2009-03-28

Riot? We'd rather have a cup of tea

The organisers wish to create "a very English revolution", and in so doing celebrate the 360th anniversary of Gerrard Winstanley, a former cowherd and proto-communist who had had enough of the system and who led a band of men on to St George's Hill at Cobham in Surrey and declared the world "a common store for all". When parliamentary politics fail, the politics of moral outrage swiftly follow, and there is no better climate for such outrage as the present time when all sorts of people feel cheated and helpless. It seems that the bankers who threw photocopied £50 notes at protesters during the "May Day Monopoly" riots of 2001 have learnt little in seven years.

It's unlikely that world leaders will listen to the clamour outside their hotel suites, or that bankers will give their pensions to the homeless or donate their bonuses to the developing world, or that war will cease or that poverty will end or that capitalism will vanish like a bad dream.

It is also unlikely that the rule of the people will ever darken British politics. We are not going to see the Houses of Parliament go up like a Roman candle as they did at the end of Alan Moore's graphic novel fantasy, V for Vendetta.

We've been here before, of course, and throughout our history there have been protests and riots in every major city and throughout the countryside. Those of us whose only idea of radical history was a garbled version of Chartism at school may be surprised that, not counting the bloody civil wars in Ireland, there have been two Welsh uprisings, one Lowland Scottish civil war, one crofters' rebellion, one uprising in Derbyshire and another in Kent. Five attempts have been made to assassinate the entire cabinet and seize London, there have been numerous plots to murder the Royal Family, and there has been an almost continuous history of terrorism from the Fenians of the 1860s to the Tartan Army of the 1970s with revolutionary groups operating in Wales, Cornwall and the Isle of Man during the 1980s.

There have been calls for the gloves to come off by both sides. The Duke of Wellington fortified his London home, Apsley House, while the Great Reform Bill was being debated in 1832 – he fitted its windows with bullet-proof shutters, then sat back with the thought that "if we are in luck, we may have a civil war". Meanwhile, George Bernard Shaw suggested the Suffragettes "should shoot, kill maim, destroy until given the vote". More ingenious ways were used, however, by Mary Billinghurst, a Suffragette, who, despite being confined to a wheelchair, managed to carry out a one-woman terror campaign by dropping glue into letter boxes and setting fire to letters.

Yet the British middle class, the politically committed class, don't really do rioting, certainly compared to the French, who have gone on strike over everything from youth employment law to the restructuring of Air France (and usually with the result that the government climbs down). Yes, the British will march if they feel that a principle of trust has been broken between them and the government. Such were the Gulf War protests, the marches of the Countryside Alliance, the appearance of the Fuel Lobby and the militancy of the pensioners.

Maybe we prefer to moan, or have a cup of tea, or maybe we have been brainwashed into thinking that politicians exist only on television so that incidents where ordinary people lose their rag and swipe an MP or throw green custard become all the more astonishing reminders of reality.

The tub-thumping street-corner politician, of whom Winston Churchill was one and Gordon Brown is not, and who was ready to exchange banter with a vociferous public that is not merely an opinion group, has long gone. The brawling days of political differences passed away with the demise of Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts in the 1930s. The big ideological issues of the political Right and Left and the traditional class who fought for them, those workers and trade unionists who sided with the Republic in Spain or the Communist popular front, have passed on. While they saw their politics in moral terms, the protesters on April Fool's day – or "Financial Fool's Day" as they are calling it – see their morals in political terms. The issues today are not who rules the world, but how do we "serve" the world.

The right way to live has become the right lifestyle to have: not a single-issue argument as in the old days, but a whole package of values, some anarchist, some libertarian, but more often old-fashioned Trotskyist socialism in which anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Heathrow expansionism and anti-fat-cat-ism are opposed to a higgledy-piggledy mixture of the positive virtues of environmental concern and in favour of a new world order based on citizenship of "planet earth".

There is no one cause any more, only a plurality of causes. It is this pluralism that will unite groups as disparate as Class War, Greenpeace and the International Union of Sex Workers. For the most part all the usual suspects will turn up, the same folks – usually young people and students – who turn up for any anti-authority gig, whatever the actual cause.

To some extent, it is the old revolt of youth against age, of the powerless against those in power, of radicalism and alternative lifestyle against the innate conservatism of those who rule. Protesters are usually white, the disaffected sons and daughters of the professional middle class. Nevertheless, unlike the 1960s, protest has gained a sense of humour. In 2000, London was treated to a "Guerrilla Gardening" event under the slogan "Resistance is fertile". In June of that same year Class War protesters gathered outside Buckingham Palace to "moon at the monarchy"; while during the first Gulf War, protesters took to throwing custard pies at politicians under the banner of "Operation Dessert Storm". Never underestimate the power of ridicule.

There is one unspoken cause that has united the discontented, and that is the desire to "have a go" at those representatives of law and order, the police, who, despite every attempt to harmonise with the community have, since the Miners' Strike, clad themselves in self-protective clothing, armed themselves with riot shields, donned helmets and jumpsuits and embraced all the outward signs of authoritarianism that George Orwell condemned as the tools of Big Brother in his novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Surprisingly only two policemen have been killed in riots over the past 200 years. Constable Robert Culley died on duty at the Cold Bath Fields riots in Clerkenwell in 1833; and Keith Blakelock was killed at Broadwater Farm in 1985.

Protesters have fared less well, though generally with few fatalities. There was, of course, Kevin Gately, who died under a police horse in Red Lion Square in 1974, and Blair Peach, killed at an anti-Nazi rally in Southall in 1979, but the days of letting loose the army or local yeomanry, sabre in hand, are long gone. More than 400 people died in the anti-Catholic rioting of 1780 and over 18 people died at the rally in Manchester known as "Peterloo", with hundreds more injured.

Perhaps we should be pleased that the old issues are gone. Yet perhaps the British people have also lost a tradition of robust political protest that they have cherished for almost 800 years. We are a relatively docile, some might say complacent, society, who put up with a lot before complaining.

The middle classes have long ceased to break windows in Whitehall as their great-grandmothers did in the cause of suffrage, nor have we put up a statue on that empty plinth in Trafalgar Square to "honest" John Lilburne, who fought Charles I and Cromwell over the issue of liberty of conscience. The revolution is postponed, then, at least until Sir Alan has chosen his next apprentice.

Clive Bloom is Professor Emeritus at Middlesex University. He is the author of 'Violent London: 2,000 Years of Riots, Rebels and Revolts' (Pan Books; £9.99)

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/5067489/Riot-Wed-rather-have-a-cup-of-tea.html