It's Going to be a Long Weekend.

In Bristol, UK like in many other British towns the supermarket giant Tesco have been on a mission to own everything. This has mainly involved using the Starbucks tactic of opening dozens of loss making stores in a very small area in order to force all the competition out of business before closing most of the stores down. The most recent Tesco store, I believe the 31st in Bristol, opened a couple of weeks ago in the St Pauls / Stokes Croft area which is famous from the St Pauls riots of the early 1980's and has been a long standing hotbed for oh so trendy alternativism.

In response to the store opening the local residents mounted a campaign of boycott and protest against the Tesco store which was co-ordinated from a council sponsored squat just across the road. Obviously the boycott and the extra security they'd been forced to hire was costing Tesco's significant amounts of money and negative publicity as the campaign was recently featured on the BBC's national news.

It should come as no surprise then to people who are familiar with local politics in Britain that yesterday (21/4/11) the local, Avon & Somerset, police suddenly discovered that they had credible intelligence that a terrorist attack was being planned from the squat and decided to raid it at around 20:00 GMT. This raid went a bit wrong as the occupants of the squat and the local residents decided to fight back leading to a six hour mini-riot complete with burning barricades and saw a maximum of 20 people arrested and 4 police officers lightly injured.

Given St Paul's history, the fact that it's going to be a sunny four day holiday weekend and social tensions had been running high across the country before the incitement of the Royal Wedding was announced there are significant worries that this small riot could spread and grow into a much larger riot that approaches the scale of those seen in the 1980's.