Within
days of the Tory victory in the UK general election, 7 May 2015, thousands
protested in towns and cities across the county, including London, Sheffield,
Bristol and Cardiff.
If the
biggest anti-war protest in human history could be ignored, then why bother
marching for or against anything ever again?
THE
PROTESTS are coming. Polish your placard, stitch up your banner, wash the tear
gas out of that old bandana. Get ready to rally over the coming weeks, months
and years, because what else is there to do?
If
you don’t like the new government, if you don’t want to see the welfare budget
cut by billions, if you are made fearful, distressed or furious by what the
Conservatives are planning, what can you do except march? Join a political
party?
Thousands
of new members have signed up to the defeated parties since the election,
apparently, but Labour is still in disarray, the Liberal Democrats are nowhere,
the Greens unconvincing, Ukip is eating itself alive. The SNP is the only
effective opposition and that’s no comfort outside Scotland. Things can only
get bitter.
Many
trade unions are too weak to strike; and David Cameron is planning to strangle
the rest with changes to the law that the TUC says will leave its negotiators
“with no more power than Oliver Twist when he asked for more”.
On
the other hand, prime ministers who try to act strong bring out strong
reactions in the people who oppose them. And social media makes it easier than
ever to organise a protest: a generation ago, it took six months of campaigning
to fill Trafalgar Square; now you can organise a flash mob in an hour.
Unions,
faith groups, charities and campaigners are taking a longer run up by calling
all dissenters to gather under the banner of the People’s Assembly, with a
national march against austerity on 20 June that will start outside the Bank of
England.
They
will want a peaceful protest, a carnival of concern: a vast version of an
anti-austerity event that happened in Bristol last Wednesday and drew a couple
of thousand people. It got less attention than the smaller, more angry
confrontation outside Downing Street the day after the Tories came back to
power, when smoke bombs and traffic cones were thrown at the police (who had
come in their body armour and riot shields ready for such a clash).
Protest
thrives in days like these, when there seems to be no alternative, but is it
worth it? Does it work?
Those
are questions posed by a new film called We Are Many that looks back at the
biggest protest in British history: the day a million people – or maybe two
million – marched in London against the war in Iraq. They were from all walks
of life, and many were protesting for the first time ever.
The
actor Mark Rylance remembers in the film that he thought he had stumbled into a
different march: “I thought: ‘This must be for something else.’ Because there
were all these families, people with pushchairs and babies, people who I had
never seen before on these things and the outpouring of rage from the people
was so beautiful, really passionate and eloquent and beautiful, people crying
out and shouting.”
We
Are Many records the great swell of opinion that brought people out to protest
in nearly 800 cities in 72 countries on 15 February 2003; and the great hope
that grew in the hearts of many of the 30 million that surely there could be no
war after this. But it was the day a generation lost its innocence.
“The
scales fell from people’s eyes,” says the director Amir Amirani, who spent nine
years making the film. “Up until then, they still had a faith in politics: that
there would come a point at which the politicians would have to listen. The
realisation that this was not the case was a huge moment which, as the author
John le Carré says in the film, has stuck in our craw ever since.”
We
Are Many will have its premiere in London on 21 May and be released in cinemas
on 22 May.
Amirani,
a Londoner of Iranian descent who trained at the BBC, says he is one of a “huge
swathe of voters who have said they will never vote Labour again because of
what the party did with that war. Where do those people go?”
His
answer is that they have gone into single-issue politics or campaign groups
such as 38 Degrees, whose co-founder David Babbs appears in the film.
“Quite
a few went into the climate camp, the Occupy movement or direct action,” says
Amirani. “A whole generation was radicalised and politicised, but just could
not buy into the politics of their parents: ‘You vote Labour or you vote Tory.’
Those people grew up and they are looking for answers that the election did not
give to them. What will they do next?”
Protest
is the answer. They are in place and ready to go. But what’s the point? If the
biggest anti-war protest in human history could be ignored, then why bother
marching for or against anything ever again?
We
Are Many has a good stab at coming up with a positive answer. First it argues
that 15 February 2003 was like a spark for the Egyptian revolution. Then it
suggests that Parliament’s decision not to go to war in Syria in 2013 was a
direct result of politicians knowing there had been “structural shift in public
opinion away from war”.
Surprisingly,
Tony Blair’s ally Lord Falconer says the anti-war march did change things: “If
a million people come out on the streets in the future, then what government is
going to say they are wrong now? When the last time the public expressed their
opposition in that way, history said the people on the street were right and
not the people in the government.” That’s quite an admission from a man who
still believes going to war was the right thing to do.
Dr
Eliza Filby, a lecturer in modern British history at King’s College London,
says he is right but such an admission is rare. “Yes, protesting does have an
effect, but politicians don’t admit it. They can’t.”
History
tells us there are three main ways of making an impact with a protest, she
says. “You can have huge numbers, as they did in 2003. You can have prominent
people – that works.” The third option is to smash things.
“You’ve
got to have lots of violence against property and destruction of property,
because that breeds chaos. Governments don’t like chaos, it undermines their
authority. They won’t admit this, but they will do anything to make sure it
doesn’t happen again.”
One
example is the race riots under Margaret Thatcher. “The riots all over in the
summer of 1981 scared the hell out of a cabinet that was divided and weak.
There was the Scarman report, the government did start putting money into the
inner cities. Thatcherism was not stopped in its tracks but it did change,”
says Dr Filby.
“The
more chaotic a protest looks, the more a government will condemn it publicly
and the more fearful it will be privately, and so liable to make changes.”
These
can happen in secret over a period of time and are rarely exactly what the
protesters want, she says: the protests in 2003 did not stop the invasion of
Iraq but they did create a climate in which no prime minister can now go to war
without the support of the Commons. “That is a direct consequence of the
march.”
How
many protests achieve anything at all? About a third is the answer, according a
remarkable piece of work from the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia
University. Researchers studied 843 protests in 84 countries between January
2006 and July 2013, from Occupy Wall Street to mining strikes in South Africa
and rallies in Brazil.
The
report says the number of protests is rising, more middle-class people are
marching and more than half of demonstrations are against austerity measures or
poverty. “Today we are experiencing another period of rising outrage and
discontent and some of the largest protests in world history.”
But
only 37 per cent of protests resulted in “some kind of achievement” in the
short or medium term. Those that did were usually about domestic policy.
So,
if you are going to protest, here’s how to have the most impact. First, make
sure it’s an issue that effects people around you, not far away. Next, make a
clear demand like stopping a war or raising the price farmers are paid for
milk.
Get
celebrity backers. Go break a window or two. Don’t hurt anybody or daub
graffiti on war memorials as some idiot did during the Downing Street protest,
but if you want to get noticed then absolutely do make it look as if there is
chaos on the streets and the authorities can’t cope. These are the lessons from
history.
Huge
numbers really help. Be warned, though: even if you can draw a jaw-dropping,
record-breaking crowd, be prepared for the politicians to ignore you. The only
way to bring immediate change is to gather day after day after day in the same
persistent massive show of force, as happened in Egypt and other countries
during the Arab Spring.
Could
that happen here? Do we even want it? As the film director Amir Amirani says:
“This is the big question facing all of us in society: what is left for people
to do? Is it non-violent resistance? Is it direct action? Is it Egyptian-style,
Greek-style and Spanish-style opposition? If a million people do come out
again, is it a one-time demonstration and then we all go home again like
before?”
The
protests are coming, but if they are ignored will we do what we did in 2003 and
melt away, almost embarrassed to have caused a fuss?
“As
Ken Loach says in our film, government can handle that,” says Amirani. “What it
can’t handle is real organisation. Whether we will have that in Britain over
the next five years remains to be seen.”
No comments:
Post a Comment