[Image by KG. Permissions info here.]

London: G20 violence.

“Well, we all turned out with the best intentions, but sadly it only takes one or two to start something, and then you’ve got a riot on your hands. We’ve tried very hard to keep things peaceful. We brought flowers and tea to hand out and one bloke actually had his guitar out in the bus on the way here. He played that Don MacLean number, you know:

Bye bye, Miss American pie! Drove my chevvy to the… something… la la la la la laaaa…

I love that one. We all got a bit weepy in that bit about Buddy Holly, if I’m honest.

And then we got here, and it was fine for most of the day.

But then PC Fussick got a bit nervy and wallopped some lad in a smock, and it all kicked off.”

That was Detective Steve Ruddil, speaking about yesterday’s demonstrations at the G20 summit. It was, as Detective Ruddil correctly observes, a day which started well and turned sour. One man died, and many were injured. The question which many will be asking today is whether the police technique of ‘kettling’, also known as ‘penning’ or more accurately as ‘coralling’ is a good idea or a bad one.

“The idea is, you keep the damage contained,” Detective Ruddil tells me. “I mean, you assume there’s going to be damage, right, because there always is. Nothing ever stays nice for long. It’s the nature of this life, both in the sense that disorder in a system always increases unless acted on by an external influence, which is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and in the theological sense that the universe in which we live is created imperfect by God for ineffable reasons of His or Her own in accordance with a plan which we as isolate souls disunited from the Cosmic All cannot hope to comprehend.”

Keeping the damage contained, in this case, means holding demonstrators for hours in a confined area and refusing to allow them to leave. This counter-intuitive policy is supposed to prevent splintergroups from causing a logistical problem for the police, but has occasionally been known to lead to problems.

“Yes, it’s true, there’s something a bit odd about forcing people to stay in an area when they want to disperse. I mean, logically, you’d think that when it gets nasty and the bulk of the peaceful demonstrators want to go home, because they’ve done what they set out to do and don’t need to get into a barney because some knucklehead can’t keep his testosterone in check, well, I’d say that’s great. But the rule is, we make you stand around getting cold and unhappy and desperate for a pee, and we give you a smack if you try to break the cordon. Because otherwise, ten of those knuckleheads might peel off and do some real damage somewhere else. I mean, these buildings and so on, they’ve got some nice furniture in them, and head office says we need to safeguard property and the like. Otherwise the bankers might not come into work tomorrow and rescue the economy from this terrible, sourceless collapse which afflicts it. I mean, what if they get upset and can’t work their mighty financial mojo? Artists are very sensitive.”

Might it not have been better to allow people to go on their way, instead of creating a pressure-cooker environment where they grow increasingly desperate, and where the genuine hard cases are gradually reinforced by ordinary people who are scared and annoyed at being herded into a box?

“Not according to the plan, no. Most days, we’re into keeping the peace. On riot days, it’s all about minimising damage. That said, it seems weird to me, too: I mean, boiling water can either be allowed to lose its energy as heat, or it can continue to boil under a pressurised cap and eventually you get a column of water filled with bubbles of superheated steam, and the whole business collapses under the weight of its cap layer and then explodes catastrophically. That’s roughly how geysers work. So to follow the metaphor, it might be better to defray that heat energy into a more lossy configuration. But orders are orders.”

[Obviously, I didn't make the Al Jazeera coverage up. It's the first piece of news footage I've seen for a while which gives a small sense of what it's been like on the demos I've been on which have gone a bit sour.]

[Plus: a stunning picture I found while I was writing this:  horse eye ]