Two widely reported acts of civil disobedience took place in Britain this past month. One was on the streets of Bristol and led to the toppling of a slave-trader’s statue. The other was on the Dorset coast at Bournemouth and Durdle Door, where thousands flagrantly breached the government’s social distancing law and, in the government’s words, “risked lives”. In both cases, the police arrived and did not intervene.
Public space is the stage of political last resort. Where consent to rule fails, where constitutional redress collapses, people will treat the law with contempt. You may call it civil disobedience, protest, trespass, a mob or a riot. It is political action with the objective of securing a change supposedly unavailable by other means.
A much-favoured fiction of history is that Britain does not do “mobs”. To Tocqueville, its politics defaulted to the club, while America and France defaulted to the mob. This was rubbish. Karl Marx may have thought Britain a hopeless venue for revolution: London’s proletariat was too suburban to congregate in street action. But agitators from John Wilkes and Lord George Gordon to the London dockers and Mosleyite fascists regularly terrified the authorities by their ability to command the streets.
Throughout the 19th century, governments watched nervously to see if Britain would be infected by Europe’s revolutionary epidemics. Just such fear caused the 1819 Peterloo massacre. It was the stones of the mob crashing against the Duke of Wellington’s windows in 1832 that drove him to concede reform. Likewise in 1867, when Disraeli saw 100,000 protesters pour into Hyde Park to face his 10,000 troops, he lost his nerve. He agreed to the mass franchise he had opposed a year before.
I have reported on many protest marches and found being surrounded by a purposeful crowd strangely compelling. The comfort of a shared opinion, the naive emotion of the shouted slogan and the exhilaration of a common enemy are a reversion to raw politics. There is no debate, just Freud’s “unlocking of the subconscious”. The rules and courtesies by which democracy operates are nowhere. The reason so many street marches veer into riots is that unrestrained politics defaults to a fight.
British politicians supposedly know by instinct how far to concede to such emotions. Parliament may have capitulated in 1832, but in 1848 it faced the Chartist marchers with 80,000 police and saw them off. There were no concessions to mass demonstrations against nuclear weapons, the Vietnam and Iraq wars, or to the anti-capitalist Occupy movement – if only because concessions were not deemed realistic.
On the other hand, the poll tax riots of 1990 undoubtedly played a part in that tax’s demise, while Extinction Rebellion in London’s West End last year secured what was at least an appearance of government support. Successive protests over race in British cities have invariably led to ardent promises of lessons learned and reforms instituted, even if present discontents show promises unfulfilled.
I do not agree with the “wisdom of crowds”. I rather acknowledge Reinhold Niebuhr’s grimmer contrast between the sainted individual and the sinful group, “moral man and immoral society”, drawing on the experience of interwar Germany. Crowds are licensed unreason. But I still regard the street as a sacred political space, the last resort, liberty rampant.
That is why what matters is not so much the protest as how authority responds to it. Street violence has undoubtedly diminished in Britain, I think because the police have become more sophisticated in crowd control. The Notting Hill riots in the 1950s flared in large part through police incompetence. So many street protests in cities round the world are caused by inept and heavy-handed law enforcement, when a deft blind eye is all that is needed to defuse trouble.
Bristol and Bournemouth might both be offences against public order, but they are hardly serious ones. The first was the result of Bristolians failing to agree on how best to deal with their chequered history. The second was a mass refusal to obey a ludicrously draconian safety rule after weeks of cooped-up self-imprisonment. In both cases, the answer of the authorities was to let it be. Move on.
Yet those who appease law-breaking must acknowledge the risk. As the American political psychologist Jonathan Haidt has noted, most good people favour democracy, prosperity and fairness, but only as long as their security is assured. And law is the guarantee of security. The liberty of the mob can be, to a majority, instant panic.
American opinion appears to have been overwhelmingly sympathetic to the Black Lives Matter movement over the death of George Floyd. Polls put support for BLM as high as 70%, coupled with strong disapproval of Donald Trump’s response. Yet when he said he would send in the national guard, 70% were strongly in favour, with just 19% against. Suddenly he struck a nerve.
Goodness only knows if this may yet secure him a second term as president.
Conceding the street to extra-democratic protest may sometimes be the least worst option, but it is playing with fire. It is a gift to those who always seek a firmer hand and more curbs on civil liberty. If bad laws are being disobeyed, the solution is not to pass them in the first place.
