transformative. The anger remains with the supporters left standing vertical. It was they who, rightly, keep shouting and chanting, their voices rising as the arrests begin. On the ground, what I experience was this horizontal sea of empathy, love and solidarity, and with it an extraordinary sense of collective power. Snatches of talk ripple through our gathering. Strangers asking each other if they were alright, sharing water and sunscreen.
‘Have you done this before?’ someone asks, and the responses bounce around in a circle.
‘Why are you here?’ a man behind me asks. I explain and return the question. He is wearing a kippah, and the next day he appears on the front page of The Observer. He talks with his neighbour of the moral need for progressive Jews to speak out and act up, and how their voice is silenced. His is the most principled stand of all, necessary to rebut the laziest and most immoral of accusations, namely that anyone supporting Palestine is antisemitic.
At 2pm, after an hour, everyone stands up as agreed. Some wander off, but the rest of us sit down again, encouraged by someone who shouts that it is important to show solidarity with those arrested. The police continue to pick us off and at 14.15 (I later see on my charge sheet) it is my turn. I am standing at the time, and do not think quickly enough to get horizontal and floppy. My arrest is therefore docile, lacking the performative action of some others. The police prefer the vertical.
My arrestor, Constable Pottage, sits next to me in the police van.
‘What do you do, then?’ he asks, in a perfectly civilised manner.
‘Do I have to answer?’
‘No, I was just making conversation.’
I tell him I need my own space, and over the next three and a half hours that I am with him we hardly talk. There is another constable with me, whose sole purpose appears to be to hold my bag of possessions. That means it’s over 1000 policemen just standing in a queue for almost four hours. Tell that to Yvette Cooper when she talks about efficient use of police resources.
We are taken to Great Scotland Yard, a street off Whitehall, and put into a long crocodile of arrestees with their accompanying police escort. There are too many of us – it is later announced as the largest mass arrest this century – to be put into custody all at once, so they have decided to “triage” us en masse, appropriating a medical term to process those they consider the crook supporters of terrorism.
The protestor next to me in the queue leans towards me.
‘Sorry,’ he says
‘’What for?’
He points down. There is a puddle of urine. He looks mortified.
‘I asked, and they said I had to stay here.’
The police operation has clearly been planned in advance (the charge sheets we are given later are preprinted with date, place and cause of arrest: Section 13 of the Terrorism Act 2000) but they obviously haven’t thought through what having 500 people, many older and frail, standing in the sun for four hours might mean. I spend the next hours carefully ignoring the puddles as they appear.
At the end of the street, a police cordon holds back a large group of protestors who remained after one of the regular pro-Palestine marches. ‘Let them go! Let them go!’ they sing over the beating of a drum. One of them is crying uncontrollably. When my section of the crocodile gets close to them, I call out to her not to cry, hand to my heart in solidarity. ‘You’re so brave,’ she responds. But it isn't bravery that brings us here – it's despair.
At intervals, the police cordon parts, allowing groups of tourists laden with Bond Street shopping bags to pass through. They're heading to the five-star hotel that now occupies the old police headquarters. "Today, the hotel embraces its storied past, with captivating historical anecdotes woven into the guest experience," reads the website blurb. The tourists look at us bemused and with some disdain, probably regretting their choice of hotel and date. I stare back, thinking the experience is educational for them. Someone further down the crocodile starts singing ‘Imagine’, out of tune but nonetheless I find myself welling up at his warbling voice.
Eventually, I reach the front of the queue for ‘processing.’ There is a raft of standard questions - What is your address? Date of birth and so on. When it gets to asking my shoe size, I laugh out loud and give it to them very precisely. Then I am let out on ‘street-bail’, on condition that I report to Plumstead Police Station in two months’ time.
It is walking up Whitehall that I start crying. I feel unbearably sad.
In a later WhatsApp my brother writes: “Once one’s experienced that sea of empathy, love and solidarity one’s whole outlook changes.” He should know; he has been arrested many times for his climate activism with XR and Insulate Britain. And he is right. I have never experienced such a profound sense of collective purpose and solidarity as sitting down with over a thousand people in Parliament Square. Many others have written about the contrast of horizontal and vertical systems of power. The horizontal is seen as dispersed, rhizomic, shared and self-organised. The vertical is described as hierarchical, potentially oppressive, controlling and top-down. In today’s politics it is the vertical which is ever dominant. The populist autocrats feign the horizontal discourse of the masses while building ever higher vertical walls of control and division. Trump’s mantra of ‘Build That Wall!’ was far more metaphorical than actual. But against such oppressions, one can find inspiration from the successful horizontal models of power, such as the Zapatistas, and remember their call for “A World in which many worlds fit.”
If my sadness was primarily about the futility of the gesture of being arrested in face of the agonising suffering of the Palestinian people and the unfettered cruelty of the Israeli state, it was also a melancholy about the way that the vertical structures of legislation are suppressing (“damming and damning”) the flow and natural rights of the horizontal sea of empathy, love and solidarity.
However, sadness, like fury, is not the best foundation for transformation. One does not need to be a great philosopher – let alone a student of Kierkegaard – to understand that melancholy too often turns in on itself to become a self-absorbing distraction. Instead, we have to believe that the horizontal sea of collective purpose can rise and break the levees of vertical control. It is a project that turns one of the great myths of neoliberalism – a rising tide lifts all boats – against itself. Because this rising tide of the horizontal sea washes away the iniquities and oppressions of the vertical state, flooding the arid plains of capital with love, and leaving the empty vertical towers as ruins of the modern project.
Thank you for sharing your humanity in this unbearable savage cruelty.
I admire your gesture and share the sadness. I was there with the 300,00. During the speeches also felt an overwhelming shock and sadness. Solidarity!