1 Mai

Time was when the first of May wasn't just for elections. Helicopters, W1 one continuous jam sandwich ribbon of personnel carriers, Bond Street a solid curtain of chipboard. Ah, thems were the days.

You could say the Public Order Act did for Mayday, in the powers it provides to the police to impose conditions on public processions and assemblies. By enabling a mechanistic tactic it arguably did. But I think what really killed Mayday was love.

Here was the dilemma: centrally, the police had become adept at strategy, using the 'Gold Control' model of central co-ordination, with some degree of autonomy for commanding officers in the field. But this amount of operational flexibility was nothing compared to that available to the protesters. The police communication chain still has a great deal of latency, often leaving significant numbers of officers deployed in locations that have gone cold, or worse for the individual cops concerned, unable to leave a situation of physical danger for want of an order to retreat. The protesters in theory could do just about anything, running in all directions, dispersing on foot and cycle or such public transport as still running, 'like so many infernals'. Being mostly anarchists they should have done. But they failed to, um, sorry, capitalise on this advantage.

Instead, almost as if in sympathy with the cumbersome organisation of their opponents, they grouped together, soldified, hung around for just about however long it took to get a cordon in place. And they did this time and time again.

Known as the kettle' or 'the bubble', the containment approach could only be achieved with large numbers of officers, though once in place it did not necessarily need as many guards as detainees. Having identified the gathering, officers with short shields, several rows deep and often with vans behind them would encircle from all sides and form a cage for the entire group. It was also remarkably 'safe' in that though it led to a frustrated crowd, it was a practically impotent one. The trick then was to hold the crowd until it became exhausted and dispirited. Then, late in the day, the contents would be allowed out one by one, making it likelier that the individuals and small groups would go home rather than simply reform elsewhere.

You could see it forming from outside, you could see it coming from inside. A person would have to have been deeply unobservant not to see the impending penning action. For many within the cordon there has to have been some collusion, some voluntary aspect.

There's something in child psychology that identifies acting up behaviour and testing of boundaries as a means of extracting actions and proof of parental love. The kid's objective is not the misdeed, but the punishment itself, and the reassurance that provides.

So obvious, the connotations of an authority figure, arbiter of right and wrong, and enabled (by legislation) to administer a kind of punishment on the spot in the form of restriction and act in loco parentis. The human consistency of the cordon. It encloses rather than disperses. It is like a big hug. Like children seeking a demonstration of parental caring, the protesters sought out and provoked that stricture, writhing within the embrace the better to feel its comforting strength.

Tomorrow I will explain why the Transport for London headquarters at St James's Park is essentially phallic and represents the father, and how New Scotland Yard just opposite is a maternal structure, and how fare-dodging is therefore an act of such intensely Freudian import that I wouldn't sit down on a bendy-bus even if I could find a seat.