I Didn’t Get Up Early on Tuesday

I couldn’t be bothered to get up early on Tuesday morning, although I expected something interesting would happen when police came to search the ‘Democracy Camp’ in Parliament Square before the State Opening of Parliament.

The flashpoint came when the police moved on from there to also search the tents of the two long-term full-time residents of the square, Brian Haw and Barbara Tucker. Brian has been there – except for a night or two locked up in the nearest police station- since early June 2001, and has witnessed a few state openings in that time, so there seemed little reason for police to want to search their tents too.  You can see the altercation with the police on a You Tube video taken by one of the campers, and pictures of him being handled rather roughly by police were in the evening paper.

I missed being there because I like to sleep at home which is around 20 miles away and don’t like to pay the high fares for travel in the early hours unless I’m actually being paid to be there.

© 2010, Peter Marshall

I called in later in the day to find out what had happened, and to talk to people who had seen the events. So I was able to put a story on Demotix, but it rather lacked the drama it would have had where I there at the right time. You don’t get stories by lying in bed.

(There was actually another reason that I’ll mention in a later post why I needed to be at home that morning, but I probably would not have been there anyway.)

Earlier in the month I’d written another story about what was happening in the square which did attract quite a lot of interest – also on Demotix, as well as My London Diary (with more pictures) and Indymedia.

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