State Power

I am writing this very quickly as I have work in thirty minutes. I travelled to work via bike and parked near a huge building in Norwich called ‘The Forum’. The Forum is a building that contains a library, a Pizza Express, a café. It’s a social space, often a meeting spot. The outside of it is beautiful. Encircled concrete steps that people sit on eating their lunch; sometimes, there are food stalls outside; occasionally, there are protests. In Norwich, the outside section of the forum is a very standard protest zone. I have seen Extinction Rebellion outside of it, I have even seen climate change deniers there.

On my way to park my bike, I saw a lone woman sitting on a Palestine flag and holding a pro-Palestine placard. She had a collection of signs besides her, presumably to encourage others to join in. It was nice to see. After I parked and locked my bike, she was packing up her things. A security guard was asking her to leave. I intervened – not with much subtlety or carefulness, for what it’s worth – and asked why she was leaving. The security guard had threatened to call the police if she didn’t go because the outside section of The Forum, whilst in a nominally public area, was private property. I wish I had been more precise and intelligent with the security guard.

I have lived in the Norwich area for over a decade. I have never seen a security guard who works at The Forum use ‘private property’ as an excuse to move activists on in The Forum’s outside space.

If the activist was inside, this might have made sense. She was not holding signs saying anything about Palestine Action. Nor was she blocking the doors. Nor was she particularly confrontational. It wasn’t disruptive direct action. It was a non-violent picket composed of a singular person. She wasn’t even standing up – she was kneeling. And when asked to go, she was very polite and apologetic. She seemed like a pleasant, well-intentioned person.

It struck me as I walked to work that incidents like this must be happening very frequently – quiet, private, isolated moments of repression where people’s speech-rights are restricted not even by the police but by over-cautious security guards who don’t want anything about Palestine being near in case an ‘incident’ happens. The strategy being ‘nip it in the bud’ as quickly as possible.