The Idler
17th April 2011, 16:05
Saw a few articles from former Marxism Today members and one just about Marxism generally in the mainstream newspapers recently so I thought I'd share them. In order, they are The Times (David Aaronovitch), The Telegraph and The Guardian.
The Times David Aaronovitch
Last updated April 16 2011 11:18AM
Sit-ins, pickets, arrests – as a young man the Times columnist was rarely without a banner and a megaphone. So what happened when he did it again?
It’s inconceivable that my mother, seven months pregnant, did not go on the May Day march the year that I was born, and stride out under the hammer and sickle banner of the St Pancras Communist Party. So I would have felt the vibrations of my first demo chants rather than hearing them; and my guess is that they would have been something to do with West German rearmament.
Our family was almost as left as it was possible to be, and all our friends were like us. The downtime of my first quarter century was spent – as others spent their leisure hours fishing, playing sports or a-dib-dib-dobbing with the Scouts – on the march. Most weekends there were pickets, rallies, sit-ins, sit-downs, lie-ins, die-ins, human chains, street theatre, street stalls, street-corner speeches, bands, floats, people on stilts, placards, banners, flags, slogans, chants, T-shirts and certainties. There might be five of us outside the Curzon cinema, Mayfair, collecting for Greek political prisoners, or 5,000 milling around denouncing Enoch Powell as he arrived to speak in some town hall or other.
From my earliest years I remember sprays of cherry blossom decorating my brother’s pushchair in a sunny Hyde Park as the comrades sat around after the march chatting and eating sandwiches, or the crackle and tinny hiss of badly amplified declamations from above the lions in Trafalgar Square. In my memory’s eye there’s a country road, lined with trees, where I think we met up to see my older sister and her comrades on their way to protest against the bomb at Aldermaston. And an image of my dad on a soapbox speaking through a loud-hailer, outside a block of flats in North London where the tenants on rent strike had barricaded themselves in against eviction.
It’s what we did, and at 13 I started doing it independently, going to demonstrations on my own or, if I could persuade them, with friends from school. We demonstrated about Vietnam, led by such eternal revolutionaries as Tariq Ali and Vanessa Redgrave (“Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh! We will fight, we will win! London, Paris and Berlin!”); about apartheid in South Africa; and about Ted Heath’s Industrial Relations Bill.
Instead of a bar mitzvah I made my family very proud by being arrested aged 17 outside Rhodesia House. A sergeant from the Special Patrol Group nicked me for obstruction as I was complaining loudly about police brutality. And suddenly it was me on my way through the police lines via the paddy wagon to the cells in Wandsworth police station, which I shared with a senior editor from the BBC. My brother-in-law appeared to get me four hours later, a great smile on his face as he welcomed me into demonstrating manhood.
Through the Seventies and the early Eighties I demonstrated. Outside the Grunwick photo-processing plant, against the rising menace of the National Front, in favour of a woman’s right to choose, and – finally – against the bomb again, as Reagan and Andropov faced each other down. The rituals would be comfortably similar: the Tube train ride downtown, spotting other demonstrators on the platform, the assembly point with its hovering left-paper sellers, the decision about which group to march with, the setting off, the occasional yells of “Go back to Russia!” from the pavement, the arrival, speeches, dispersal. Rinse and repeat. And repeat. And repeat.
Of course, after a long while I could see that this life was particular, eccentric even. Though being part of a crowd a few thousand strong, licensed to reclaim the streets from traffic for three hours, feels temporarily empowering (a word that I don’t think existed until the Nineties), it is human peanuts set against the half million at English soccer matches every weekend or the ten million watching a soap opera or an adrenalised talent competition.
Most people never marched. Marches didn’t alter the outcomes of elections, and elections tended to decide things. When, to our utter surprise, Margaret Thatcher was actually elected in 1979, her Government enacted unbelievable policies that Labour would never have done and it was a big shock. We’d taken the postwar settlement (mixed economy, nationalised utilities, beer and sandwiches at No 10 for the unions) as the right-most border of a politics that we aimed to picket and rally to the left. “The workers united will never be defeated!” was chanted, alongside that Eighties ubiquity, “Maggie out!”, initially in the half-belief that both were a prediction. The delirious Benn moment in Labour and the 1983 election landslide for the Tories rendered such a view untenable.
And “peaceful” demonstrating bores its participants, as does anything comfortable. Except in the cases of the very large demos, there would generally be the same people, the same placards, the same slogans, an unofficial uniform and a sense of trudging futility. After becoming a paid journalist in the Eighties I laid down the banner poles, imagining that my new status required some objectivity – but in reality out of a relief that this family duty was over.
My new world was a complex adult one, resistant to slogans even where I might have agreed with the drift of the sloganeer. And increasingly I didn’t agree. I found myself not just out of sympathy with the fuel protesters, the Countryside Alliance and the “anti-war” movement, but opposed to them. The biggest demonstrations of my lifetime took place in Britain between 2001 and 2003, and I was against them! An outsider, I increasingly jibbed at their pretensions: their complaints about police violence should a constable take their elbow a little roughly, their notion that their numbers entitled them to a result and the habit of doubling or trebling those numbers. One day a social historian will submit a PhD on how the February 2003 anti-Iraq war protest went from 750,000 to two million in a month.
*****
March 26, 2011, and my first large demonstration as a participant for a quarter of a century begins, as it used to, on the Tube. Already in the carriage, bringing people in from the northern suburbs, are some of the stereotypes of the marching world. There’s a middle-aged man with heavy banner poles, and my guess is that he’s Labour Party or trade union. Further down sit two male members of the Polytrotocracy – grey goatees, shabby jackets and earrings. At Camden Town a pair of mid-thirties chunky women with Technicolor hair join us, heavily tattooed, NUT stickers on their leggings, one wearing a “The Daily Mail hates me!” T-shirt, and between them exhibiting as much read-me attitude as a Berlin nightclub. Finally the new naughty children of protesting Britain arrive at Euston. Four of them, two with crusty dreadlocks, every one with a nose-ring that makes it look as though something is leaking from their nostrils. As the train draws into our destination at Goodge Street one of the boys laughs contemptuously at the recorded announcement that tickets will be collected at surface level. At the barriers, they enact a rehearsed routine of one paid, one free through the machines, in a fine show of disdain for the bourgeois notion of paying your way. In their Utopia (if they’ve got that far) the trains will be free, or everyone will have a horse, or no one will want to travel, but will lie under trees smoking home-grown grass and complaining about their infected piercings.
It’s 10.30am and our feeder march is assembling outside the University of London Union in Malet Street, not far from the British Museum. It’s the radical wing of the demo – mostly students and anarchists, so it’s also likely to be the scruffiest set of today’s marchers. The thought takes me back to my short time at Oxford before rustication (a smart word for expulsion) in the Seventies. Then we were running a campaign for a Central Students Union (CSU), which the university perversely refused to stump up a few million for. Anyway, there were occupations and arrests, and in the middle of all this Lady Alexandra Trevor-Roper, wife of the historian, wondered aloud to a Daily Telegraph journalist whether all the people involved were really Oxford students. Her doubt was provoked, she said, by her observing that many were wearing “dirty jerseys”. From then on, added to the chanting questions of what did we want and when did we want it, was the query, “And what do we wear?” The answer, of course, was, “Dirty jerseys!” Laugh? Perhaps you had to be there.
But though many of the home-made placards are droll, there is nothing humorous in the chants of the loud-haileristas outside ULU. To a drumbeat they are yelling, “Tory scum, here we come!”, which is not really a promise of exemplary civil behaviour. In fact it’s about as aggressive a promise of ruckuses to come as you can imagine.
As we set off southwards most of the demonstrators seem to be nice kids really. I get talking to one student from Glasgow who has travelled down with his comrades on an overnight coach. And then five minutes later I nearly get into a fight. There is a group of sombre-looking middle-aged men in black, one of whom has a mask over his face. So I ask him why he’s wearing it and he gives me the finger. So I ask him again and his taller, Italian-looking companion tells me to eff off. So I ask him again and a scrotty little man of about 45 appears at my side and begins to jostle me. In fact, every time I ask the question yet another preposterous pensionable anarchist seems to appear to add a new swear word or to insinuate that there may be trouble ahead.
They remind me of some of the elderly ex-hooligans who still go to football matches and look belligerently at the opposing fans, desiring the fight, recalling its pleasures, but without quite the capacity any more to perform. And violence is exciting. On March 17, 1968, at Grosvenor Square, a barely teenaged me watched as a crowd – thwarted by the horses outside the American Embassy – turned on the Indonesian Embassy with the shout, “They kill communists too!” (they certainly did), and put out several of its windows. It was like a desert-booted version of a Bullingdon Club night out, except that, next day, the newspapers carried a front-page photograph of a protester’s crepe sole heading for a policeman’s face.
Some time later, having left the main march (we’ll go back to it in a bit) I find myself beside a paint-spattered police line outside Topshop. Topshop is a big target of a group called UK Uncut, which uses direct action to protest against perfectly legal but morally questionable tax minimisation practices. In this case the black-clad anarchists are piggybacking the campaigners and carrying out their own assault. Every time the police, in riot helmets, move anywhere even in small numbers, there are dozens of phones and digital cameras trained on them by clucking demonstrators.
Back in the day we had a more robust attitude towards policing. Essentially, if we were doing anything that we weren’t supposed to be doing – such as deviating from a route or trying to lock something off or shut something down – we expected the fuzz to do something to us. Once, at a demo outside South Africa House, I found myself pushed to the front of a pushing crowd. Unaccountably the policeman in front of me, his arms linked to those of his colleagues, began to kick my legs hard with his big boots. If I’d fallen we both might have been hurt, but it felt like his way of telling me that there was some price to be paid for all this. Now I suppose I’d take his number, photograph him, write an online column for The Guardian and insist on an investigation.
But we didn’t take pictures, and there was no comeback. The standing joke was that you’d get charged with whatever they did to you. If they simply carted you off to make up the numbers, you’d be charged with obstruction, as I was. And if they hit you, you’d face a charge for assaulting a police officer. In court you’d face a stipendiary magistrate who, until the Eighties, would automatically take the law’s word over yours.
Sometimes people would retaliate. I remember my mother, who’d had ponies as a girl in Worcestershire, remonstrating with someone who wanted to throw ball bearings under the hooves of charging police horses. All that was needed, she told him, was to take the beast’s bridle firmly and lead it away.
It was in Lewisham in 1977 that I began to feel some sympathy for the coppers. It was a year when the National Front felt strong enough to bring their marches through areas with large black populations, and it was the job of the police to escort them. A large and very angry counter-demonstration assembled and showered the fascists with bricks, sticks and bottles, and I saw many policemen hit and bloodied.
There is a semi-myth believed by many who take part in violent or illegal protest, which is that it is often effective. I say “semi-myth” because sometimes it appears true. At the end of 1969 a Young Liberal called Peter Hain led a campaign to stop the South African cricket tour of 1970 from going ahead. He was right – it was an affront that an all-white team should play official Test matches in England. The tactic used was to disrupt that winter’s rugby matches played by the Springboks. And we did disrupt them, getting on the pitch at Twickenham and elsewhere. The 1970 tour was cancelled.
But then the legend ran ahead of the reality. It became the violent picket at the coke depot in Saltley that started the process that brought down the Heath Government; it was the poll tax riots that finally got Maggie out. And it will be student riots that force the coalition to abandon its whole economic policy.
On the March 26 demonstration this psychology is represented by the number of placards and slogans comparing this protest with the Arab Spring. “We will fight, we will win, Tunis, Cairo…” Suggests one. “Be an Egyptian!” requests another.
Oddly, the most outwardly confident of the slogan-makers are also the most politically isolated. Here, as ever, are the weirdly parasitic left groupuscules who always hang around other people’s nice demos, telling them what they ought to be thinking and trying to sell them copies of Workers Hammer. “General Strike Now to Bring the Tories Down!” is their call now, as it has ever been, though even Socialist Albania is, alas, no more. Never mind, there’s always the Bolivarian Revolution of Comrade President Chávez of Venezuela.
Now I’m outside Bhs in Oxford Street, looking at a sit-down protest from 20 or so members of UK Uncut. They’ve just been inside, and now are holding a little event before being tweeted off to some other place (which subsequently turns out to be Fortnum & Mason). Later in the week the Treasury Select Committee will launch an inquiry into corporate tax avoidance, and one senior Tory figure tells me that he privately agrees with their targeting of Sir Philip Green.
But right here and right now their innovative tactics have turned to tedious self-righteousness, as a woman who could be the twin of Neil from The Young Ones reads out a long series of one-line statements purporting to come from the Establishment. “They tell you that the only answer is war!” she intones, and the followers amen with, “Don’t believe them!”
The thing is, it’s only for their benefit. No shoppers are watching and not even a 24-hour news station will be beguiled by such tedium. And there’s also the question of whether they have ruined the big march by allowing space for the anarchists to operate. A week or so later Brighton UK Uncut describes the mini-riots as “the collective creative act of the people striving to redefine the status quo through shared emotional experience”. If you read that out loud, it’s the same sound someone makes when they disappear up their own rectum.
And here’s the problem. After a while the vanguardist either turns to mainstream politics, or becomes a vainglorious, self-reiterating windbag, to be given an annual outing on Question Time or a regular slot in the London Review of Books.
Earlier, in the mainstream march, the mood was almost joyful. People who thought they were something of a minority in village, town and workplace, suddenly found thousands there like themselves. I spoke to teachers from Derbyshire and council workers from Leicester and briefly marched with firefighters from Hampshire. Looked at from any small height, you would see the demonstration stretch back down long, wide streets – banners waving in colour-coordinated blocs, like a battle scene from a Kurosawa movie. Teachers in purple, Unison in blue, firefighters in flamey orange, Greens in surprise-me-not green. Here and there you’d find a theatrical object, such as giant inflatable scissors or a huge balloon. The banner of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapists waved beside the route, next to a man in an alarmingly revealing one-piece latex suit in sky blue.
There were a lot of ordinary people here, mostly left of centre, some with a small picture of what they were trying to save in their minds, others with bigger political objectives. Some were there because they were union folk, some because they just felt that they had to do something, make a statement, take a stand, because if they didn’t, who would? The biggest dangers here came from the old chap with a hearing aid waving his long-stocked placard in arcs like the blade from The Pit and the Pendulum. As he tired the long scything sweeps got closer to the heads of those in front of him and behind.
It felt warm and familiar to me, even after all this time. The kinetics were the same, jamming up and slowing down in narrow roads and then in wider streets stretching out and going briskly. Now I found myself in front of this banner, now behind it. The faces were the same – still almost entirely white.
Near Downing Street someone hugged me from behind. It was my brother-in-law, and behind him was my beloved sister. How we had found each other in this throng of 250,000 people was inexplicable. They went off to find a café, knowing they could rejoin this huge gathering. Earlier, near the Embankment, a middle-aged woman had sprinted up to me.
“I just wanted you to know,” she told me, “that it’s wonderful to see you here.”
She must have recognised me and thought, maybe, I was returning to the tribe. Welcome home, son. You’ve been away a long time. And now we’re all together again, on the march.
It was a great day. But it’s the same as being an atheist at a carol concert. I love the tunes, I am among good people and I badly want to join in. But I just don’t believe the words.
A confession: I used to read Marxism Today ? Telegraph Blogs
The Daily TelegraphKatharine Birbalsingh
Katharine Birbalsingh is the teacher who exposed the failings of the comprehensive school system at the Conservative Party conference last year. Katharine has been teaching in inner London for over a decade and plans to set up a Free School in south London to help to serve underprivileged children. Her book, To Miss with Love, is out now. Follow @Miss_Snuffy on Twitter to see what Katharine's doing now. Katharine's personal website is www.katharinebirbalsingh.com (http://www.katharinebirbalsingh.com).
A confession: I used to read Marxism Today
By Katharine Birbalsingh Politics Last updated: April 6th, 2011
149 Comments Comment on this article
Oxford revisited (Photo: Reuters)
Oxford revisited (Photo: Reuters)
I’m sitting on the panel with a couple of other writers at The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival. It feels odd, being at the age I am now… having been 19 years old just the other day, wandering around Christchurch meadows. The great Ann Leslie is chairing. She is so funny. Later she tells me how she went recently to inquire about botox and the doctor told her that, frankly, it was just too late! We are discussing selfishness. Has capitalism made us more selfish? How can we foster compassion and kindness in our communities? I’m there, of course, to question the idea that capitalism is the root of all evil, and maybe it has something to do with how we are teaching our children at school instead.
Standing up at the podium, I am slightly terrified, as I’m not entirely sure of the audience. Are they friend or foe? Having been on a panel next to John D’Abbro (Jamie’s dream Head on Jamie’s Dream School) at the RSA (Royal Society of Arts) last week, I am worried about what might be in store.
I find that I am agreeing with much of what my writer colleagues are saying. I agree until one of them explains that on the back of the idea that capitalism is inherently selfish, where one works all of the time in order to earn money, where women leave the home in order to further their careers and forget to love their children, our selfishness will only be encouraged by all of the cuts that are taking place.
Lefties always believe that the only way to do good is through the state. If one wishes to live a selfless life, one becomes a doctor, nurse, teacher or social worker. One works for the state and therefore for others, instead of working in industry and trying to earn a fortune for oneself. I too had always believed exactly this.
I shake my head. “But no, no, don’t you see… that’s the whole point of the Big Society! It stands in opposition to the Big State! When the state does everything for you, then there is no need for you to try to help people because you expect the state will do it instead.” I sigh. “I see it all of the time in school. Why should I pick it up? The cleaner will do that! Look after my textbook? You can just give me another one! And so on.”
I can see some people squirming in their seats, but I continue. “The idea as I see it, is that the Big Society should reduce the size of the Big State so that people have to take responsibility for themselves and their communities. A smaller state won’t encourage selfishness. It will force people to look after each other!”
I suppose the question is whether or not it will. Perhaps we’ll just leave each other to die on street. The irony is that while this other writer argues that we are not inherently selfish, that Dawkins was wrong, that it is our modern society that makes us this way, in fact it is because of a fundamental belief in our inherent selfishness that we insist on a Big State looking after people, because we know that we are too selfish to do it ourselves.
I look to the audience. “The thing is that there are good people everywhere, you see. In the last few months, not having known many Conservatives before, I’ve met quite a few. And I’ve found that some of them do good by earning lots of money in banking or law and then use it to build schools in Africa, or by spending their weekends in soup kitchens. I never knew that about Conservatives before.”
Ann Leslie laughs. “What, you mean you were surprised to find that we didn’t all have horns sticking out of our heads?” She places her fingers on her temples.
I smile. “Well… yes!”
The audience laughs and I know that whether Left or Right, I am among friends, back in Oxford, where I used to read Marxism Today, and where now, a lifetime on, I’m arguing in favour of what the Conservative Party has to offer.
The Guardian
A new answer to welfare must be found – socialism | Peter Thompson (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/mar/31/new-answer-welfare-socialism?INTCMP=SRCH)
Karl Marx, part 1: Religion, the wrong answer to the right question | Peter Thompson (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/apr/04/karl-marx-religion?INTCMP=SRCH)
Karl Marx, part 2: How Marxism came to dominate socialist thinking | Peter Thompson (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/apr/11/marx-engels-science-marxism?INTCMP=SRCH)
The Poverty of Popper (http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2011/04/poverty-of-popper.html)
The Times David Aaronovitch
Last updated April 16 2011 11:18AM
Sit-ins, pickets, arrests – as a young man the Times columnist was rarely without a banner and a megaphone. So what happened when he did it again?
It’s inconceivable that my mother, seven months pregnant, did not go on the May Day march the year that I was born, and stride out under the hammer and sickle banner of the St Pancras Communist Party. So I would have felt the vibrations of my first demo chants rather than hearing them; and my guess is that they would have been something to do with West German rearmament.
Our family was almost as left as it was possible to be, and all our friends were like us. The downtime of my first quarter century was spent – as others spent their leisure hours fishing, playing sports or a-dib-dib-dobbing with the Scouts – on the march. Most weekends there were pickets, rallies, sit-ins, sit-downs, lie-ins, die-ins, human chains, street theatre, street stalls, street-corner speeches, bands, floats, people on stilts, placards, banners, flags, slogans, chants, T-shirts and certainties. There might be five of us outside the Curzon cinema, Mayfair, collecting for Greek political prisoners, or 5,000 milling around denouncing Enoch Powell as he arrived to speak in some town hall or other.
From my earliest years I remember sprays of cherry blossom decorating my brother’s pushchair in a sunny Hyde Park as the comrades sat around after the march chatting and eating sandwiches, or the crackle and tinny hiss of badly amplified declamations from above the lions in Trafalgar Square. In my memory’s eye there’s a country road, lined with trees, where I think we met up to see my older sister and her comrades on their way to protest against the bomb at Aldermaston. And an image of my dad on a soapbox speaking through a loud-hailer, outside a block of flats in North London where the tenants on rent strike had barricaded themselves in against eviction.
It’s what we did, and at 13 I started doing it independently, going to demonstrations on my own or, if I could persuade them, with friends from school. We demonstrated about Vietnam, led by such eternal revolutionaries as Tariq Ali and Vanessa Redgrave (“Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh! We will fight, we will win! London, Paris and Berlin!”); about apartheid in South Africa; and about Ted Heath’s Industrial Relations Bill.
Instead of a bar mitzvah I made my family very proud by being arrested aged 17 outside Rhodesia House. A sergeant from the Special Patrol Group nicked me for obstruction as I was complaining loudly about police brutality. And suddenly it was me on my way through the police lines via the paddy wagon to the cells in Wandsworth police station, which I shared with a senior editor from the BBC. My brother-in-law appeared to get me four hours later, a great smile on his face as he welcomed me into demonstrating manhood.
Through the Seventies and the early Eighties I demonstrated. Outside the Grunwick photo-processing plant, against the rising menace of the National Front, in favour of a woman’s right to choose, and – finally – against the bomb again, as Reagan and Andropov faced each other down. The rituals would be comfortably similar: the Tube train ride downtown, spotting other demonstrators on the platform, the assembly point with its hovering left-paper sellers, the decision about which group to march with, the setting off, the occasional yells of “Go back to Russia!” from the pavement, the arrival, speeches, dispersal. Rinse and repeat. And repeat. And repeat.
Of course, after a long while I could see that this life was particular, eccentric even. Though being part of a crowd a few thousand strong, licensed to reclaim the streets from traffic for three hours, feels temporarily empowering (a word that I don’t think existed until the Nineties), it is human peanuts set against the half million at English soccer matches every weekend or the ten million watching a soap opera or an adrenalised talent competition.
Most people never marched. Marches didn’t alter the outcomes of elections, and elections tended to decide things. When, to our utter surprise, Margaret Thatcher was actually elected in 1979, her Government enacted unbelievable policies that Labour would never have done and it was a big shock. We’d taken the postwar settlement (mixed economy, nationalised utilities, beer and sandwiches at No 10 for the unions) as the right-most border of a politics that we aimed to picket and rally to the left. “The workers united will never be defeated!” was chanted, alongside that Eighties ubiquity, “Maggie out!”, initially in the half-belief that both were a prediction. The delirious Benn moment in Labour and the 1983 election landslide for the Tories rendered such a view untenable.
And “peaceful” demonstrating bores its participants, as does anything comfortable. Except in the cases of the very large demos, there would generally be the same people, the same placards, the same slogans, an unofficial uniform and a sense of trudging futility. After becoming a paid journalist in the Eighties I laid down the banner poles, imagining that my new status required some objectivity – but in reality out of a relief that this family duty was over.
My new world was a complex adult one, resistant to slogans even where I might have agreed with the drift of the sloganeer. And increasingly I didn’t agree. I found myself not just out of sympathy with the fuel protesters, the Countryside Alliance and the “anti-war” movement, but opposed to them. The biggest demonstrations of my lifetime took place in Britain between 2001 and 2003, and I was against them! An outsider, I increasingly jibbed at their pretensions: their complaints about police violence should a constable take their elbow a little roughly, their notion that their numbers entitled them to a result and the habit of doubling or trebling those numbers. One day a social historian will submit a PhD on how the February 2003 anti-Iraq war protest went from 750,000 to two million in a month.
*****
March 26, 2011, and my first large demonstration as a participant for a quarter of a century begins, as it used to, on the Tube. Already in the carriage, bringing people in from the northern suburbs, are some of the stereotypes of the marching world. There’s a middle-aged man with heavy banner poles, and my guess is that he’s Labour Party or trade union. Further down sit two male members of the Polytrotocracy – grey goatees, shabby jackets and earrings. At Camden Town a pair of mid-thirties chunky women with Technicolor hair join us, heavily tattooed, NUT stickers on their leggings, one wearing a “The Daily Mail hates me!” T-shirt, and between them exhibiting as much read-me attitude as a Berlin nightclub. Finally the new naughty children of protesting Britain arrive at Euston. Four of them, two with crusty dreadlocks, every one with a nose-ring that makes it look as though something is leaking from their nostrils. As the train draws into our destination at Goodge Street one of the boys laughs contemptuously at the recorded announcement that tickets will be collected at surface level. At the barriers, they enact a rehearsed routine of one paid, one free through the machines, in a fine show of disdain for the bourgeois notion of paying your way. In their Utopia (if they’ve got that far) the trains will be free, or everyone will have a horse, or no one will want to travel, but will lie under trees smoking home-grown grass and complaining about their infected piercings.
It’s 10.30am and our feeder march is assembling outside the University of London Union in Malet Street, not far from the British Museum. It’s the radical wing of the demo – mostly students and anarchists, so it’s also likely to be the scruffiest set of today’s marchers. The thought takes me back to my short time at Oxford before rustication (a smart word for expulsion) in the Seventies. Then we were running a campaign for a Central Students Union (CSU), which the university perversely refused to stump up a few million for. Anyway, there were occupations and arrests, and in the middle of all this Lady Alexandra Trevor-Roper, wife of the historian, wondered aloud to a Daily Telegraph journalist whether all the people involved were really Oxford students. Her doubt was provoked, she said, by her observing that many were wearing “dirty jerseys”. From then on, added to the chanting questions of what did we want and when did we want it, was the query, “And what do we wear?” The answer, of course, was, “Dirty jerseys!” Laugh? Perhaps you had to be there.
But though many of the home-made placards are droll, there is nothing humorous in the chants of the loud-haileristas outside ULU. To a drumbeat they are yelling, “Tory scum, here we come!”, which is not really a promise of exemplary civil behaviour. In fact it’s about as aggressive a promise of ruckuses to come as you can imagine.
As we set off southwards most of the demonstrators seem to be nice kids really. I get talking to one student from Glasgow who has travelled down with his comrades on an overnight coach. And then five minutes later I nearly get into a fight. There is a group of sombre-looking middle-aged men in black, one of whom has a mask over his face. So I ask him why he’s wearing it and he gives me the finger. So I ask him again and his taller, Italian-looking companion tells me to eff off. So I ask him again and a scrotty little man of about 45 appears at my side and begins to jostle me. In fact, every time I ask the question yet another preposterous pensionable anarchist seems to appear to add a new swear word or to insinuate that there may be trouble ahead.
They remind me of some of the elderly ex-hooligans who still go to football matches and look belligerently at the opposing fans, desiring the fight, recalling its pleasures, but without quite the capacity any more to perform. And violence is exciting. On March 17, 1968, at Grosvenor Square, a barely teenaged me watched as a crowd – thwarted by the horses outside the American Embassy – turned on the Indonesian Embassy with the shout, “They kill communists too!” (they certainly did), and put out several of its windows. It was like a desert-booted version of a Bullingdon Club night out, except that, next day, the newspapers carried a front-page photograph of a protester’s crepe sole heading for a policeman’s face.
Some time later, having left the main march (we’ll go back to it in a bit) I find myself beside a paint-spattered police line outside Topshop. Topshop is a big target of a group called UK Uncut, which uses direct action to protest against perfectly legal but morally questionable tax minimisation practices. In this case the black-clad anarchists are piggybacking the campaigners and carrying out their own assault. Every time the police, in riot helmets, move anywhere even in small numbers, there are dozens of phones and digital cameras trained on them by clucking demonstrators.
Back in the day we had a more robust attitude towards policing. Essentially, if we were doing anything that we weren’t supposed to be doing – such as deviating from a route or trying to lock something off or shut something down – we expected the fuzz to do something to us. Once, at a demo outside South Africa House, I found myself pushed to the front of a pushing crowd. Unaccountably the policeman in front of me, his arms linked to those of his colleagues, began to kick my legs hard with his big boots. If I’d fallen we both might have been hurt, but it felt like his way of telling me that there was some price to be paid for all this. Now I suppose I’d take his number, photograph him, write an online column for The Guardian and insist on an investigation.
But we didn’t take pictures, and there was no comeback. The standing joke was that you’d get charged with whatever they did to you. If they simply carted you off to make up the numbers, you’d be charged with obstruction, as I was. And if they hit you, you’d face a charge for assaulting a police officer. In court you’d face a stipendiary magistrate who, until the Eighties, would automatically take the law’s word over yours.
Sometimes people would retaliate. I remember my mother, who’d had ponies as a girl in Worcestershire, remonstrating with someone who wanted to throw ball bearings under the hooves of charging police horses. All that was needed, she told him, was to take the beast’s bridle firmly and lead it away.
It was in Lewisham in 1977 that I began to feel some sympathy for the coppers. It was a year when the National Front felt strong enough to bring their marches through areas with large black populations, and it was the job of the police to escort them. A large and very angry counter-demonstration assembled and showered the fascists with bricks, sticks and bottles, and I saw many policemen hit and bloodied.
There is a semi-myth believed by many who take part in violent or illegal protest, which is that it is often effective. I say “semi-myth” because sometimes it appears true. At the end of 1969 a Young Liberal called Peter Hain led a campaign to stop the South African cricket tour of 1970 from going ahead. He was right – it was an affront that an all-white team should play official Test matches in England. The tactic used was to disrupt that winter’s rugby matches played by the Springboks. And we did disrupt them, getting on the pitch at Twickenham and elsewhere. The 1970 tour was cancelled.
But then the legend ran ahead of the reality. It became the violent picket at the coke depot in Saltley that started the process that brought down the Heath Government; it was the poll tax riots that finally got Maggie out. And it will be student riots that force the coalition to abandon its whole economic policy.
On the March 26 demonstration this psychology is represented by the number of placards and slogans comparing this protest with the Arab Spring. “We will fight, we will win, Tunis, Cairo…” Suggests one. “Be an Egyptian!” requests another.
Oddly, the most outwardly confident of the slogan-makers are also the most politically isolated. Here, as ever, are the weirdly parasitic left groupuscules who always hang around other people’s nice demos, telling them what they ought to be thinking and trying to sell them copies of Workers Hammer. “General Strike Now to Bring the Tories Down!” is their call now, as it has ever been, though even Socialist Albania is, alas, no more. Never mind, there’s always the Bolivarian Revolution of Comrade President Chávez of Venezuela.
Now I’m outside Bhs in Oxford Street, looking at a sit-down protest from 20 or so members of UK Uncut. They’ve just been inside, and now are holding a little event before being tweeted off to some other place (which subsequently turns out to be Fortnum & Mason). Later in the week the Treasury Select Committee will launch an inquiry into corporate tax avoidance, and one senior Tory figure tells me that he privately agrees with their targeting of Sir Philip Green.
But right here and right now their innovative tactics have turned to tedious self-righteousness, as a woman who could be the twin of Neil from The Young Ones reads out a long series of one-line statements purporting to come from the Establishment. “They tell you that the only answer is war!” she intones, and the followers amen with, “Don’t believe them!”
The thing is, it’s only for their benefit. No shoppers are watching and not even a 24-hour news station will be beguiled by such tedium. And there’s also the question of whether they have ruined the big march by allowing space for the anarchists to operate. A week or so later Brighton UK Uncut describes the mini-riots as “the collective creative act of the people striving to redefine the status quo through shared emotional experience”. If you read that out loud, it’s the same sound someone makes when they disappear up their own rectum.
And here’s the problem. After a while the vanguardist either turns to mainstream politics, or becomes a vainglorious, self-reiterating windbag, to be given an annual outing on Question Time or a regular slot in the London Review of Books.
Earlier, in the mainstream march, the mood was almost joyful. People who thought they were something of a minority in village, town and workplace, suddenly found thousands there like themselves. I spoke to teachers from Derbyshire and council workers from Leicester and briefly marched with firefighters from Hampshire. Looked at from any small height, you would see the demonstration stretch back down long, wide streets – banners waving in colour-coordinated blocs, like a battle scene from a Kurosawa movie. Teachers in purple, Unison in blue, firefighters in flamey orange, Greens in surprise-me-not green. Here and there you’d find a theatrical object, such as giant inflatable scissors or a huge balloon. The banner of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapists waved beside the route, next to a man in an alarmingly revealing one-piece latex suit in sky blue.
There were a lot of ordinary people here, mostly left of centre, some with a small picture of what they were trying to save in their minds, others with bigger political objectives. Some were there because they were union folk, some because they just felt that they had to do something, make a statement, take a stand, because if they didn’t, who would? The biggest dangers here came from the old chap with a hearing aid waving his long-stocked placard in arcs like the blade from The Pit and the Pendulum. As he tired the long scything sweeps got closer to the heads of those in front of him and behind.
It felt warm and familiar to me, even after all this time. The kinetics were the same, jamming up and slowing down in narrow roads and then in wider streets stretching out and going briskly. Now I found myself in front of this banner, now behind it. The faces were the same – still almost entirely white.
Near Downing Street someone hugged me from behind. It was my brother-in-law, and behind him was my beloved sister. How we had found each other in this throng of 250,000 people was inexplicable. They went off to find a café, knowing they could rejoin this huge gathering. Earlier, near the Embankment, a middle-aged woman had sprinted up to me.
“I just wanted you to know,” she told me, “that it’s wonderful to see you here.”
She must have recognised me and thought, maybe, I was returning to the tribe. Welcome home, son. You’ve been away a long time. And now we’re all together again, on the march.
It was a great day. But it’s the same as being an atheist at a carol concert. I love the tunes, I am among good people and I badly want to join in. But I just don’t believe the words.
A confession: I used to read Marxism Today ? Telegraph Blogs
The Daily TelegraphKatharine Birbalsingh
Katharine Birbalsingh is the teacher who exposed the failings of the comprehensive school system at the Conservative Party conference last year. Katharine has been teaching in inner London for over a decade and plans to set up a Free School in south London to help to serve underprivileged children. Her book, To Miss with Love, is out now. Follow @Miss_Snuffy on Twitter to see what Katharine's doing now. Katharine's personal website is www.katharinebirbalsingh.com (http://www.katharinebirbalsingh.com).
A confession: I used to read Marxism Today
By Katharine Birbalsingh Politics Last updated: April 6th, 2011
149 Comments Comment on this article
Oxford revisited (Photo: Reuters)
Oxford revisited (Photo: Reuters)
I’m sitting on the panel with a couple of other writers at The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival. It feels odd, being at the age I am now… having been 19 years old just the other day, wandering around Christchurch meadows. The great Ann Leslie is chairing. She is so funny. Later she tells me how she went recently to inquire about botox and the doctor told her that, frankly, it was just too late! We are discussing selfishness. Has capitalism made us more selfish? How can we foster compassion and kindness in our communities? I’m there, of course, to question the idea that capitalism is the root of all evil, and maybe it has something to do with how we are teaching our children at school instead.
Standing up at the podium, I am slightly terrified, as I’m not entirely sure of the audience. Are they friend or foe? Having been on a panel next to John D’Abbro (Jamie’s dream Head on Jamie’s Dream School) at the RSA (Royal Society of Arts) last week, I am worried about what might be in store.
I find that I am agreeing with much of what my writer colleagues are saying. I agree until one of them explains that on the back of the idea that capitalism is inherently selfish, where one works all of the time in order to earn money, where women leave the home in order to further their careers and forget to love their children, our selfishness will only be encouraged by all of the cuts that are taking place.
Lefties always believe that the only way to do good is through the state. If one wishes to live a selfless life, one becomes a doctor, nurse, teacher or social worker. One works for the state and therefore for others, instead of working in industry and trying to earn a fortune for oneself. I too had always believed exactly this.
I shake my head. “But no, no, don’t you see… that’s the whole point of the Big Society! It stands in opposition to the Big State! When the state does everything for you, then there is no need for you to try to help people because you expect the state will do it instead.” I sigh. “I see it all of the time in school. Why should I pick it up? The cleaner will do that! Look after my textbook? You can just give me another one! And so on.”
I can see some people squirming in their seats, but I continue. “The idea as I see it, is that the Big Society should reduce the size of the Big State so that people have to take responsibility for themselves and their communities. A smaller state won’t encourage selfishness. It will force people to look after each other!”
I suppose the question is whether or not it will. Perhaps we’ll just leave each other to die on street. The irony is that while this other writer argues that we are not inherently selfish, that Dawkins was wrong, that it is our modern society that makes us this way, in fact it is because of a fundamental belief in our inherent selfishness that we insist on a Big State looking after people, because we know that we are too selfish to do it ourselves.
I look to the audience. “The thing is that there are good people everywhere, you see. In the last few months, not having known many Conservatives before, I’ve met quite a few. And I’ve found that some of them do good by earning lots of money in banking or law and then use it to build schools in Africa, or by spending their weekends in soup kitchens. I never knew that about Conservatives before.”
Ann Leslie laughs. “What, you mean you were surprised to find that we didn’t all have horns sticking out of our heads?” She places her fingers on her temples.
I smile. “Well… yes!”
The audience laughs and I know that whether Left or Right, I am among friends, back in Oxford, where I used to read Marxism Today, and where now, a lifetime on, I’m arguing in favour of what the Conservative Party has to offer.
The Guardian
A new answer to welfare must be found – socialism | Peter Thompson (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/mar/31/new-answer-welfare-socialism?INTCMP=SRCH)
Karl Marx, part 1: Religion, the wrong answer to the right question | Peter Thompson (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/apr/04/karl-marx-religion?INTCMP=SRCH)
Karl Marx, part 2: How Marxism came to dominate socialist thinking | Peter Thompson (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/apr/11/marx-engels-science-marxism?INTCMP=SRCH)
The Poverty of Popper (http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2011/04/poverty-of-popper.html)