... I've suffered for my music, now it's your turn." But seriously folks. No, for once actually seriously. I try and keep my politics out of my blogging—being a medievalist, I don't need to limit my chances of a job any more—but this little crop should elicit the outrage of anyone who believes in freedom of speech and thought, which I take to be core academic beliefs. It's not really new, it's just current and we've hit the point where I have to say something even if it's only to vent.

First, from London. Those not in the UK may not have registered the fact that despite how well the media in the UK love Mr Obama and (so far) all his works, the whole G20 summit was a subject of some controversy. It's hard to be neutral about this for me, but it's only factual to say that some five thousand people joined in a protest that had as aims declared by some of its organisers to shut down the City of London's banking district. In the event the only serious damage to property was at the Royal Bank of Scotland, which has been a particular target of ire since its retiring chief executive refused to reduce his £300693,000 a year pension even though it was being mainly funded from a government bailout after he had led the bank to almost complete collapse. Here, anyway, a small group managed to break the front windows in; all other premises in the area had been boarded up.

The media coverage before the protest, encouraged by some of the stupider protestors, gave the impression that there was expected to be large-scale anarchist violence. Certainly the policing was such as to deal with such violence. And when it didn't materialise, they created it. UK media attention has been centered on the figure of Ian Tomlinson, not involved in the protest but whom a police officer hit with a baton and threw to the ground, and who died of internal bleeding later. Unfortunately the officer was caught on video doing it, albeit anonymised by balaclava and missing badges (and he has, to his limited credit, come forward). Alun Salt of Archaeoastronomy covers the story here but since he wrote that, a new post mortem has revealed the actual cause of death and yesterday's Guardian newspaper has a story about new video evidence which the beleaguered justice system has had to suppress for fear it may prejudice juries. It's still a live issue, in other words, which is more than can be said for the poor sod who happened to be walking down the wrong street when a policeman was out looking for heads to crack.

My main reporter on the demonstration was lucky; they were blocked in by the police but managed to get out to Bishopsgate, outside Liverpool Street station, where Climate Camp protestors had organised a huge garden party. My source then got out of there before, a few hours later, the police charged that with riot shields too. Again, there was no violence beforehand, in fact the police were running down people stood with their open hands out calling to the police, 'this is not a riot'. The first link I can give for that could be accused of being partisan, though they also have video evidence, but this blog post from the church charity which the Camp happened outside is a bit more like neutral coverage and says the same.

I personally find this disgusting but sadly predictable. Over the term of the Labour governments that have run Britain since 1997, and the last days of the Conservative government that preceded them which enacted the Criminal Justice Act that effectively makes such protests conducted without permission illegal, and which Labour promised at election to repeal and of course have not, it has become effectively illegal to protest at the government in any direct way. Doing so meets with, if not arrest, curtailment of the right to come and go as you please, and now we see that it can not just get you killed, but get others killed. It is also now illegal to approach within a mile of Parliament with aims of disturbance. Dammit, in my period the peasants didn't even have to get that close before the king came out to hear their demands. Is it really the case that the men and women of the kingdom had better recourse in the fourteenth century than we do now? (I realise that our general welfare is rather better, but there's a point there all the same.) And if one does protest, as the magazine cover above commemorates with respect to the war in Iraq, it doesn't make any difference. Meanwhile electoral turn-out goes down and down and the politicians profess themselves baffled. I'm pretty sure this isn't the system we were told we had by the Whigs.

You may by now be wondering what the academic hook of all this is. Well. That was a protest in the streets, and at the very least constituted an obstruction to the public. We in the towers of academe are safe from such things, right? Well, unless you're a student. Or actually involved in a protest yourself, in Barcelona, where both teachers and pupils have been speaking out and demonstrating against the Bologna process by which Continental European higher qualifications are currently being unified. Then, apparently, you can have the police baton charge your sit-in at five thirty in the morning, and confiscate all phones and camera-like devices so that, unlike the unfortunate British police, they don't get caught on camera chucking students to the ground. (That link in Catalan: there is an almost-but-not-quite-useless translator widget in the right-hand sidebar.) Except that they do, as the following video shows.

That's not threatening the social order or impeding global finance. That's a sit-in about a syllabus change. This being Catalonia, the fact that that's a syllabus change imposed by the national government from whom the area wants separation, and beyond them from the EU via that government, makes it rather more political. But it's still about a syllabus change, in the end. And for that they can get baton-charged, beaten up and arrested, for complaining about the content of the service for which they are paying or even providing. What also worries me about this is the type of commentary that that's earned the protestors on YouTube. This variant (later, longer, and less pleasant) video of some of the violence, for example, has picked up some even more unfriendly comments than its title, which is, I quote for full value,"Catalan Mossos d'Esquadra Police kicking some whinny Marxist punks in Barcelona, Spain". (The comments also include a Catalan being told he comes from Spain so speaks Spanish, even though he says he doesn't, which is objectionable in a whole extra range of ways.) Fancy this happening in your faculty? I'd quite like a post in Barcelona, so those are my potential students those policemen are kicking in. Angry yet? I am. And it's not like Barcelona's the only place where students are protesting; the sleepy UK relies on adults for its protesting now, and if the USA still has student demos they don't seem to get press coverage over here, but there're plenty of other places: Colombia, Poland, Spain, Japan, Finland, Croatia... It's a long long way to go yet before people can speak and publish what they like, even in the supposedly affluent and enlightened West, and if you think that academia is somehow exempt and you don't need to worry, then I'm afraid it'll cost you any sense that academia is a global community yet.