The Need for Civil Unrest

Sunday morning I drove up to Piccadilly and went to my gym - just because I have a guilty conscience about doing nothing all day. What I saw as I walked along Piccadilly was some paint spattered on the pavements and a few broken windows. These had been targeted: Lloyds Bank had broken windows and paint, Barclays' plate glass was untouched. Of the two banks, Barclays, home of multi-millionaire tax evasion experts Barclays Capital, is by far the worse corporate citizen, but Lloyds is the one that got conned into buying Halifax / Bank of Scotland and taking billions of pounds of "government support" aka "Chinese savings". (There are a handful of countries with net savings - all borrowing is ultimately from them - and China is the largest.) Actually, they should have broken the windows of Sir Victor Blank's and Eric Daniels' mansions - they were the Lloyds senior managers who decided with their egos rather than their brains.

The British establishment is all over the place. How dare a few "anarchists" defile property? Read the reports in the press: the outrage descends into bathos as you look at the targets: John Lewis, the Ritz, Fortnum and Mason. Not hospitals, not fire stations, not surgeries, but some retailers. That isn't "property" - it's a plate glass window, shop fittings and some signage. It's insured. It gets torn out and replaced every eighteen months anyway. The cost of cleaning up the damage is about one millisecond's profits for the owners.

For the French, of course, a few broken windows is nothing. The French don't even blink when they tear up roads or dump cowshit all over motorways. They know how to give a protest in France. In this country, we've only had one French-scale political riot - the Poll Tax riots of 1990 - and something truly terrible happened: it worked. Governments of both colors have lived in fear of a riot like that happening again. Because in a British democracy, the people must never be allowed directly to change political policy. Control of the process must be in the hands of the political class and the process must only respond those who are committed to its continued existence. This is elementary stuff. It means a million people can march and as long as they don't actually make the headlines, it doesn't matter. Let one of them break the windows of a corporate behemoth and that's news. Popular, organised protest must therefore be neutered (peaceful, not newsworthy) or marginalised (newsworthy but the work of "anarchists").

I'm all for violent protest - if that violence is directed towards the property and senior management of the guilty parties. Not the employees. Not your pet-hate coffee shop chain. Not a looting expedition. The actual guilty parties: tax dodgers, bribers, outsourcers, debt-laden utilities who can't even fix water pipes, and so on. Read an issue of Private Eye or look at the Coalition of Resistance or UK Uncut. I don't take part because I'm too old and I can't do the time.

Violent civil unrest is also a tit-for-tat. Because when the government takes money from your income to pay for bail-outs or wars you didn't vote for, it's mugging you. That's violence. It might be by Direct Debit, but it's still violence - the use of force to achieve an aim.