In defence of the riot
The UK is an angry place in 2021. It seems that those tweets, posts and stories in December that wanted to ‘forget about 2020’ and to simply start again in the new year were doomed. Of course these posts were partly expressions of exasperated humour: after all, who wouldn’t want to neatly reset the world at midnight, January 1st, after the horrors of the last year?
However, there’s no reset button for the pandemic and the social inequality it has so nakedly exposed. Neither is there such a thing for the murder of George Floyd and the critical conversations concerning racial inequality that it prompted, through the powerful BLM movement here in the UK as well as the US. Or for the climate crisis, which Extinction Rebellion kept powerfully on the agenda through effective and widespread protest in 2019. Or for LGBTQ+ discrimination, as the government has failed for yet another year to deliver on its promise to outlaw ‘conversion therapy’, whilst waiting times for an initial appointment at a gender clinic have climbed as high as 26 years in the capital.
It is unsurprising that all of these issues that dominated 2020 did not, in fact, disappear on the stroke of midnight. Instead, they continue to worsen. The alleged murder of Sarah Everard at the hands of a serving Metropolitan Police officer has encapsulated the too-often ignored and suppressed issue of misogynistic violence, and how that extends to the very institutions that are supposed to prevent it. It has catalysed discourse around the startling and outrageous fact that 97% of 18–24 year old women have experienced sexual harassment, and cast the spotlight on a police force with a dark history of targeted sexual violence toward vulnerable women and female police officers themselves.
Misogyny has quite rightly taken its place in the British sociopolitical conscience amongst other key issues that share long histories, which have been punctuated by continuing oppression and precious little positive change. These issues have forced society as a whole to confront the ugliness of its true form beneath the crumbling veneer of ‘Britishness’ both major political parties are committed to maintaining.
It is the entrenched, institutionalised nature of these issues’ hold on British society that has made them both so difficult to speak out against and so damning in their scale when individuals and movements have been able to do so.
If this is what lies beneath the facade, what allows us to see behind it? The answer is simple: protest.
Protest has powerfully disrupted the status quo and exposed those parts of society both our governments and selves would rather not see, not just in recent years but throughout history. It is protest that both articulated the ‘horrors’ of 2020 and also stops us cowering behind fantasies of a reset button. It rightfully robs us of the naivety of thinking that things will ‘sort themselves out’, and forces us to engage in self-reflection and collective mobilisation toward the goal of building a better, more compassionate, and understanding society.
Protest is by its very nature disruptive. It is emotional, fuelled by an intense feeling of injustice and the need to stand in solidarity against the immense weight of the establishment. It is the crucible of radicalism, and the purest expression of pressure for change.
It can be peaceful; it can also be violent. Just as it can be successful, or it can fail to affect change. These are characteristics which some would say are entirely decided by protestors, most would argue are decided by protestors and the establishment against which they take a stand, and too few argue are essentially decided on by the establishment entirely.
The establishment is a concept that is beyond cliche but it comprises in its basic form a unit made up of those individuals, organisations and institutions that benefit from maintaining the status quo. Since protest is in its purest form opposed to the status quo, it is both the product of, and a threat to, those who have had a hand in creating it and upholding it.
Its make-up changes over time, but for as long as there is governance, there will be an establishment. Protest represents the bedrock on which checks and balances on this entity are built, and the two are locked in continual but vitally important opposition. This inherent conflict is a natural product of politics, and the engine which drives its restless existence.
These two polarised entities share a number of key attributes. They both look outwardly to amass support, are based on an idealised vision of ‘how things should be’, and contain an inherent potential for violence. However the two differ substantially in how these attributes are expressed.
The establishment derives its support from continuity, acclimatising the population to the status quo through mass media, in order to set the landscape through which protest must navigate. Protest derives its support from breaking through that landscape, using the free press, social media, culture and even the laws produced by the establishment itself to express opposition, raise awareness and mount resistance.
Whilst both are based on visions of how the world should be, the establishment’s existence is its vision, and it encapsulates that vision both in its true form and through the lens of mass media. The protest is not granted the same luxury: it lives or dies on the altar of its vision. A protest that defines itself in opposition alone seldom brings about the same degree of change that one based on a proposition can. Protests that focus on opposition are an effective tool in some regards, but can too often fail to engage underlying issues. Those that can surmount the difficult task of formulating and articulating a propositional vision are better equipped to effect meaningful change. It is no coincidence that two such movements, BLM and XR, have become bywords across the establishment for extremism.
Finally, both contain the potential for violence but critically differ in how this is expressed. The establishment has access to the police and the overt violence of a baton, but also the Treasury and the covert violence of austerity. The means of state violence are diverse, and through their institutionalisation they are rendered invisible to those who accept these institutions. Furthermore, those that oppose such violence face the double-edged sword of fighting both the violence itself and the institutions that act to obscure its severity. Contrast this with protest, where the situation is a binary between passivity and overt violence. Protesters are victims of wide-ranging, persistent and complex violence which has driven them to take a stand. Yet they are presented with only two means of response, knowing full well that should they engage in violence, they lack the institutional means to normalise and obscure their actions, and as a result are vulnerable to being discounted on account of the anti-social nature of their protest.
This last point is critical to what this essay will look to address: the sociopolitical stigma of the riot. History is littered with rioting: the 2011 riots, the Brixton riots, the Stonewall riots, the Suffragette riots, the Chartist riots and so on. Rioting is a fixture of political existence as the most concentrated form of protest, and it is in part shaped by the factors given above, but this is far from the whole story.
Yet a curious tendency exists whereby the more time has elapsed, the more understanding we are of the rioters. The riots of 2011 still loom large in racial prejudices, policing attitudes and law & order politics, and would be as widely denounced by elected politicians now as they were then. However look at the Stonewall riots and there is at least more of an understanding of the role which rioting had in shaping the subsequent course of LGBTQ+ rights campaigning. Or look at the suffragettes, whose violence is now more commonly understood within the context of their attempts to break free from centuries of established submission. The Chartists? The establishment is the bad guy even in the textbooks.
If history is teaching us that riots are both a product of extreme social oppression, and the most crystallised expression of resistance to such oppression that the protest can offer through its binary choice, why is it that we cannot move past a blanket dismissal and uncompassionate rejection of violent protest when it happens contemporarily?
Why is it that within hours of rioting in Bristol, the government, police and even movements representing the aims for which the protestors were marching were falling over themselves to denounce ‘a minority’ of protestors?
It is because, just like the hospitals, hospitality venues, shops and homes of 2020, politics has become sanitised whilst the individual has been made desensitised. Disconnected from the reality of oppression it has never been easier for individuals to engage with an issue without getting their hands dirty. This widespread engagement contains within it both the scale required to affect societal change but also the risk of collapsing into what Adam Curtis called ‘Oh Dearism’: that faced with unparalleled insight into the scale and breadth of society’s problems, we retreat into defeatism, pursuing as best we can those issues to speak to us individually, within the institutional framework that in its enormity is the cause of our defeatism.
The riot is the last bastion against ‘Oh Dearism’. In the 21st century the riot has evolved alongside its establishment counterpart. No longer is the riot just the crystallised form of resistance to the establishment. It is also a refusal to accept the defeatism of those on the side of protest — a statement of defiance to both sides, fuelled by years of victimisation, burning brightly against the pacification and sanitisation of political protest.
To burn brightly is to make yourself a target, and this has been borne out by a policing bill which has taken direct aim at protest, fundamentally undermining the individual’s right to protest which was already under covert attack through COVID legislation. Measures to disband protests that are a nuisance, and the imposition of a maximum 10 year prison sentence for damaging a public statue, are direct responses to XR and BLM respectively.
They are the legislative equivalent of the kettling tactic employed by police against protestors: by constricting the nature of protest within defined legal parameters, the hope is to pacify it. Yet, just as with that infamous policing strategy, the outcome will likely be an even greater chance of violence, as the protestors are left with ever fewer other means of expressing the scale of their opposition.
However, in a sociopolitical environment that has largely tried to wash its hands of violent protest as a means to confront institutional violence, an increased propensity for violent protest can only be seen as a good thing from the perspective of the law & order conservatives, who can appeal to the outrage of ‘sensible middle Britain’ in order to dismiss the movements in question.
That both XR and BLM have been treated across the political divide as extremist political groups has both facilitated the police bill, but more importantly allowed the government to sidestep the issues that fuel those movements in the first place. Labour has been complicit in allowing this to happen.
This then leaves the protest caught between compliance with the very institutions they are fighting, or stigmatisation and the derailment of the entire cause. This is the reality of protest in 2021, and rioting is at the very heart of the issue.
Too often, rioting is referred to by politicians and the media alike as a criminal element of peaceful protest. It is seen as an outlier, and those who riot are portrayed as disconnected from the main body of protestors. Never was this more evident than in the 2011 riots, where news reports referred to the ‘hijacking’ of protests by a criminal element more interested in looting than making a political statement.
That this ‘criminal element’ was overwhelmingly made up of young, unemployed working class men made it easier for the press to vilify them as simple thugs. It was therefore possible to dismiss any significance behind how the intense anger around the unlawful killing of Stephen Lawrence had devolved into such open defiance of the authorities.
There was an opportunity to engage with the issues at the heart of events: the lack of investment in youth centres, poor job prospects for young people, an oppressive policing strategy that lacked meaningful engagement, and gentrification which brought exorbitant housing prices to the capital.
Instead of trying to understand why the riots happened, the preferred response by both the press and politicians was to take events at face value and to dismiss them on the grounds of their criminality. August 2011 simply reinforced the stereotyping of the forgotten urban youth, an often racialised stereotyping that still haunts us today, with the pro-Corbyn, white, middle class student who says they’d rather not go to Brixton on a night out because it’s a ‘bit rough’.
There has been a consistent tendency throughout history to decry the riot’s criminality at the time. Yet just as consistently, time has allowed us to better contextualise these riots within their respective movements: to understand them as products of real, intense anger toward the status quo. Unfortunately it seems to take quite some time and distance from the original event for this contextualisation to be established, and in the meantime the profundity of this violent resistance is ignored.
This looks set to be the case in Bristol, where rioting took specific aim at the police, and resulted in the destruction of a police van, the hospitalisation of two police officers, and damage to a police station. The events were roundly decried on all sides as counterproductive, and unfortunately, given the context of a policing bill that in its extremity requires evidence that such sweeping powers are necessary, the rioting will be seen as ample justification of the bill’s measures.
However, is that because of the rioting itself, or is it a product of our societal failure meaningfully to understand and engage with the riot? I would argue it’s a failure to understand the point above: that political protest is forced into an unfair binary choice between passivity and overt violence when responding to the nuanced spectrum of violence perpetrated by the state, who can rely on institutions to camouflage their overt violence.
The result of this situation is that even when the very parameters of the acceptable, lawful and peaceful protest are being restricted, the protestors who wish to avoid having their cause dismissed on account of their actions must participate within the increasingly narrow permitted space of protest determined by the establishment.
The policing bill is actively seeking to further erode this already small avenue for permitted protest by outlawing creative forms of peaceful protest, which were themselves a product of the limited tools available to the protestor.
XR’s mass civil disobedience built on a rich history of effective peaceful protest, and through careful planning and coordination was able to make a decisive statement on the climate crisis, having a discernible impact on climate consciousness nationwide. The occupation of high profile public spaces combined with an incredible commitment from participants that allowed for the group to pursue a strategy of mass arrests made it a powerful movement that did not have to resort to violence to fulfil its aims.
Under new policing powers, such a protest would face enormous difficulties. The Home Secretary would have the powers to define the parameters of nuisance, and therefore enable police to disband protestors and make arrests on a legal basis provided, essentially, by one person. Given Priti Patel’s previous comments on BLM and XR, it is self-evident that these movements are in the crosshairs, on account of their targeting of the policing infrastructure and their creative evasion of policing powers respectively.
So what next? Well it should hopefully be self-evident to any reader that there is a fundamental need to push back, whether that’s writing to your MP, spreading awareness of the consequences of this bill, or joining a protest yourself if you can.
However, there is a more important point to be made here, especially in the context of the recent riots. The reflex to denounce violent protest is a strong one, made necessary by the conditions of political resistance in the 21st century. It is enshrined by societal norms and values fundamentally opposed to the idea of resorting to violence, and encouraged by a cautious press. It also benefits politicians who can use such episodes to reinforce their case for the bill in the first place.
Rather than simply denouncing it, take a moment to contextualise. Seeing rioting as symptomatic of a deeply entrenched problem, rather than an isolated and disconnected feature of protest, allows us to integrate it into the message without necessarily endorsing it. You do not have to condone rioting in order to understand it.
Push back against those that would seek to capitalise on violence to further their repressive ends. Understand the scale of anger and emotion that leads to such events in the first place, and how that anger transcends one single issue but rather is a snapshot of several issues that run deeply across society.
Most importantly, remember that in the narrow space of permitted protest, the law is closing in. Peaceful protest is being kettled: we must do our best to fight this process, but before you denounce the rioters as counterproductive, remember that the rioting is itself ultimately a product of a repressive establishment. Maybe this time it won’t take decades to understand the significance of that.
