Small riot: no one dead

The English, on the whole, dislike young people. At my local pub, parents with children are banished to the far end of the garden and scowled at by the landlord. The manager of my nearest teashop takes great pleasure in evicting anyone who arrives with a child, snarling: "Can't you bloody read? No kids!"

The point is also proved whenever youthful political dissent manifests itself. Young people are routinely denounced in the right-wing media as idle good-for-nothings and couch-potatoes; but they are even more severely vilified if they actually show some spirit. It happened with the Anti-Nazi League in the 70s, and with the peace camps at nuclear bases in the 80s. Now the targets are the predominantly youthful supporters of Reclaim The Streets.

"On Monday, a crowd of ugly, scruffy social deviants are planning yet another 'anti-capitalist' march," the Daily Mail reported last Saturday. On the morning of May day itself, the Telegraph decided that the threat was grave enough to merit a lengthy editorial. In tones of spluttering incredulity, it noted that the Green candidate for London mayor, Darren Johnson, was proposing a 20mph speed limit in the capital, a ban on cars in the centre and a £10 charge for motorists who drive into London. "There is," it observed, "an alarming degree of support for this sort of nonsense" - not least from the "anarchist hooligans" who were intending to plant flowers and vegetables in Parliament Square.

According to the Telegraph, now visibly foaming at the mouth, all criticisms of globalisation and turbo-capitalism "amount to a direct assault on the most basic human freedoms, on the prosperity and additional freedoms which trade generates for all". Luckily, however, "occasional demonstrations against capitalism, such as today's, are a fleck of dust on the vast landscape of capitalist demonstrations".

Well, quite. Every day, in countless hideous ways, triumphalist capitalism demonstrates its globe-girdling dominance. Monday's protest, which was largely peaceful and good-humoured, seems pretty mild by comparison. It was not a "full-scale riot" or a "mob frenzy". Even the small number of guerrillas bent on violence did little damage: the Lords of the Golden Arches are unlikely to lose much sleep over the trashing of one branch of McDonald's. Small Riot Near Trafalgar Square: No One Dead.

Why, then, do Tony Blair and the Telegraph feel so threatened by a mere fleck of dust? If capitalism is allowed to have its way for the rest of the year, shouldn't a few thousand Greens be able to bring rhubarb and apple trees to Parliament Square on one day a year without finding themselves branded as "idiots" who are "beneath contempt"?

There are ironies galore here. On the same day that Blair denounced the anti-capitalists, he expressed a fervent hope that Rover could be rescued from the malign capitalist grasp of BMW. And, while our motor industry may be terminally ill, there is still one British enterprise that has a powerful presence in the international market: street protests. The Nation magazine in New York pointed out last week that recent American demonstrations against the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund took their cue from our very own Reclaim The Streets, which began life as a campaign against the M11 extension in east London. "RTS's global impact has been as formidable as it was unexpected," it reported admiringly.

There are also some ancient but resonant echoes. As the Nation article noted, RTS uses "the strength of sheer absurdity and spectacle to bring traffic to a halt . . . Typically, this is achieved by the speedy erection of a 'tripod scaffold structure' - a giant, three-pronged contraption spanning the street from the top of which one lucky RTSer is dangled for the admiration of bystanders". Turn now to The Golden Bough, that great study of folklore and ritual, where Sir James Frazer describes the English figure Jack-in-the-Green: a leaf-clad mummer "who walks encased in a pyramidal framework of wickerwork, which is covered with holly and ivy, and surmounted by a crown of flowers and ribbons. Thus arrayed he dances on May Day . . ."

The tree-planters of Parliament Square are, in other words, guardians of a very old tradition - as they emphasised through their slogan, "Resistance is Fertile". May is named after Maia, the Roman goddess of growth, and its arrival has always been marked by fertility celebrations. "It would be needless," Frazer writes, "to illustrate at length the custom which has prevailed in various parts of Europe, such as England, France and Germany, of setting up a village May-tree or May-pole on May Day."

In the sixth century, St Augustine - the first Archbishop of Canterbury, rather than the author of City Of God - complained to the Pope that Kentish youngsters had put up floral branches from a May tree outside his cathedral; in 772, a maypole in north Germany was destroyed on the orders of Charlemagne. Eight hundred years later, that puritanical old miseryguts Philip Stubbes published his Anatomie Of Abuses to draw attention to the excesses of Merrie England: "Against May, Whitsonday, or other time, all the yung men and maides, olde men and wives, run gadding over night to the woods, groves, hils, and mountains, where they spend all the night in plesant pastimes . . ." Oliver Cromwell outlawed maypoles altogether.

With his hyperbolic reaction to Monday's events, Blair places himself squarely in the tradition of Stubbes and Cromwell. For centuries, May 1 has been a day for upturning the established order through anarchic stunts; a day when official potentates are overthrown by Robin Hood, the Lord of Misrule and the Queen of the May. Could this be why control-freaks fear it so?

MI5's email snoops

Yes, MI5 is building a new surveillance centre that will enable it to monitor all British emails and internet transactions. But fear not: that prize ass Tom King MP, outgoing chairman of the parliamentary intelligence committee, reassures us that all warrants for email-tapping will be scrutinised by Lord Nolan, the commissioner for the interception of communications. "At least people can know that they're not being improperly intercepted," King says. "Lord Nolan's a pretty shrewd observer. He has sight of and access to all warrants."

Nolan's most recent annual report revealed that in 1998 Jack Straw authorised 1,646 phone-tapping warrants - the highest total ever, and nearly double the number of five years ago. "I have reviewed the relevant files and documentation," Nolan wrote in his introduction. "I have also discussed the cases directly with the operational officers concerned to ensure that the facts warranted the use of interception."

This is no mean feat for a part-timer, especially since each warrant may cover any number of phone-taps on "associates" of the suspect. Last year I asked Nolan's secretary, Nick Brooks, how many researchers and assistants were employed by the commissioner. "Er, the secretariat is actually me," he confessed. As I suggested at the time, the idea that a 71-year-old peer aided only by one secretary could thor oughly investigate the background to each and every one of those 1,646 warrants seemed, ahem, a little implausible. Yet now Nolan will have to check email interceptions too.

There will be plenty of them. While other countries, such as the Republic of Ireland, are seeking to outlaw government snooping on internet traffic, Britain is doing the exact opposite. Under the regulation of investigatory powers bill, now trundling through parliament almost unnoticed, the government will be permitted to tap internet servers, emails and even electronic pagers. It can also demand that you yield up all your encryption keys and passwords. If you have lost or forgotten an old password you'll be liable to two years in jail, since Jack Straw has reversed the usual burden of guilt: all encrypted files on your computer are presumed to be incriminating unless you can prove otherwise. Oh, and if you make any public complaint about your treatment, another five years will be added to the sentence.

Only a home secretary as ingenious as Straw could invent a new crime of forgetting one's password. It can't be long before he decides that losing one's front-door keys should be an offence. Will the tireless Lord Nolan be expected to invigilate that as well?