Cuts protests: where is the anger now?

Cuts protests last winter prompted one police chief to warn of a new era of political unrest. But months later, the great British revolt went quiet. Will a teachers’ strike reignite the unrest? Just off a stairwell at the University of London Union, last winter one of the nerve centres of the student anti-cuts protests, there is a small, locked room. “Free Education For All,” read the old placards piled carelessly on a windowsill. “Protest/Strike/Occupy.” Stacked more neatly on the floor, like firewood, are hundreds of unused placard handles. Has the anti-cuts movement just been biding its time in recent months, while the coalition’s poll ratings have steadied and mass protests have almost ceased? Or has a certain momentum been lost? This Thursday’s planned strikes, the first big, overtly political ones since the coalition took office more than a year ago, should clarify the state of play somewhat. But what is already obvious, though not much remarked on, is that opposition to the government’s radical policies – policies for which it has provocatively little electoral mandate – has not developed in the ferocious way many people thought it would. Are most Britons simply not that angry with the coalition? Or is it that modern political anger has its limits? Seven months ago, the students who had just stormed the roof of Conservative party headquarters sent a text to journalists. “We are against all cuts,” the occupiers announced. “This is only the beginning.” Strikingly, within hours a government source described the disorder in London that day in exactly the same terms: “This is just the beginning. This is the first of a series of protests by various sections of society against what we are now doing. This sets the benchmark for other protests.” A fortnight on, after another turbulent student march, it was the turn of the head of the Metropolitan police, Sir Paul Stephenson, to forecast “disorder on the streets” as Britain entered a “new period” of political ferment. Through the winter and into the early spring, evidence of this apparent change kept coming: campus occupations on a scale not seen since the 1970s; the involvement of schoolchildren , and of young Britons of all classes, on the student marches; the massive all-ages anti-cuts demonstration in London in March; even the attack during the December student march on a Rolls-Royce containing a startled Prince Charles and Camilla – a world-turned-upside-down moment worthy of a revolutionary propaganda film. “In November and December there was this euphoria of dissent,” says Mark Fisher, a leftwing blogger and academic. “It made you think a new thing was coming.” In March, the radical publisher Verso rush-released a book, Springtime: The New Student Rebellions , on the unrest in Britain, the rest of Europe and the Arab world. “There is a new mood in the air,” declared the introduction. At Verso’s 40th anniversary party in London in November, intense-looking participants from ongoing student occupations met excited veterans of the legendary youth insurrections of the 60s. But then the great British revolt went a bit quiet. A plan to turn Trafalgar Square in London into a centre of resistance like Tahrir Square in Egypt came to nothing. The campus occupations ended. At the May local elections, the Liberal Democrats were mauled but the Conservatives did much better than expected. The wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton in April suggested that much of austerity Britain was still keener to gawp at rather than attack luxurious royal vehicles. Meanwhile, the spring’s unusual glut of sun and bank holidays and huge non-cuts-related foreign news stories also helped change the British political atmosphere. Just at the moment the long-dreaded cuts began to take effect, with the start of the current financial year, they almost disappeared from the front pages for the first time in many months. “It’s not that the anger has gone away, but without the constant flashpoints provided by the student protests, it feels more dissipated,” says Fisher. Owen Jones, another well-connected young leftwing writer, says: “The danger is just to have one-day [actions], almost to release a bit of anger, make the point, do some media-friendly protest-as-theatre, then go home – with no sense of where the protests go next.” University College London had the winter’s most high-profile student occupation . The grand square room the students held for a fortnight – talking to journalists, hosting sympathetic academics and celebrities, and turning the walls, according to an admiring London Review of Books article, into “a sort of slogan competition” – now looks as if the occupation never happened. The walls are slogan-free and spotless. The chairs are back in rows for the room’s usual round of exams and dinners and conferences. Outside in the main quadrangle, the occupation’s banners are gone, and students wander about in graduation gowns: non-political life goes on. Since January, pollsters have noticed this lull. “We expected to see more anger,” says Tomasz Mludzinski of Ipsos Mori. “The net satisfaction ratings for the government are holding up pretty well.” In the 70s Edward Heath, a more moderate Tory prime minister than David Cameron, infamously had ink thrown at him and a cigarette stubbed out on his neck by enraged voters. During Margaret Thatcher’s premiership in the 80s, Morrissey and Elvis Costello wrote songs longing for her death, Margaret on the Guillotine and Tramp the Dirt Down (” . . . when they finally put you in the ground/I’ll stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down”). Heath and Thatcher’s modest backgrounds, and Thatcher’s gender, made some people readier to hate them. Cameron’s old-fashioned male ruling-class aura, depressingly, prompts more deference and acceptance. In recent months, the double-digit leads Labour sometimes enjoyed over the Tories in the winter have disappeared, to be replaced by a flimsier advantage. The Conservatives’ ratings remain remarkably steady, at around the 36% they won in the general election. The proportion of voters worried about losing their jobs or being directly hurt by the cuts is, according to YouGov, slightly smaller now than it was in January. “We’ve had at least 18 months of everyone telling us, ‘It’s going to be hard,’” says Lawrence Janta-Lipinski of YouGov. “There’s been some very good perception management by the government.” Cameron, famously, used to work in PR. Others, too, have had things to gain from issuing apocalyptic forecasts: police chiefs shielding their budgets from the cuts; unions wanting to show their continuing political relevance; newer anti-cuts groups wanting attention; and a media hungry, as ever, for national crises. Meanwhile, Cameron’s U-turns – starkly different from Thatcher’s behaviour in office – have made his government’s policies look like bargaining positions rather than actual ambitions. Political anger needs a focus, and the coalition presents a moving target. Polls also show voters deeply split over who is responsible for the cuts and the feeble economy: besides the coalition, they blame the bankers, Gordon Brown’s government and the global economy. The parliamentary expenses scandal has also cast a long shadow, spreading a paralysing disillusionment with politics in general, evident in the poor performances of all three main parties in the 2010 election. Ed Miliband’s time as Labour leader has done little, so far , to unite and energise the coalition’s enemies. But his frustrating silences and missed open goals in the Commons are only part of a bigger problem. As a political vehicle and way of thinking, the British left has been losing ground for three decades. Even the fiery Mark Serwotka , head of the Public and Commercial Services Union and one of the instigators of Thursday’s strikes, conceded in this paper last December : “The union movement today is different from that of the early 1980s – the last time we faced such an attack on the public sector. Membership is barely half what it was, and anti-union laws constrain us.” Labour local authorities, too, lack the legal loopholes – and the political confidence – that enabled Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council to act as a rallying point against Conservative policies in the 80s. Instead, with expressions of regret, and fierce but usually short-lived protests outside their council chambers, current Labour authorities have voted the government’s cuts through. In 2009, shortly after the financial crisis, Fisher published Capitalist Realism , a punchy but dispiriting book about the collective gloom created by a malfunctioning market economy and a shrinking left. Across the west, he wrote, there is a “widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative”. A related sense of resignation underlies public attitudes to the cuts: seen as “unfair” by a two-to-one margin in all YouGov’s recent polls, but also seen as “necessary” by the same margin. The sociologist Richard Sennett produces a good metaphor for the dread and passivity that has frequently been the British national mood since the general election: “It’s the snail pulling into its shell.” Thirty years ago next month, another economic slump and austerity government helped provoke Toxteth in Liverpool into the fiercest of the many riots of the Thatcher era. Toxteth is still poor: most of its eerily half-empty landscape of huge, often derelict Victorian properties, waste ground and boxy council estates is in the most deprived 1% of neighbourhoods in the country. The area remains profoundly alienated from the Conservatives, without a Liverpool MP since 1979. But residents seem more resigned than in the 80s. “The north ‑always gets hit worst by cuts,” says a pensioner in one of the few remaining shops, who has been in Toxteth since the 40s. “People are angry. But they’re really scared of losing their homes, their jobs.” A newsagent in the street where the 1981 riot started says: “This government can’t manage a thing. But when I get into debt, I blame myself first, the government second.” As we talk, a stream of customers ask him the prices of the cheapest sweets and sugary drinks: modern British escapism in action. “In the 80s, you could get 100,000 people on the streets in Liverpool against the Tories,” says Tony Nelson, a longstanding Liverpool trade union and community activist. “Those days are gone. People are watching Jeremy Kyle on TV all day. There is anger among the unemployed, but community groups like us, we’re keeping a lid on it for now.” But, he goes on: “The government needs to be very careful: they’re thinking of taking funds away from the community groups. People in this city have always had a disrespect for authority. If there’s one place where something kicks off, it’ll be here.” There are two ways that street unrest can badly damage a government. One is for the government to appear to have lost control, as with Heath and the miners’ strikes of the 70s, which led to power cuts and the police being swamped by mass pickets. The other is for protests to crystallise a wider dissatisfaction, as with the poll tax march and riot of 1990, which showed how out of touch the Thatcher government had become. In other circumstances, anger can fizzle out – or even backfire. The 1981 inner-city riots , the 1984-85 miner’s strike , and the immense 2003 anti-Iraq war march all temporarily shook governments, but left them even more publicly determined not to change course. In each case, they won a general election not long afterwards. So far for the coalition, the protests have been awkward rather than fatal. But it is more vulnerable than most recent governments. There is potential for splits both between and inside the coalition parties in response to well-organised opposition. The government’s many U-turns have made further campaigns against its policies likely. There is the economic situation: Britons are among the gloomiest of all westerners about their economy, according to Ipsos Mori. And there is the fact that austerity governments across the world are losing elections. In many ways the coalition, with its lack of a proper majority or mandate, and its faithful adherence to the free-market economics discredited by the financial crisis, resembles a cartoon character that has run off a cliff and, any moment, may feel the force of gravity. “After two years of this government, will the public be as forgiving? I don’t think so,” says Vidhya Alakeson of the Resolution Foundation , a thinktank which this year has been running focus groups of economically-stressed voters. She has found her interviewees “partly ignorant” about the impact the cuts will have on them, and “partly grateful to still be staying afloat” financially, for now, but also “a bit sad” at “losing out on options” they expected to have. After the seemingly endless boom of the Blair years, says Alakeson, “I don’t think those expectations have gone away.” And frustrated public expectations can be lethal for governments. Often, it is not until the second or third year that a British government’s poll ratings collapse. And Britain, like other rich democracies, is only just emerging from a long depoliticised era, dominated by the technocratic ideas explored in Adam Curtis’s recent BBC2 documentary series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace , and by what Fisher calls the “debate and comment” culture of cathartic but politically impotent radio phone-ins and internet forums. The anti-coalition actions so far have at least re-established the idea that protest can be meaningful, and even enjoyable. And just as the cuts are turning out not to be the overnight apocalypse many feared, but a quieter, more relentless erosion , so the protests may not hurt the government immediately, but eat away at its perceived legitimacy for years until its rickety structure suddenly folds. “There’s a huge, slow momentum building,” says a spokesman for the rising activist group UK Uncut, which is scheduled to meet unions for the first time to discuss coordinated anti-government protests. “So far, UK Uncut has done single-day actions, but it will definitely have to look again at that model. There is some way to go in getting the Daily Mail readers who are outside their local library protesting at cuts and, say, striking teachers to link up.” Yet few doubt that interesting times are coming. On Newsnight a fortnight ago, a British political veteran gave his little-reported view of the prospects for unrest in Europe and beyond. “There is enormous discontent among young people,” he said, “about longterm unemployment, about the extent of economic problems . . . We will see political movements for change – not just in the Arab world.” And as he concluded his remarks, the foreign secretary William Hague looked intriguingly calm. Protest Cuts and closures Students Tuition fees Public sector cuts Public services policy Public finance David Cameron Conservatives Liberal-Conservative coalition Andy Beckett guardian.co.uk

Posted by on June 28, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.