The Great
British Riot
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I cut my
political teeth on demonstrations. Within 6 weeks of going to University I
was occupying the administration building, demanding that the University sell
its South African investments. Following that I was elected to student Council
and learned to take part in committees and contribute to often heated debate.
But always marches and demonstrations, from tiny student grant marches to CND
and, of course, Iraq. For so many of my generation, this has been the way of
expressing political views. But this is
not the way it is these days. Walking with Matthew the other day I sounded
off on the uselessness of social media posturing. I suggested that we have a
generation who think that spending two minutes signing an online petition or
just a few seconds clicking like on
Facebook is the equivalent of getting involved in protest and democratic
activism. He countered with his standard debating counter – does it do
any harm? It may not do a great deal of good, but it surely does no harm so
is essentially not worthy of censure. And it is hard
to disagree. We live in the shadow of the Iraq war demonstrations. We all
thought that gathering together the largest demonstration - possibly ever
– in protest at our planned involvement in the Iraq adventure would
have had an effect. And yet it didn’t. In the end a million people on
the street had just as much impact as re-tweeting Je Suis
Charlie…. I have been
reading a fun little book about the Cheese Riots in Nottingham –
favourite quote ‘Be damned with your charity, we’ll have the
cheese for naught!’ It also looks at the riots surrounding the
rejection of the Reform Act some 40 years later. It reminded me that the riot
has always been the traditional British form of direct action, the mechanism
in which we have told governments what is and is not acceptable. The
demonstrations surrounding the Reform Acts were enormous by any standards,
and many did end in violence. Interestingly the recent (well relatively)
demonstrations that were successful in changing Government’s mind were
those against the Poll Tax, which were far smaller than Iraq, but more
violent and disruptive. Distressingly I do wonder if we had been more vandalistic, less responsibly liberal, we might have had
more impact? Nonetheless,
if I were in Government, it does seem to me that I would be less discomforted
fielding an online petition of 100,000 signatures, rather than 100,000 people
on the street, peaceably or not. I think politicians have tried to give us
the idea they are terrified about pressure exhibited on social media when
they really are not; it simply deflects anger into a containable format. Noble
though the organisers of Change-it
and similar websites may be, I think a government overseeing a massive
crackdown on the poor of this country is highly comfortable to see protest
funnelled into such passive protest. It is a long time now since our leaders
had to face the full impact of massive numbers of the populace on the street
making their presence felt. The big
demonstrations are the successors of the great British tradition of riot. And
despite the overwhelming force which pre-democratic states could employ
against a localised uprising of the poor (or the middle classes), riots on
the whole have succeeded. I find it
slightly astonishing that the mighty Tories of the 19th century,
with their upper class confidence that they really were next to God, were
eventually cowed by the masses and forced to concede, time after time after
time, and yet the ranks of New Labour socialist democrats felt entirely able
to ignore their core support as it marched endlessly down Whitehall. So I may
as well just like this facebook page about benefits sanctions….. |
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Blog #23 |
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If you
would like to comment on any of these Blog pieces please email me on: bjc@briancreese.co.uk