BRITAIN: May Day anti-capitalist demonstrations in London passed off relatively peacefully yesterday with only a few small scale scuffles between protesters and police.
One of the main areas of confrontation was in Piccadilly last night where police officers wearing riot gear were confronted by about 100 people, some of who threw bottles and stones at them and shouted "police scum".
The mood of the crowd, which had earlier been peaceful, appeared to change after two protesters climbed 8ft-high scaffolding near Coventry Street and police attempted to remove them.
To the cheers of the crowd, another protester punched a telephone kiosk, shattering the glass. Others then joined in the destruction of nearby telephone booths.
Eight people were arrested for minor public disturbances. Police began removing cordons from narrow streets in Soho in an attempt to coral protesters into confined areas, a tactic successfully used during last year's May Day protests. The Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Mr Mike Todd, said the 6,000 police officers on duty had been told to adopt an "in yer face" style of dealing with the protesters and they would not countenance violent trouble makers.
"We are making sure as they move through London that we have officers with them. We have high visibility policing and it will in effect be 'in yer face' policing with strong evidence-gathering," Mr Todd said.
"The approach is that if you are interested in crime the evidence will be gathered against you and you will be held to account."
Earlier, about 6,000 anti-capitalist demonstrators gathered for a peaceful protest in Trafalgar Square where the former Labour MP, Mr Tony Benn, told the cheering crowd that when he was a child he remembered listening to the voice of Hitler, knowing he would bring war to Europe because no one was prepared to stand up against fascism.
"After the war the generation of which I was one resolved we would build a new world order based on peace," Mr Benn said. "Now we find that all those hopes have been dashed as we return to imperialism, to war and to fascism." The first protesters began assembling on the outskirts of west London at 7.30 a.m. where they joined two convoys of cyclists moving slowly into central London.
Disrupting the traffic for several hours as they cycled slowly towards Grosvenor Square, the protesters eventually held a peaceful demonstration in the Square close to the US embassy and the Canadian High Commission.
Another group of demonstrators established a picket outside Horseferry Road Magistrates' Court in central London where seven members of an anti-capitalist group called The Wombles (White Overall Movement Building Liberations through Effective Struggle) were standing trial for minor offences. Other minor skirmishes between protesters and police took place as about 1,000 anti-capitalists and environmental campaigners marched past the expensive department stores of New Bond Street.Many of the stores had boarded up their windows and some car showrooms transferred their cars to warehouses.