Vex Appeal

Protests are cathartic but useless

UPDATE: I would like to give credit to the fine citizens of Tunisia & Egypt, who have exposed the post you are about to read as the poorly conceived and clumsily argued bit of claptrap that it really is. Cheers guys.

Turn on the television news at the moment, and you’re likely to encounter some breathless reportage on the latest anti-cuts protest. I know lots of people who feel strongly about these issues and have protested accordingly.

But I think protests are mostly useless.

Protests are acts of catharsis for their participants. “We have to fight these cuts,” say protestors. But they aren’t fighting anything. They are walking from place to place, and shouting a lot.

Protests are the fever, not the flu; the symptom, not the cause. Protests will only “succeed” when they represent a level of public support that poses a threat to the government, but it is the support that is the threat, not the protest. Protests don’t help build the support that they need.

Protests steer conversation away from the cause they represent. In the case of the recent student protests, countless pages were dominated by competing narratives of under-prepared police vs. militant anarchists vs. police brutality vs. earnest campaigners. Amidst all this, the political point quickly gets lost. Who turned on the news and thought: “I used to think raising tuition fees was a good idea, but now I’ve seen these kids getting kettled, I’m starting to rethink my position?”

[Let’s leave to one side the predictable outrage over incidents violence and vandalism. If there is a point to protest - thousands of angry people marching towards the geographic heart of the state’s power - it is the implicit threat of violence. It’s like complaining that people have sex after flirting.]

The latest tuition fees bill may have passed by a much-reduced majority, but they still passed, and I don’t believe that’s due to insufficient protesting.

You’ll remember the million-strong Stop the War protest in March 2003…

And though we often think of this brave guy as an icon of civil disobedience…

…we should remember that the column of tanks ultimately spelt the end for China’s pro-democracy movement.

Fighting for your political goals involves reaching out to the unconvinced, persuading them that you’re in the right, and building truly formidable public support that any official would be crazy to ignore. Marching with placards, however cleverly sloganned, is not a hugely effective way to do this.

And although in some ways it’s sad that highly-motivated groups with passion and conviction can’t win victories against the state, it isn’t necessarily a bad thing our democracy. This coalition government has made a risky but legitimate bet that, in five years, a majority of the public will have begun to see the wisdom in their approach.

Maybe they’ll lose their bet, but perhaps not. Just ask the Countryside Alliance…