So, has Italy turned into a police state when I wasn't looking? Mind you, you'd only have to wait 2 months and another government would turn up anyway!

Excellent! I'd like to add my own testimony. My wife June and I were on our way home from that spineless, pro-government, Brown-nosing Make Poverty History charade (where we’d marched with anti-government placards) and the brilliant Alternative G8, and were in Edinburgh still with a few hours to while away before our train left (for Scarborough, where we live). There was a heavy visible police presence with about thirty mounted police so it was obvious something was going on. We learned that the Anarchists would be marching. As we happened to know someoone who is an Anarchist - he is also a member of the group we belong to (SCAWAG, Scarborough Coalition Against War and Globalisation) so we decided to stick around to see if he would be marching with them. We couldn’t see him but decided to tag along anyway. At this point the march was going well and everyone was in good spirits: the Anarchists were beating drums, blowing pipes, waving flags, dancing to a Samba band. Nobody was throwing anything, yelling abuse at the police, or wielding maps and mobile telephones, if you get my drift. Suddenly there's a change in the atmosphere - palpable: police officers are darting about, eyeing the protesters, pointing to this one and that one, they're sort of animated, keyed up... Then everything goes quiet...the police are like cobras about to strike. Suddenly two of them pounce on this guy (shortish, glasses, goatee beard, ‘down-with-the-establishment’ / ‘up the revolution’ sort of chap), each gripping an arm. The guy goes limp; he doesn’t resist. There is some vocal protest by anarchist comrades as they drag him to the side of the road. Then they let him go. A couple of other protesters are subjected to the same treatment, seemingly at random. Then before we realise what's happening, the police have herded us down a narrow street and blocked off both entrances. It happens so quickly, you know they’d played this game before. So there we are hemmed in a narrow street with concrete walls, no ground level windows or doors, no means of escape. The police presence is just so over the top - there are maybe six or nine police vans at each end of the alley and several lines of police officers. Next thing is - it's a very swift, co-ordinated manoeuvre - the ordinary police officers are replaced by riot police with shields, batons and teargas canisters, and are body-locked together so nobody can break through. The Anarchists all the while are just chanting, beating drums, waving flags… After about half an hour without any response from the protesters, the riot police prepare to attack: shields raised, batons poised to strike, feet positioned in charge formation. There is some shrieking and someone shouts, ‘I need to get out, I’ve got a weak bladder!’ (probably reported in the Sun as ‘Protester Threatens to Urinates on Police’). And what are the Anarchists going to do? Is there going to be any bravado? Is any among them going to even grab a stick or a bin lid to defend themselves? No, they just continue to chant and beat drums. Then the police drop their guards and fall back into their original formation. As they do this there is a great cheering, clapping and flag-waving. But why are the police charging when no one has done anything? They are not. You’re only meant to think they are. This charade was repeated several times at irregular intervals, each time the Anarchists refusing to take the bait, refusing to be drawn into any kind of confrontation. And every time the police lower their shields there is, again, a great triumphal cheering, clapping and flag-waving. No violence, no aggression, only (ha!) a pure and glorious act of defiance as this one Anarchist dances this battle dance slowly, very closely along the line of riot police, blowing war-like sounds into a sort of longpipe that reaches to the ground (love to know what that instrument was!). Still no retaliation from the Anarchists and therefore no arrests. The police did little to disguise their hostility toward two individuals in orange tabards with ‘LEGAL OBSERVER’ written across them. We learned that they have been hired by Dissent, the umbrella group to which the Anarchists belong. Makes you sort of wonder, doesn't it why the protesters felt the need to hire legal observers - it ought to tell us something about the kind of tricks employed by police on past marches. It also raises the question of how far the police might have been prepared to go in their absence. About two and a half hours go by before we are told we are free to go – after being searched and interrogated: name, address, why were we here, had we ever been in trouble with the police before (only a letter from the superindent for riding a bicycle without lights). By the time we were finally freed, riot police were lining up along the entire length of streets, manning the bridges, and blocking off whole areas. The whole city appeared under siege. It's easy to understand how scuffles could break out – indeed, they were entirely predictable, unless you expected every protester to be as experienced, canny and…well, self-disciplined as the Anarchists were. Now it's perfectly natural to rail against individual police officers but every indication is that orders came from high up the chain of command. It's clear from the testimony of other groups of protesters that the police - acting presumably on these orders - did everything they could, resorting to every devious trick, to prevent peaceful and (still, at the time of writing) legitimate protest. The question is: why was it part of the police agenda to provoke peaceful protesters? Well, who knows - but indubitably the effects of police arrests and the attendant media reports of ‘rioting’ is, to depict protesters as violent and outside the law - in other words, to perpetuate the myth of the ‘dissenter’ as threat to society. To demonise protesters in this way is effectively to take away their voice: who wants to hear what these ‘thugs and anarchists’ are ‘rioting’ about? And, of course, let's not underestimate the effectiveness of police scuffles, violent outbreaks, riots etc. as a deterrent against future mass protest movements! Regards Joseph Dormer