“Friends, first of all demonstrations are very important.
They are part of our political process and I say thank you to each and every
one of us that has come here today, to say it is possible to have a different
world.”
These are the words of Jeremy Corbyn, prospective Labour
leader and MP for Islington North. As crowd pleasing as they are, I couldn’t
help but feel, as I stood amongst the quarter of a million other demonstrators
in parliament square on the 20th of June, that these words were not
enough.
I saw men and women painted head to toe linked by their fingertips
as they danced. Bric a brac marching bands backed their light footed sways, to
and fro, and smoke filled the air. The streets of London danced to the sounds of
youthful summertime contentedness. And as spirit rousing as this was both my
mother and I both felt that the demonstration needed something to grab government’s
attention. My mum reminded me that, “the poll tax riots were nothing like this.
These people aren’t angry.” She said. She was right, and Londoners, those not
taking part in the march, who sat in the windows of eatery’s and coffee houses
that lined the route from The Bank of England to Parliament Square, saw the
marchers as festooned happy go lucky mobs. “Look at em babe, they’re just a
bunch of hippies avin’ a laugh.” I overheard this as I queued for the toilet at
McDonald’s and felt deflated for the marchers, as if I wasn’t one of them.
The poll tax riots saw 113 people get injured, 45 of those
were police, by fist, by brick, by flying bottle. As fires burned and the
hordes of angry Britons skirmished, the TV crews and more importantly the
Government watched. The poll tax was a regressive tax and sources inside
cabinet, as the record suggests, were imploring the PM’s office even prior to
the strikes to repeal the evidently unpopular legislation. After the riots and
the destruction, the poll tax had to go and so did Margaret Thatcher who had
been left weaker as a consequence.
The People’s Assembly Against Austerity march certainly
wasn’t violent and although a recent research initiative from Columbia University
in the United States shows there is some evidence to suggest, that peaceful
protest can be equally as successful as its violent counterpart, previous
large-scale demonstrations in this country have rarely effected any kind of
change unless some violence or civil disobedience was employed. The closest
that the June 20th March came to civil disobedience was a small campfire,
which was doused by officers in an inept fashion and posted on you tube in an
attempt to satirise the police force. Not quite the exhibition of anger that I
or my mother had expected. The People’s Assembly Against Austerity had drawn
together a very civilised bunch
The Initiative for Policy Dialogue released a working paper
in 2013. It’s primary claim was that, of
the 843 worldwide demonstrations analysed, some 37% resulted in some kind of
achievement. The working paper divided the 843 events into subcategories based
on particular grievance/demand of the protestors. Those demonstrations
surrounding the general economic subsistence of the aggrieved only represented
a third of all positive achievements and the less specific grievances/demands
yielded even less positive results globally.
The Occupy movements are recent examples of large
non-violent protest but most notably they were unsuccessful, despite the
extreme lengths participants were willing to go to in camping outside St Pauls
Cathedral and the Houses of Parliament for prolonged periods of time, due to
their inability to focus their message. As with Occupy, the People’s Assembly
Against Austerity seem equally unfocused despite their clear opposition to cuts.