Did people come with PITCHFORKS, SYTHES AND SPADES last mayday?

NO!

Did RTS stockpile ILLEGAL WEAPONS ready for a bloody street battle?

NO!


These rumours are COORDINATED STATE PROPAGANDA - nothing less.


Write letters of complaint - at very least.

MONDAY APRIL 23 2001
Mass bomb scare ploy planned for May 1
BY DANIEL MCGRORY
 http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,2-118536,00.html

ANARCHIST groups plan to disrupt emergency services in their campaign of chaos on May 1 by encouraging their followers to make hundreds of bogus alarm calls. They want protesters to create bomb scares at London’s main rail and Underground stations, which would swiftly paralyse the capital.

The leaders are also suggesting raising fire alarms in streets choked with protesters. Police are worried about the dangers to genuine emergency calls if the groups carry out their threat, which one senior officer described as “mindless and irresponsible”.

The anarchists also plan to set up fake road-blocks and immobilise vehicles to increase the chaos. The promise by Tony Blair, Scotland Yard and Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, of a “zero tolerance” policy to ensure that the city stays open is regarded as a challenge by the protest organisers.

One leading figure said yesterday: “They boast that it will be business as usual on May 1, and we will show them otherwise to make our point.”

Public buildings will again be a target, with a plan to barricade No 10 by padlocking the gates of Downing Street. The climax of the protest will be in Oxford Street, where
protesters are being urged to pour into shops and department stores to block the doors so that customers cannot come or go. As soon as police arrive, the protesters will be told to disperse and move to a different target.

Specialist police teams are intensifying their electronic warfare against the organisers to unmask the ringleaders and discover their targets. Detectives know that they are being bombarded with misinformation in this high-tech battle and are trying to crack encrypted e-mails that the leaders are using to discuss tactics.

Police have the power to shut down Internet sites, but they say that they prefer to leave them running and to monitor them. It was through electronic mail that police first found details of the Mayday Monopoly, where demonstrators pick addresses from the board game to match targets for the protest.

Homeless groups will descend on Park Lane, protesters against Third World debt will gather in the Strand, and groups trying to drive cars off London’s streets will begin the day with a slow cycle ride at King’s Cross station.

The latest threat on the Internet is a campaign of looting designated businesses called “Sale of the Century”, taken from the Seventies television game show of that name. Some
student groups have threatened to boycott the May 1 protests if the looting is not dropped.

Police are investigating links between British groups and a band of international anarchists called Black Bloc, which was heavily involved in the weekend’s riots at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec. Three of its leaders were among the masked figures arrested during the trade summit siege.

Black Bloc was at the centre of attempts to disrupt George W. Bush’s presidential inauguration in January and the violent protests at the World Trade Organisation summit in
Seattle last year. It has proposed joining the London demonstration and has sent ideas on how to disrupt the city.

Their plans have been translated into four languages and distributed on the Internet to make it easier for activists from Europe to join the protest. The Italian anarchist movement known as Ya Basta is expected to attend. It has been linked to the hijacking of a train in Italy, and British protest groups are known to have studied its tactics and been in contact with its leadership.

repare for May Day madness
 http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/dynamic/lifestyle/londonlife/top_review.html?in_review_id=383315&in_review_text_id=329259
by Matt Munday

Until recently, Wombles were best known as the diminutive furry creatures from a Seventies kids' TV series who kept Wimbledon Common tidy. Although they lived in a commune of sorts - a burrow underneath the common, to be precise - and preferred not to mix with outsiders, they were a fairly genteel bunch who never got in trouble with the police.


Not so the Wombles of today. According to recent newspaper reports, the Wombles - an acronym for White Overall Movement Building Liberation through Effective Struggle - are much rowdier folk. They are, apparently, a gang of hardcore anarchists planning to turn Central London into a battle zone on 1 May.

Anti-capitalist protest on May Day has become an annual fixture. Last year, around 10,000 demonstrators converged on Parliament Square for a protest dubbed 'Guerilla Gardening' by its organisers, Reclaim The Streets. For a few hilariously surreal hours protesters - mostly young people in their twenties - expressed their discontent at the unethical practices of profit-hungry multinationals, and set about recreating a temporary version of a fairer, freer, more eco-conscious society.

This mostly entailed digging ponds, planting saplings, uploading live video-feeds onto the internet, dancing to a samba band and smoking a crafty reefer or two. The policing was low-key and the mood of the protesters, on the whole, was relaxed and easygoing.

Then a handful of protesters - including a 17-year-old Eton pupil - decided to trash a McDonald's on Whitehall - which, rather naively you might think, was still open for business, presumably in the hope that some of the nice protesters would drop in for a Big Mac. From there the whole event became mired in clich...s.

Cue rows of bulky riot cops; a Mexican standoff between police and demonstrators; police-baiting by a few Special Brew drinkers, oblivious to entreaties from scores of people to shut up and sit down; the sound of breaking glass as someone lobbed a bottle - and then the police charged, the cameras clicked and the following day's incendiary headlines virtually wrote themselves (especially when the defaced Cenotaph was added to the mix).

Yet despite its sour ending - and the ill-advised behaviour of a moronic minority - May Day 2000 was a largely peaceful protest and, even though it took place mere yards from Downing Street, never looked like developing into a full-scale riot. 'The mood appears playful rather than nasty,' I wrote in The Face after spending the day at the protest. 'Nobody [was] seriously entertaining the idea of bum-rushing Number Ten.' Whether the vibe will be the same this year remains to be seen. The initial omens haven't looked good. The Metropolitan Police have been quoted in The Telegraph stating that they will not be pursuing last year's 'softly softly' policy. 'It is extremely difficult to prepare for this sort of event,' the Metropolitan's assistant commissioner, Mike Todd, has said, 'because of the complete unpredictability of those taking part. But we are treating it as a serious attempt to disable the City.'

And then there's the emergence of a mysterious new group - the Wombles. On 31 March, 200 riot police raided a disused factory in Brixton which they believed to be a 'secret training centre' for the Wombles, a 'radical organisation of anarchists importing a frightening brand of Continental-style violence', according to Det Supt Bob Randall, who led the raid. But there was nobody there. The Wombles had - ha - gone underground.

'It was just ridiculous,' froths 25-year-old 'Ginger' - a crop-haired, blue-eyed activist who insists that she's 'not a Womble, but I associate with them. The Wombles are a non-violent organisation. There were meetings in that building, yes, but nobody was being trained to attack the police. I've never attacked a police officer, or even thrown anything at one, in my life.'

We're drinking tea in a vegetarian caf... on the common (regrettably Clapham, not Wimbledon). If Ginger is an advocate of 'continental-style violence', whatever that may be, she hides it well. Maybe it's the 'Geek' T-shirt she wears under her bulky red anorak. Maybe it's the cuddly monkey fastened to her rucksack. Or the laptop she produces and plugs into a nearby socket ('I'm a software engineer - I work for a living!').

Ginger, a veteran of 1993's M11 protest and last year's anti-WTO demo in Prague, has brought info on this year's May Day action, titled 'Mayday Monopoly'. As the name suggests, the thinking behind the protest is that throughout the day, there will be hundreds of autonomous actions by scores of different groups at real-life Monopoly-board locations. Hoteliers in Mayfair, one suspects, might be slightly more nervous about this than the residents of the Old Kent Road.

The London Mayday Collective are co-ordinating the day, in as much as their glossy-cover booklet is filled with hundreds of suggested locations for protests - from Bond Street clothes shops to Pall Mall gentlemen's clubs. But even they are unable to keep track of everything being planned.

The protest (like May Day last year, and J18 in 1999) swiftly assumes a life of its own as it snowballs on the internet, and hundreds of groups from the UK and Europe - from anti-GM food campaigners in Oxford to Kurdish immigrants in London and skint students in Nottingham - pick up on the theme and decide upon their own courses of action, and which locations to head for.

So what is likely to happen? Scan any of the direct-action bulletin boards on the internet and an anarchic, though hardly terrifying, picture begins to emerge. Plans are afoot for everything from mass bike rides to 'street theatre' along the Old Kent Road, a 'tour of shame' along Oxford Street where - libel alert! - talks will be given about the nefarious activities of certain high-street names right outside their flagship stores, sticker campaigns (Ginger produces handfuls, designed to look like Monopoly property cards, each bearing such irony-free slogans as 'Phone In Sick, Call A Strike, Take The Day Off' and 'Capitalism Needs War: Do You?') and impromptu pickets.

Prepare for Mayday Madness continued...

One group of anti-privatisation protesters that Ginger admits to being involved with, The South London May Day Collective, is planning something more ambitious. 'We're meeting at noon at the Elephant and Castle and we're going to play a big game,' she begins. 'There's going to be three teams: workers, who create assets; capitalists, who will be dressed as fat cats and will have a stack of monopoly money; and politicians, who will have control of the army. The politicians and the army will be trying to get the money off the workers, right, and the fat cats will be trying to get the assets by bribing the politicians, but if the workers link arms they can overthrow the state!'

It sounds like a version of It's A Corporate Knockout. 'That's the idea! We were actually gonna call it Privatisation Sans Frontières! But we decided not to 'cos nobody under the age of 25 will get the reference...'

Right. But what if the capitalists win? (Rolls her eyes.) 'It's a game! Look, it's going to be fluffy, OK? There's gonna be kids there, pensioners. There's a picnic after. We're not planning a confrontation with the police.'

Confrontation with the police, one suspects, may come later. There are rumours on the bulletin boards of a Main Event - although precisely what this is going to be is unclear. Mick, a 29-year-old Brixton-based activist (and DSS employee) I had met a couple of days prior to my encounter with Ginger, will be orchestrating the aforementioned 'tour of shame' in Oxford Street, but as far as The Main Event goes, he professes to be none the wiser. 'It's all a bit up in the air,' he shrugged. 'But whatever happens, I just hope we manage to come across better in the media than we did last time. However, it's an open day. Anyone's allowed to come. So you can't always legislate for troublemakers and agents provocateurs.'

An educated guess - although just a guess - is that there may be a Reclaim The Streets-style illegal street party in the offing. Smack in the heart of the West End. On a Tuesday. With bangin' techno, 'creative' dancing, and a sound system that will arrive on a tricycle, no doubt. News, if it proves true, that is likely to set shopkeepers' pulses racing, cause the police a headache of titanic proportions, and have everyone under the age of 25 bunking work/college, synchronising their watches and advancing directly to Oxford Street without passing Go!

This may be where the Wombles plan to come into their own. The group's website explains that the white overalls to be worn by members on the day will be heavily padded (with the things everyday folk leave behind, perhaps?). They will also be 'helmeted, with breathing protection' (read: wearing gas masks). The padding is intended to cocoon them from 'baton charges' and, rather optimistically you might think, 'horse charges'; the gas masks from police CS sprays. It doesn't take a genius to work out that they're planning at some point to form a human wall - and one hell of a photo opportunity - in order to, in their own words, 'facilitate free movement and communication during protests'. If they succeed, it will signal a critical mass both for police in front of them and protesters in the 'reclaimed' space behind them. The Wombles themselves may remain passive, but what will everyone else do? There could be tears before bedtime.

It wouldn't be the first time that padded-overall tactics have been used by anti-capitalist protesters. Infamous Italian activists Ya Basta - a notoriously violent collective or an entirely peaceful direct-action outfit, depending on whom you believe - employed similar methods during last year's Prague demonstrations.

Astrange thing happened when I attempted to interview a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police. I telephoned to get a response to Ginger's assertion that the Wombles were a non-violent organisation. I was given the Wombles' website address, which I already had, and was told that this was 'proof that they weren't nonviolent'. But when I asked the spokesperson to be more specific, and ventured that although I could find references on the site to 'self-protection from the depredations of the constabulary', I could see nothing which was an unambiguous statement of the Wombles' intent to act violently on May Day, I was told there would be no further comment. A few minutes later they called back and said they'd fax me a statement. This is what it said:

There is intelligence to suggest that a variety of anarchists and other groups are organising a day of anti-capitalist protest on Tuesday 1 May 2001.' Hey, they might be onto something there... It continues: 'The MPs and the other policing agencies in London are working together to develop comprehensive and flexible policing options to allow London to continue as normal while thwarting any concerted criminal activity.

'There are strong indications to suggest that protest groups' planning is well-advanced and that their in-tention is to disrupt the everyday workings of London life. There are further indications that a sizeable minority is intent on exploiting opportunities for public disorder and violence against a variety of targets which are likely to include the police, commercial institutions and government buildings. We are not prepared to discuss individual groups or their aims.'

It is true that most of the direct-action bulletin boards have at least one anonymous posting, among hundreds of others, of the let's-do-the-rozzers variety. But much more common, when the subject of trouble on May Day crops up, which isn't as often as you might think, are opinions along the lines that violence is hardly going to endear the protesters to the population at large - however hard they argue that capitalism breeds devastation on an infinitely greater scale.

So how will May Day 2001 go down in history? It's worth remembering that not all of the past few years' activist-led demonstrations have turned into riots - take Reclaim The Streets' 10,000-strong party on the M41 in 1996, which ended perfectly peacefully. It would be a shame if the national anti-globilisation debate is all about 'anarchist violence' come 2 May.

Perhaps it's time the wider issues got an airing.

Dear Mr Cadogan,
we at Red Star (the Revolutionary Socialists), are disappointed to read your reported remarks about this years revival of left wing activism. We were saddened to see that a veteran of the struggle, part of one of the most famed demonstrations in recent history (1968) cannot give a vote of confidence to those who will be carrying it forward for the next few decades.
We would so prefer for those such as you to, in the words of Dylan "...please get out of the new road if you cant lend your hand..." and retire, with dignity, as other erstwhile leftists of the time, such as Regis Debray, have done.