Hell to pay at Parliament Square just now: a wagonload of coppers and helpers in high-res jackets have fenced Parliament Square in on behalf of London's very own GLA, and are ripping up tents in the peace camp. Charming.

'There was no eviction notice, or no warning - they just came here this morning and said they were taking the tents down, and then the fence went up,' says an exasperated Maria Gallastegui. Maria, a Londoner, has been camping in Parliament Square for about a year. She joined the camp to support Brian Haw - 'he wasn't allowed to leave the site unattended (the site being Brian's pavement protest with his anti-war billboards and signs), so we joined the camp to help him and look after the site when he wasn't there.' She says the police have 'never said anything about the tents before. They can't do this. There was no warning for us at all.'

Brian Haw says Ken Livingstone was the culprit this time. A year into the peace camp, the GLA has developed some sort of hangup with peace-camp hygiene, apparently. 'They're saying that the people in my camp are defecating and pissing all over the square,' Haw says. 'Well, they're not. The people who help me out are clean. They don't do that. They have been here for a year and nobody has said anything about it.' Haw says the weird thing is that the police told him that the peace campers could stay, as long as they move their 20 tents into the tiny area around his own protest site - an area of about half the size of a garage. Presumably, the peace campers will still have to wee, though: Haw isn't sure why the cops think putting 20 people into a different part of the Square will change that.

'I'm entitled to have 20 people with me here,' Haw says. 'They said I could have 20 people with me. That's why we've got about 20 tents. They have to have somewhere to live. This is just more of their harassment.' He says the police like to torture him and the other protestors at night. 'They come down here and shout and get those bastards across the road (the police at the Houses of Parliament) to scream and shout out at us and keep us awake. This is just more of their bastards selves.'

'They've got money when they want to do things like this,' Gallastegui says. 'They didn't say anything to us yesterday that they were going to do this, but they must have been planning it.' She's probably right about that. The fence is impressive - it's one of those tall, joined-up, ground-fastened security jobs that doesn't move at all when you lean on it. There's a lot of it, too - it goes right round Parliament Square. It would have taken quite a bit of transporting and assembling.

'Yeah,' Haw says. He's trapped behind the fence, at the moment: there's no way through the fence here to his own protest site at the front of Parliament Square. 'They told me that I could get in or out over there.' He points to a small, unfenced corner right across the Square, towards St James' Park, directly opposite his protest site. One passerby rightly observes that the peace campers, and indeed the rest of us, will have little choice except to wee in the Square shrubbery, now - everyone's kind of trapped behind the fence.

Gallastegui isn't sure if she and her fellow peace-campers are going to be arrested. 'We're not going to leave, though,' she says. 'That's what they don't understand.'