Thread: Protests are increasingly popular in Britain. Fortunately, they usually fail

To the barricades, darling

Britons have historically been less keen than, say, the French, to air their grievances in public (all those strangers, and anyway it might rain). But the appetite for demonstrations is growing—and the profile of the protesters is changing

Mar 6th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Protests are increasingly popular in Britain. Fortunately, they usually fail



WINNIE, the giant brown sow, didn't make it into Downing Street. She was confined to the pavement in Whitehall, along with several hundred pig farmers (theme song: “Stand by your ham”) who came to London on March 4th to complain about the plight of their industry. Down the road protesters had scaled a crane overlooking Parliament and unfurled banners demanding a referendum on the European reform treaty. Opponents of the construction of a third runway at Heathrow outdid them a week earlier, hanging their banners from the roof of the Palace of Westminster and throwing paper aeroplanes into the square below—itself host to an eternal peace protest, plus a lone environmentalist in an apache head-dress.

As well as ventilating angst over Europe and airports, the past fortnight has illustrated an underlying but important trend. Britons have historically been less keen than, say, the French, to air their grievances in public (all those strangers, and anyway it might rain). But the appetite for demonstrations is growing—and the profile of the protesters is changing. Once they were mostly industrial workers, peaceniks or extremists; these days they are as likely to be policemen or junior doctors. Groups who used to pursue their goals inside politics now do so outside it as well; once-marginal techniques are becoming orthodox.

The widening of the protest franchise is mostly seen as healthy. In fact, it suggests a dangerous view of politics.

King Mob

Interest in politics is generally thought to be waning in Britain; more accurately, it is being diverted from established parties and elections (whose membership and turnout have fallen) to groups who campaign on single issues, sometimes on the streets. The rise of this brand of politics is often said to reflect a failure by politicians, who are either hopelessly remote from voters' concerns or powerless to address them. But the big worry may be less politicians' failure than the naive expectations of the public.

The basic deal of parliamentary democracy is, or used to be, that on polling day voters make an overall choice among the packages on offer. They can turf out the government at the next election, but until then they have to live with compromise, frequent disappointment and occasional coercion.

That old model seems to be increasingly unsatisfactory to voters accustomed to bespoke treatment in other aspects of their lives. People are right and entitled, of course, to make their views known to their elected representatives; but swelling numbers seem to expect the same sort of service from Westminster as they get from Starbucks—to choose their policies in the same way as they choose the toppings on a cappuccino (a sprinkling of low taxation, please, with a referendum on the side). They demand a kind of personal satisfaction that government, with its conflicting priorities, can't deliver. In places such as California where government has tried to do so, by introducing more direct forms of democracy, the results have been chaotic.

There is a consolation, albeit one that carries its own risks, for those concerned by the rise of Starbucks politics and protest culture: despite their increased popularity, most protests are failures. The pig farmers staged a bigger one eight years ago and their industry has shrunk rapidly since; the main beneficiary of the campaign has been Winnie, who would have been eaten had she not become their mascot. The two biggest protests in the last decade—two of the biggest ever—were by the Countryside Alliance in 2002 and the one on the eve of the Iraq war in 2003. Nevertheless, foxhunting—which the rural folk wanted to conserve—was banned; British forces went into Iraq regardless.

The organisers of those two mega-marches argue that they succeeded in raising morale and embarrassing the government. But in a way, by advertising its respect for dissent, the demonstrations redounded to the government's credit. An understanding of the utility of protest may have influenced Gordon Brown's decision to lift the Blair-era restrictions on protests in Parliament Square. The same calculation may be at work in the government's new enthusiasm for politics by internet, which some fear may lead to a crass majoritarianism. So far, although there are lots of e-petitions on Number 10's website, they have mostly just allowed the disgruntled to let off steam.

Stunts—designed to attract the media rather than influence politicians—are no more effective than sheer numbers. “If we hadn't done it”, observes a spokesman for the rooftop anti-Heathrow group, “you wouldn't be talking to us”; but, as with some adverts, the stunts and the stuntmen often become better known than their causes, as was the case with “Swampy”, a grubby hero of 1990s road-building protests. Violence, on the other hand, has sometimes paid—especially when the demands of the mob chime with the sympathies of some politicians. The angry hauliers and farmers who, in 2000, blockaded refineries in protest at the cost of fuel were more successful than those ranks of decorous rustics. The poll-tax disturbances of 1990 helped to bring down Margaret Thatcher; the Hyde Park riots of 1866 increased the pressure for an extension of the voting franchise. But more sensible policing has made mob rule harder to achieve—and violence is anyway unlikely to appeal to the new cadres or protesters (“we're frightfully well-behaved, aren't we?” a farmer in Whitehall observed mournfully this week).

The best hope for protesters may be to enlist the support of a tabloid newspaper. There is not much evidence that the tabloids really articulate their readers' views, let alone anyone else's. But they exert a voodoo power over politicians: last month the Daily Mail ran a campaign urging tighter controls on the use of plastic bags and Mr Brown instantly signed up. Otherwise, protesters in the age of Starbucks politics are fated to be doubly frustrated: first by the politicians, then by their own failure to change things.

economist.com