This is not politics as usual
Soon after seeming to congratulate police for not shooting protestors, Boris Johnson told this morning’s Today programme that he hoped the student fees protests would soon be at an end.
‘People will understand that democratic procedures have taken place and they cannot adjust this by taking to the streets,’ he said.
This is no doubt what Nick Clegg was hoping for too when he begged Lib Dem MPs to ‘walk through the fire’ with him earlier this week. Suffer the pain, get the vote through, and things will calm down.
From what I saw at the protest yesterday, if that is what the politicians are expecting to happen, they have sorely misjudged the situation. The coalition leadership are treating this movement as if it is just another political protest campaign - a more violent one, yes, but one that has arisen in response to a particular policy, and that will now dampen down as that policy is voted through parliament and people realise they can’t do anything about it.
But this is categorically NOT just another political movement. In fact, I’m not sure that it is political at all - certainly not in any way that has been previously thought of in this country. And it is that very lack of a coherent political structure (in Westminster terms) which is both the movement’s strength and its weakness.
The protestors can be split into three groups. First, the mainly middle class students who are involved in the occupations. Second, the small number of ‘usual suspects’ - the anarchists, swp and hard lefties. The rest - and possibly the majority - are mainly schoolkids, and drawn from working class backgrounds. Paul Mason writes about this group on his blog, describing them as Britain’s answer to the banlieues of Paris. He says that dubstep is the soundtrack of this group. He’s wrong, it’s not the avowedly middle-class dubstep that was being blasted out of sound systems yesterday, it was grime - the harsh, aggressive sound of east London council estates that has been virtually banned from clubs in the capital. For this group, it is the removal of EMAs which was the catalyst for protest, even more than the increase in fees.
But a catalyst is all that the EMAs are. For these teenagers, the education cuts are only a confirmation of what they already know: that they exist on the very edges of a society that doesn’t want them. Condemned to poverty-stricken estates, in schools that that face huge social problems and a lack of resources, their music, cultural life, even their manner of speech and dress is routinely demonised in the media and by the political class. And now even if they do ‘play by the rules’ – go to school, try to get to university, find a job – they find the door slammed in their face.
For this group, these protests are more than an expression of dissent within the narrow confines permitted by a parliamentary democracy. They are the physical manifestation of an inchoate rage that has been building for a long time. It’s the same thing that provokes the endless disputes over postcodes, and respect, and often ends in fights and stabbings. It is a lashing out, not just at the political process, but at society itself.
This is why the protests are such fluid, amorphous events – they have no easily defined political aim or demand, apart from a need for confrontation (and be in no doubt that many there yesterday wanted the confrontation with police, which is why confining people for hours and aggravating them with horse charges and beatings was even more stupid than normal). This is why they spread, seemingly randomly, from Parliament Square, to attack shops in Oxford Street, and good old Charles and Camilla. And it’s why they are much more dangerous and powerful than the politicians seem to realise.
In 2007, Slavoj Zizek wrote that the Iraq war protests were “an exemplary case of [the] strange symbiotic relationship between power and resistance”. He wrote :
“Their paradoxical outcome was that both sides were satisfied. The protesters saved their beautiful souls: they made it clear that they don’t agree with the government’s policy on Iraq. Those in power calmly accepted it, even profited from it: not only did the protests in no way prevent the already-made decision to attack Iraq; they also served to legitimise it. Thus George Bush’s reaction to mass demonstrations protesting his visit to London, in effect: ‘You see, this is what we are fighting for, so that what people are doing here – protesting against their government policy – will be possible also in Iraq!’”
Johnson and Clegg (and, it seems, Aaron Porter) believe that these protests will fulfill the same function – let the students ‘save their beautiful souls’ with protest, until they understand that this is all for the best. But these protests are of a completely different nature to the Iraq war marches. There is no leadership stewarding people to Trafalger Square to listen dutifully to speeches and then trudging home (again something Porter can’t get his head around). It’s a much more instinctive thing, a reflex action, and all the more effective for it.
But this amorphous, indefinable nature is also why any political group hoping to harness this explosion of energy will face considerable difficulty. The usual channels of political discontent – the unions, the dinosaurs of the hard left (SWP, Stop the War etc) – are nowhere here. The 15 year old Asian kids I saw shouting ‘one solution – revolution!’ at the TV cameras yesterday aren’t interested in top-down direction by white middle-aged union officials. They’re doing their own thing, driven by motivations that are a million miles away from the usual union piecemeal fare of higher wages and better conditions. Ultimately this could be the downfall of the nascent anti-coalition movement, because, as Sunny Hundal writes , without organization, the energy and anger could soon burn itself out or turn inward – much like it did with the banlieue protests of 2005.
But whether it does that or not will have virtually nothing to do with the Parliamentary process. This is an extra-political movement which cannot be analysed or viewed through the usual prism of Westminster politics, the predictable push and pull of government and opposition. What has been released in these past few weeks is a force that is much bigger, and runs much deeper, than anything this generation of politicians has seen before. It won’t be long before they begin to realise that.
