The rhetoric of the latest press release from the creators of Sukey is oddly positioned between forlorn hope for a more humane future and deliberate baiting of an opponent whose violent proclivities are abundantly well-known and unlikely ever to change. Is it arch or ingenuous? Its peculiar effectiveness as political rhetoric seems to derive from its ability to be taken either way: it has the quality Merle Brown described (with reference to the poetry of Geoffrey Hill) as divisiveness - the ability to sustain two mutually incompatible interpretations, each of which contests or redresses the other.

Sukey itself is both a nifty gadget and a kind of emblem of organisation, a statement of intent. It’s widely understood that the likely outcome of any further escalation of the confrontation between protesters and riot police is a Hillsborough-type disaster. This awareness gives rise to a kind of brinksmanship: nobody really wants the disaster to happen, but each side wants to coerce the other into averting it by unilaterally backing down.

The police have shown no willingness to de-escalate, perhaps because they believe they can rely on the protesters to back down first. It’s a reasonable assumption, given that it’s protesters rather than police who would end up being crushed and/or beaten to death: there’s not a lot of mileage in appealing to the better nature of the man with the big stick.

However, it’s against the better nature of non-violent protesters to try to wield a bigger stick of their own: for better or worse, there doesn’t seem to be much prospect of serious rioting, sufficient to overwhelm the ability of the police to contain the demonstration. (It can be done, and has been done in the past, but there are good reasons for not wanting to go down this road). It’s possible that violent (i.e. armed and organised) groups will emerge, but the general spirit of the movement seems to be strongly against this.

Sukey represents a kind of diagonal way out of the impasse: neither forwards (escalation) nor backwards (backing down) but changing the orientation of the conflict, creating new dividing lines. One such division is between those police who want to avoid injury to protesters, and will agree to tactical co-operation with them via Sukey and other means, and those who simply want to use force to intimidate them and stop them from protesting at all. Another is between those spectators who will continue to blame protesters for the violence that occurs during conflicts between them and police, and those who will be persuaded (by Sukey and other such initiatives) that the burden of responsibility for such violence rests with the burly sods with truncheons. It’s a game-changing move, and demonstrates formidable strategic intelligence. I wish them every success with it.