Chief Correspondent Alex Thomson says there has been an angrier, louder mood at today’s tuition fees protests which have turned violent.
My earlier predictions that today’s protest would absolutely lead to violence on a wider scale then we have seen have, it seems, been entirely borne out by events. We witnessed a police officer knocked to the ground and injured before the protest had moved a mile from London University early this afternoon.
From the outset the mood today was different. Radically different. There were scores turning up already masked up and the mood was louder, angrier, than before. There were hundreds here who were plainly out for a ruck with the police and they were going to have it wherever the police decided.
The place where the police stop the protest is the battleground for these things. Today many hundreds of marchers peeled off at various points along the route to Parliament Square. But when they entered the Square it was clear they were going no further at this stage.
That did it. Hundreds burst across police lines. The half dozen mounted officers simply fled from the Square to be reinforced much later. Barriers around the lawns of the Square itself were soon torn up and the crowds spilled across what is a traditional protest area for the British people. So they have certainly reclaimed that today, if nothing else.
From then on, hour after hour there was mass shoving at lines of riot police whilst anything that could be thrown at the police was thrown.
The police tactics are basically to stand there and take it, it seems. No water cannon or tear gas for these officers. True they had batons and used them when necessary with considerable gusto but in truth the police that I saw acted with a restraint you would not see in many other countries
It got worse. It got dark. There were a series of police mounted charges as it grew dark next to Westminster Abbey. Police came under a hail of paint bombs – but in truth the protesters were not particularly tooled up.
Inevitably as afternoon turned to night there were injuries and currently the police say three of their officers are seriously injured and I saw several protesters with various kinds of head injuries – all of them dramatic and colourful, though I sense few were particularly serious.
There was fighting on at least three sides of Parliament Square and you can only witness one small part of a wider disturbance. It may well be that the numbers of people injured grow into the night where various bonfires have now been lit across Parliament Square.
It remains the case that most of those in Parliament Square and on this protest were peaceful. Some broke into a spontaneous and just a little bit ironic rendition of “Silent Night” as we filmed other protesters bash the police and get bashed in return over the crush barriers not ten feet away.