Everybody to Kenmure Street

In May 2021, a UK Home Office dawn raid triggers one of the most spontaneous and successful acts of civil resistance in recent memory. In Pollokshields, Scotland’s most diverse neighbourhood, hundreds of residents rush to the streets to stop the deportation of their neighbours.

When a couple of Home Office immigration officials take two men into custody in Glasgow’s ethnically diverse Pollokshields district, they get a lot more than they bargained from from the quick-to-react locals. Before they can drive off with their prisoners, a man has slid under their van and attached himself to it’s axle. His part, depicted by Dame Emma Thompson - her face his words, and his increasingly uncomfortable conversations with a passing nurse (Kate Dickie) form the only dramatised part of this documentary as some one hundred and forty police officers ended up in a street of tenement buildings surrounded by some two thousand irritated and noisy Glaswegians. Is a showdown inevitable? Is a riot? There’s an impressive array of hand held photography used here to illustrate just how quickly this escalated into something akin to a powder keg scenario, but for my money there simply isn’t anywhere near enough meat put on it’s bones. For a start, there are no contributors from the authorities (conveniently British not Scottish) to offer an explanation as to why these two had been targeted in the first place. We are told both men had been in Scotland for ten years yet none of their own reminiscences of that traumatic day were in English. I ultimately lost interest when ordinary police officers doing their jobs were referred to as “scum” and “racist”. Odious language that is hardly appropriate to apply to equally ordinary citizens who just happened to be enforcing the law as they saw it. These were not armed soldiers charging with water cannon or police horses, indeed the only attempt they seem to have made to force their way through the protesters shows them clearly escorting a paramedic. This was a scene that too many people appeared to relish for my liking, and this is my city too. Sadly, as I continued to watch this overlong project I found it more inclined to reinforce socialist and nationalist political opinions and attitudes than to explain just what went on behind the scenes here in 2021 and after ninety minutes I felt it a rather sad illustration of mob rule.