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This outdated ritual of banners, pushchairs, linked hands and incantations won't turn Trafalgar into Tahrir
Trafalgar Square is not Tahrir Square. London is not Cairo. George Osborne's budget is not the repressive one-party diktat of Hosni Mubarak's Egypt but the product of a democratic parliament. The desire of certain Labour MPs and the organisers of Saturday's anti-cuts rally to identify themselves with "recent protests in the Middle East and north Africa" is worse than silly. It dumbs down politics and insults those suffering under quasi-fascist regimes. John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn should find other ways of giving their Saturday demo some radical stardust.
The political form of the street demonstration has revived in states so degenerated as to have defaulted to mob rule. Social networks and internet publicity have eased the task of marshalling large numbers in confined spaces. This has been effective in two countries in north Africa, Tunisia and Egypt, where large crowds convey legitimacy lacking in other domestic political institutions. It has also been startlingly ineffective where dictators have shown determined opposition. It is hard to see much new here.
Such displays in Britain are on a different planet. Taking to the streets to overturn a decision of an elected government challenges democracy, albeit one democracy can take in its stride. I have gone on some demos and covered many. They are mostly boosts to group morale, childish song festivals, obsessions with the media and desperate attempts to cause a genteel nuisance without breaching the law. Apart from a rally long ago to Save Covent Garden, I cannot think of one that made much difference.
Britain has long been a poor venue for crowd power. The worst disturbance since the civil war, the Gordon riots of 1780, resulted in 235 deaths as some 60,000 people rampaged across London. They were anti-Catholics. The French revolution fascinated British radicals, but the onset of the Terror alarmed rather than galvanised them. In 1819 the Peterloo massacre in Manchester led to 15 deaths at the hands of the cavalry and a burst of revulsion rather than any national uprising. Much the same followed Ulster's Bloody Sunday march.
During Britain's great crisis over political reform in the 1830s and 1840s, parliament never lost touch with the debate. Chartist riots merely led to repressive policing. It was in parliament that the great debates of 1831-32 took place. Feargus O'Connor and the Chartist leaders on Kennington Common in 1848 were frantic for non-violence. They duly gathered a petition, claiming a phenomenal six million signatures, and were allowed by the police to take it to parliament in a taxi, where it was cursorily rejected.
The passion of the suffragette rallies may have turned some opinion, but it was the Great War that won women the vote. The biggest extra-parliamentary movement in Britain was the Peace Ballot of 1935, with over 11 million votes overwhelmingly for pacifism. But it only encouraged Hitler to rearm. The Aldermaston CND marches of the 1950s and 1960s were great festivals of protest, but were totally ignored by Conservative and Labour governments. They did not ban a single bomb. The poll tax riots of 1990 did not end the poll tax nor did the G20 riots of 2009 end world poverty.
The most violent events of the past half century have related to immigration and race, such as the Brixton and Toxteth riots of 1981, grim backdrop to the wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales that year. All they secured was the classic British response to political embarrassment, being fobbed off with a liberal report from a sympathetic judge, Lord Scarman. The biggest ever rally and march in London, against the Iraq war in February 2003, brought a million people on to the streets and did not stop Tony Blair's path to war by an inch.
Most people nowadays take to the streets en masse only to protect their incomes or their interests. Dockers, miners and power workers have given way to white-collar workers, civil servants and, on one colourful occasion, huntsmen. Strikes by these groups hardly bring the country to its knees. In the case of students, recent demonstrations were probably counterproductive. Few people could see their problem when their "fees" had already morphed into income surtax. The 2004 pro-hunt lobby dust-up in Parliament Square succeeded in doing what only Charles I had done before, invading the actual Commons chamber. It did them no more good than their royal predecessor.
The truth, for better or worse, is that Britain is a peaceable, parliamentary nation. The majority of Britons have bought into the constitution, with the monarchy, House of Lords, voting system and all. Street demonstrations seem like a throwback, a masonic ritual of banners, pushchairs, linked hands and incantations. By the mid-60s, the CND marches to Trafalgar Square had become a festival, like the Lord Mayor's Show or Glastonbury, albeit with anarchist hangers-on. Today's student demos degenerate into rugby club nights out, with traffic cones as trophies.
For all this, the status of the street as battleground of last resort is a hallowed one. Behind parliament, elections, television and the press, lies Walpole's "supreme governors, the mob". The mob is the last obstacle on the road to chaos, articulated by such much-neglected ideologues as George Sorel and Robert Michels with their eulogising of myths, crowds, general strikes and ultimately violence in mobilising opposition to the "iron law of oligarchy". A mass of people gathered in one place still conveys the thrill and implied menace of an alternative power. That is why all governments fear crowds and why Labour home secretaries tried to curb London assemblies with their machine-guns, barriers and march licences.
Techno-dazzled political activists predicted that the internet would replace old political structures with a new "virtual" democracy of the web – direct, penetrating, ubiquitous. They even saw last year's Iran uprising as the first "Twitter" revolution. They were wrong. As the American political scientist, Evgeny Morozov, writes in The Net Delusion, the belief in "internet freedom as the ultimate technological fix" misses the point. A means to power is not power itself, and indeed it cuts both ways.
The internet may facilitate democratic action, but it also facilitates reaction, as the Chinese have shown. Hillary Clinton might announce, a year ago, "the age of internet freedom", with America as its champion. But when push comes to shove, she reverts to the old politics, assassinating al-Qaida leaders with drones and bombing the hell out of Gaddafi. The internet can assemble a crowd, but as often as not that merely makes it easier to shoot.
The new, post-digital "age of live" is as vigorous in politics as anywhere else. As live assembly moves out from the screen, asserting itself in entertainment, religion or green activism, the internet is merely a summons. Politicians too have found they cannot abandon the hustings, the handshake, the public debate and the demonstration. Anti-politicians cannot abandon the demonstration and the riot. Everyone wants live.
Protest may be ineffective, but it answers to a public need for self-expression. People come together and draw strength. They bring their fears directly to the attention of power by means of flesh-and-blood humanity. Tahrir and Trafalgar Squares have this in common. They are the venue for the withdrawal of consent when all else has failed.