Decadent Protest

The baiting of Keir Starmer and David Lammy on Victoria Embankment on Monday provided a spectacle open to multiple interpretations. The easiest, and laziest, was that this was all the fault of a local man, a certain Mr Johnson of 10 Downing Street, who has been spreading lies about the Labour Leader's negligence when he was Director of Public Prosecutions. A more hysterical reaction was the claim that this was a "hate mob", despite the fact that the chief interlocutor, from the Resistance GB conspiracy group (whose video has now been signal-boosted by the mainstream media), addressed the Labour Leader respectfully as "Mister Starmer" and asked questions ranging from the party's "failure to represent the working man" to the case of Julian Assange. Though some in the background were shouting "traitor" and "nonce", no arrests were made. My own guess is that the Opposition Leader and Shadow Foreign Secretary were walking back to the Palace of Westminster from the Ministry of Defence in Horse Guards Avenue, presumably having received a briefing on Ukraine. That Starmer subsequently gave an interview to the Times, in which he lauded NATO and Ernest Bevin, and authored an article in the Guardian, in which he labelled the left as fellow-travellers of the UK's enemies, is suggestive.

An even more hyperbolic reaction to the spectacle was Paul Mason's claim in The New Statesman that this is Fascism (specifically that the Savile slur is a "fascist libel"), though as he's got a book out called How to Stop Fascism, I suspect there's some self-interested exaggeration in the mix. What caught my eye in Mason's fulmination was the claim that the spectacle itself is an innovation that can be attributed to the Johnson era: "The existence of a small, semi-permanent fascist mob around Westminster is one of the innovations history will associate with the Johnson era. So is the total failure of the Metropolitan Police to deal with it." The second sentence is important because it indicates that Mason's critique comes from the left, hence the concern that not only is a senior politician enabling Fascism but that the Met is indifferent at best and complicit at worst. He goes on to say: "The police force that charged into a crowd of black teenagers on horseback, and which floored women mourning the murder of Sarah Everard in 2021, cannot seem to bring itself to arrest people engaged — live, proud and on camera — in threatening words and behaviour against left-wing politicians."

I suspect "history" will be more interested in the growth of semi-permanent protest in Parliament Square, irrespective of its ideological colouring, since the start of the century. It is little remembered now but the makeshift peace camp set up by Brian Haw in 2001 was originally a protest against the  punitive sanctions imposed on Iraq. This predated not only the 2003 invasion of that country but even the 9/11 attacks in the US, which would be used, along with spurious claims about WMD, to justify that invasion and all the human and material waste that followed in its wake. In 2005, the Labour government passed the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, which placed restrictions on protests within a kilometre of the Palace of Westminster. In 2011, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government passed the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act, which defined a series of prohibited activities in the vicinity of Parliament that effectively outlawed the peace camp and similar semi-permanent fixtures.

Since then, we've seen a series of more fluid protests taking place around Westminster. Unlike the large-scale gatherings of yore, in which sheer numbers were necessary to attract any sort of media coverage, these have tended to attract smaller numbers but be more broadly viewed through videos disseminated via social media, bypassing the traditional channels who can only play catch-up by both literally and figuratively embedding the video in their own narrative. The ambush of Keir Starmer reflects the merging of the interrogative style of traditional media (i.e. striding up Whitehall with a microphone under the nose of a reluctant politician) with the flash-mob of social media, a process that has been under way since the EU referendum. Occasionally these protests attract larger crowds, as in the Black Lives Matter march and counter-protests ("save our statues") in 2020, but most of them remain spectacles that employ the mannerisms of traditional media (the shouted question, the chase, the almost comically fast walking), such as the badgering and insulting of high-profile remainer MPs in 2019 and now of Starmer.

Pace Mason, the move of the far-right spectacle to the Westminster stage probably doesn't indicate the advance of Fascism. In the UK is appears to reflect a decline in numbers as a standalone movement, or at least a decline in the ability to get numbers out on the street for explicitly far-right protests. Contrary to liberal media panics, far-right material circulated online can have a demobilising effect, leading supporters to become passive spectators, a process encouraged by the desire of many far-right provocateurs to monetise their fame via YouTube and other channels. As a result, the UK far-right is now piggybacking on other causes, such as anti-vax and anti-restriction protests, which both helps obscure its limited numbers and provides (some) opportunities for recruitment. This in turn confirms that the strategy of aggressive protests in Asian areas against "grooming gangs", which was favoured by both the BNP and EDL, has failed. The turn to the spectacle of Westminster is the strategy of a group that has given up on building a mass movement. 

For this reason I am also sceptical of the claims of those on the left, such as David Osland, who imagine that the changing social composition of Westminster protest is the harbinger of a new far-right threat: "The left behind have finally reached Westminster. Britain now has a permanently-constituted heap of accumulated social detritus that a serious figure on the right could set ablaze." It's too reductive to imagine that protests of old were mostly leftwing and middle-class - a characterisation that served the "anywheres" narrative of David Goodhart - while contemporary protests lean towards the native and rightwing - the corresponding "somewheres" of that narrative. The reality is that protest has always attracted a mixed bag. Brian Haw was neither middle-class nor particularly leftwing (his commitment to peace sprang from a Christian evangelical background). In contrast, much of the anti-vax movement today is clearly middle-class, having a significant overlap with anti-MMR protestors, while the leading champions against Covid-19 restrictions are Tory MPs. These aren't the left behind.

I think this point generalises. For example, my impression of last year's US Capitol riot, and also of this year's Ottawa truckers blockade and anti-vax protests in Auckland, is of a movement that is decadent rather than ascendant. While the number of participants has been significant - probably over 2,000 in the case of the Capitol riot - the turn towards symbolic protests against the national legislature suggests not that there is a desire to supersede the state any more but an intent (more in hope than expectation) to capture it. This could be attributed to the way Donald Trump has essentially taken over the American far-right and diverted it in his own interests, both financial and political ("Stop the steal" abuses the system but does not seek to overthrow it), but it also suggests a shift towards an agonistic theory of politics that is mirrored in the employment of protest forms more usually associated with the left: the march on the seat of power, the demand for change, the inevitable anticlimax. This is a significant departure from the US right's tradition of secession, states rights and the empowerment of militias, all of which emphasised the rejection of the federal state. 

To return to the UK. The evolution of far-right protest into a series of media spectacles that mimic the behaviour of the mainstream press has both structural and cultural drivers. By trying to outlaw protest in the vicinity of Westminster, while simultaneously needing to allow the operating methods of the fourth estate, the leading political parties have channeled the far-right into the form of media gadflys. This is why Tommy Robinson has been posing as a journalist. But that pose is made easier because of the style of the British press, which is accusatory, insulting and prone to smears. Just as Trump's pollution of the American body politic can be seen from another perspective as a process by which the establishment has absorbed the far-right into the political system, so the UK far-right's reinvention as a extreme version of British tabloid journalism can be seen as their absorption into the politico-media ecology. That there exists a clear pathway between the extreme right and the mainstream, via the likes of Guido Fawkes, GBNews and the Spectator, is evidence enough of the potential this gives rise to, but let's not imagine this is a new danger. Our politicians have been pandering to the far-right for decades and it doesn't appear that they intend to change, not least Keir Starmer. The decadent protest mirrors our decadent politics.