The police attack on the man who died in the G20 demonstration has parallels with the death of Anti-Nazi protestor Blair Peach. This is his story
Thirty years ago this month, Blair Peach, a 33-year-old who'd come over from New Zealand to teach at a special needs school in East London, was killed while protesting with the Anti-Nazi League against the decision to allow the National Front to hold a meeting in Ealing town hall.
Throughout the 1970s, Southall, an Asian enclave of west London, had been a hotbed of tensions between immigrant residents, their supporters on the political left and anti-immigration groups such as the neo-fascist National Front.
At a meeting held on St George's Day, April 23, 1979, the National Front were preparing for their General Election campaign. Their candidate, the Socialist Worker newspaper reported, pledged to "bulldoze Southall to the ground and replace it with an English hamlet".
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/46954,features,blair-peach-30-years-on-death-of-a-political-protestor
It also 25 years on from The Battle of Orgreave is the name given to a confrontation between police and picketing miners at a British Steel coking plant in Orgreave, South Yorkshire, in 1984, during the UK miners' strike. In 1991, South Yorkshire police were forced to pay out half a million pounds to 39 miners who were arrested in the events at the Battle of Orgreave.
The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) organised a mass picket of Orgreave for June 18, 1984, with the intention of blockading the plant, and ideally forcing its temporary closure. Aware of the plans by means of MI5 infiltration, the police organised counter-measures.
The NUM was represented by 5,000 to 6,000 pickets from across the UK. The police deployed between 4,000 and 8,000 officers, and were deployed from 10 counties. Of these, a small number had been trained in new riot tactics following the Toxteth and Brixton riots, while most had little or no experience in dealing with such events. There were between 40 and 50 mounted police and 58 police dogs. There were no women officers and only a handful of female picketers.
Unlike most of the strikes of the time, where picketers were kept well away from their intended positions, the strikers were escorted to a field to the north of the Orgreave plant. The field was flanked by police on all sides except the south, where the Sheffield to Worksop railway line runs. Opinion is divided as to whether this was a deliberate arrangement.
20 Years on from The Hillsborough Disaster was a deadly human crush that occurred on 15 April 1989, at Hillsborough, a football stadium home to Sheffield Wednesday in Sheffield, England, resulting in the deaths of 96 people (all fans of Liverpool Football Club). It remains the deadliest stadium-related disaster in British history.[1] It was the second of two stadium-related disasters to feature Liverpool supporters, the other being the Heysel Stadium Disaster in 1985.
The match was an FA Cup semi-finals clash between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. It was abandoned six minutes into the first half.
The inquiry into the disaster, the Taylor Report, named the cause as failure of police control, and resulted in the conversion of many football stadiums in the United Kingdom to all-seater and the removal of barriers at the front of stands.
Need we remind ourselfs how the police act:
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--for ever."
--from Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell (1903-1950)