How Can UK Protesters Make Any Difference at All in 2014?

Photo by Muir Vidler, graphic work by Sam Taylor

Last month, the Economist Intelligence Unit looked at the year ahead and attempted to calculate the potential risk of social unrest in 150 countries around the world. Of the countries they examined, 65 – some 43 percent – were deemed to be at either "high" or "very high" risk of social instability in 2014. Which means that if you made a heatmap of global rage, our planet would look like a big angry, red ball floating in space.

It probably won’t shock you to hear that the Middle East, North Africa, the Balkans and many countries within the former Soviet Union were well represented in the EIU's list – these places have had the upper echelons of the league table sewn up for years now. However, also deemed likely to see unrest were Brazil and Turkey, which experienced large, sustained and unanticipated protest movements in 2013. Those mass demonstrations left observers scratching their heads – weren’t the Turks and the Brazilians supposed to prove the theory that fast-growing economies placate populations into not running around throwing Molotovs at things? Despite burgeoning middle-classes, both saw their streets turned into tear gas-strewn battlefields. The lesson elites elsewhere will draw from the tumult is that small, seemingly innocuous issues – the price of a bus ticket in Rio, for example – can very quickly become Trojan horses for a host of other grievances. Throughout the world in 2013 – in countries both rich and poor – it was trust in political institutions, a valuable commodity when regimes wish to govern by consent, that was at an all-time low.

What with Planet Earth being a tinder box of political disaffection, it's interesting that 2014 is set to be the biggest ever year for electoral democracy – with over 40 percent of the world preparing to hold elections of some kind. That includes Brazil and Indonesia – two of those large, high-growth and potentially restive economies on the EIU’s list.

Protesters behind a barricade in the Ukraine in December (photo by Henry Langston)

Elections – especially when all sides don't have faith in their fairness (remember: that’s fucking loads of them) – frequently provide the trigger for protests over corruption. It was a perception of rigged elections that catalysed the Rose (Georgia), Tulip (Kyrgyzstan) and Orange (Ukraine) “revolutions” at the beginning of the last decade, as well as the more recent “Green Revolution” in Iran in 2009 and anti-Putin protests in Russia three years later. And then there's the unfathomable flaming dogshit on the doorstep of democracy that is the current situation in Bangladesh. Try bending your head round that one if you can. Anyway, the point is that a year that seems like it should be defined by elections could easily come to be defined by the streets of major cities being filled with irate protesters.

The background music to all this, of course, remains the global financial crisis of 2008-9. Doubts linger among governments as to whether they’ve really fixed things or merely patched plasters onto their badly wounded economies. In developed economies, the financial crash and the austerity imposed as a countermeasure have led to a decline in living standards. That hasn’t happened in developing economies yet, but it won’t take much to ignite a spark – and a repeat of the food inflation seen in 2008-9 that tends to generate protest almost anywhere on Earth.

Looking to this drizzly corner of the planet, the environment surrounding extra-parliamentary politics is looking bleak. In September last year, 286 anti-fascist protesters were arrested in Whitechapel as they opposed an EDL march that had intended to pass through Tower Hamlets. At the time of writing, two are still waiting to be charged (the others have had their charges dropped). On the day, arrestees were taken to custody suites across the capital on London buses requisitioned by the Met. A Freedom of Information Request made shortly afterwards revealed that a chief inspector had in fact booked these buses ten days in advance.

The fact that arrests on such a large scale were obviously pre-planned suggests that this was an act of political policing. Rather than just wanting to ensure that pensioners could get the bus home from Sainsbury's without catching a brick in the face, it seems fair to suggest that the police wanted to dissuade people from the idea of protesting altogether. Academic Nina Power agrees: “When they are making these arrests, it isn't about getting prosecutions but about showing who's in charge… as well as putting activists out of action through ridiculous bail conditions for charges that are never made.” Power says that these bail conditions – often imposed for long and indefinite time periods – are intended to "explicitly prohibit people from attending any protest" until whenever the authorities deem it convenient.

Anti-fascist protesters in Tower Hamlets in September (photo by Henry Langston)

The arrests at Tower Hamlets should be viewed within a wider context that includes the 182 arrests on the eve of the 2012 London Olympics and 58 arrests at a counter-demonstration in Whitehall against the BNP in June 2013. In both instances barely any charges were brought and arrestees were once again taken into custody on public buses. It’s almost enough to make you wonder if the Met’s pension fund is tied up in bus company shares, but more than anything it seems to further back up what Nina told me – that the arrests were premeditated and born from political intent.

While the policing in 2013 largely disrespected the rights of people to gather in large groups to vent in public, you have to wonder how long the cops can keep it up. Trust in public institutions is in crisis and while the police aren’t as hated as bankers or politicians, they’re not immune. Over the last 18 months, the scale of police wrongdoing at Hillsborough – combined with the events surrounding Andrew Mitchell and "Plebgate" – have led even conservative commentators, such as Peter Osborne, to write that the police “lie and cheat”. What was already known to anyone who has been on a protest in the last few years – that you can’t trust a copper – is now becoming “common knowledge”, even among people who write for the Telegraph. If the police are not trusted by the general public or the right-wing press, then how far they can take the tactics of “total policing” becomes questionable. The less public support the police have, the less they can get away with, and the more each swing of a baton validates the claims of anti-police activists.

An Anonymous protest in London in November 2013 (photo by Jake Lewis)

A series of Cops Off Campus demos organised by students in London last December can tell us a lot in this respect. The first one – organised over a month in advance and, true to student type, through Tumblr – resulted in 39 arrests and photographs of student blood spilled on the pavement. This approach to policing prompted a second, even larger protest the following week, with 3,000 turning up to vent their anger at the police who cleverly decided not to attend, in front of a now-interested national media. Not that the presence of TV cameras and tabloid snappers could provide any more coverage than the internet as a mass entity. YouTube footage, tweets, Facebook status updates and Instagram posts came together to form a solid body of evidence of the students' efforts, suggesting that these protests – horizontally-organised and broadcast over social media – could be a growing trend in the UK in 2014. And a declining trust in public order policing could prove a volatile mixer – the trigger for the 2011 August riots was the alleged "execution" of Mark Duggan by a CO19 police marksman. I guess this week’s decision that it was a “lawful killing”, despite the fact that Duggan was unarmed by the time he was shot, won’t do much to restore faith in the police.

Protests like the second "Cops Off Campus" one or the Tottenham riot on the 6th of August 2011 were spontaneous and visceral displays of public contempt, rather than choreographed performances designed to appeal to policymakers. That type of protest can grow quickly and almost out of nowhere, but they’re kind of erratic and don’t make any concrete demands as people shuffle off home at the end having “done” their protest, even if nothing was really achieved other than heavy bruising, a few burnt bins and the shaking of an angry fist at some poorly defined authority.

For evidence of protests that really have their rhetorical shit together, look to those that emerge through syndicalist-style labour organising – such as the 3 Cosas (or "three causes") Campaign. Outsourced Latin-American cleaners at the University of London have already been successful in winning two of their "Cosas" – the right to pay when they're sick or on holiday ­– and are now holding out for the third (pensions). Here, smart use of new media – such as a crowd-sourced strike fund for the 3 Cosas campaign – along with its own video, proved a major factor in raising a £6,000 strike fund for workers.

“Raising the £6,000 for a local workers' dispute over such a short period of time – and within the context of a labour movement that rarely offers strike fund support at all – is exceptional," Daniel Cooper, vice-president of the University of London Union, told me. "Today’s unions can learn a lot from what we did and how we did it.”

Anti-capitalists make their demands in October 2012 (photo by Henry Langston)

What made the campaign so powerful was that slick digital media was combined with what really matters – the hard work of organising an independent union of over 120 members in an effective and democratic way. This took years of meetings and has created the kinds of thick ties between students, support and teaching staff that you simply don't get by "Liking" someone's zinger of a George Osborne meme on Facebook. I know that over the last few years certain commentators have been getting really excited about "Twitter revolutions" but in 2014, maybe protesters should talk to each other more in real life – I know that seems crazy; I’m just putting it out there.

Compare the relative success of the 3 Cosas campaign to the similar but far less successful UCL “campaign against outsourcing”, where 94 of UCL's lowest-paid workers were outsourced with barely a whimper of real resistance. That was not because those affected didn't care. The logic of “negotiation over organisation” – common throughout much of the trade union movement – triumphed, leading to the campaign's failure. As Sarah Gilbert, one activist involved, told me: "Outsourcing at UCL was a classic case of unions saying they wanted to campaign against outsourcing but in the ‘right way’… ultimately however, that was just a delaying tactic with them later presenting the deal as the best one possible."

These kinds of outcomes emerge from a culture where, despite decades of evidence to the contrary, representatives think power comes from negotiation and getting the "best deal possible" – rather than engaging memberships, providing leadership and building power in the only way successful unions ever have: mass, collective action. Progress made with the 3 Cosas campaign, Occupy Sussex and elsewhere show there is another way of doing things. Those wishing to organise around job insecurity, low-pay and zero hours – from unionised Curzon cinema workers to cleaners at the Royal Opera House – could draw inspiration from workers taking things into their own hands, rather than waiting around for trade union bureaucrats or party leaders to step in and save the day.

Workers protest against UKBA "fishing raids" in London's Chinatown in October 2013 (photo by Simon Childs)

Should there prove to be a “large-scale version of an Occupy Wall Street-type movement” by the end of 2014 – as the consultancy Gartner predicts – lessons will surely have been learned since 2011. Perhaps the biggest of the Occupy movement's failures back then was the failure to make specific demands. As Jason Hickel has written, “Occupy activists fell in love with their own horizontalism and fetishised physical occupation as a revolutionary tactic. In the process, they ignored generations of accumulated wisdom about how to mobilise successful social movements. Even to the point of refusing to isolate and organise around specific demands. As a result… poor and working-class Americans lost faith in Occupy’s ability to affect the change that people so desperately needed.” So, another tip for 2014 – spending the winter shivering in a tent isn’t as terrifying to the £100k-a-year bankers stepping over your guy ropes as you might think.

If you are going to occupy something, maybe make some demands – that way, if they get met, you can go home and have a shower. As a start: a very large increase in the minimum wage; the abolition of student fees and debt and a maximum working week of 21 hours with automation of what were old jobs meaning less work for all, rather than redundancies and higher profits for the few. Why not throw in cheaper energy, travel and food while we're at it, as well as a fundamental redistribution of wealth and free housing. Sounds good, right?

Okay, so these demands are pretty radical and they’re not going to be won overnight. But at least they are specific and another bonus is that they look forward to a bright future rather than nostalgically back to a utopian past that probably wasn’t all that great anyway. As Paul Mason, culture and digital editor at Channel 4 News, told me, "For about 30 years, ‘protest’ in the UK was characterised as people resisting modernity: resisting globalisation, marketisation, harking back to days of social solidarity. Now, wherever they break out, the protests seem more modern than those they're aimed at. We're looking at a generation that is trying to shape modernity and saying: 'It's the 1 percent – with their attachment to luxury, high carbon and corrupt banking practices – who are beginning to look as dated as the medallion man of the 1970s."

An anti-fascist in Tower Hamlets in September 2013 (photo by Henry Langston)

Broad, but radical, frames and demands could well start emerging in 2014 – on housing, energy, food and transport bills. They might actually have public support, too – a recent survey commissioned by Class indicated that on these issues the public is not only to the left of the government or the Labour Party, but to the left of any platform advocated by a mainstream party in the UK in decades.

For the first time in a generation in the UK, it is protesters who look modern and those in power who look dated. Demands made in 2014 need to accentuate that and learn from the mistakes of Occupy in 2011. It's not just elites that now look anachronistic but also the “official” channels of dissent. Think of how big trade union marches inevitably hark back to those of yore and how redundant they feel. At the micro-level, this means that syndicalist workplace organising is growing, and proving more successful than the approaches of larger incumbent unions, while at the macro-level political parties – even nominally “progressive” ones – will, for now, remain utterly incapable of offering a modernity that is an improvement upon, or even just at odds with what is currently on offer.

Follow Aaron on Twitter: @AaronBastani

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