Riots have always been a part of British political life, for better or worse. Both protestors and the coalition should better understand that when violence is unleashed – by whichever side – the outcomes are unpredictable. Volatile force on the streets can advance or damage a cause, bring down a government or strengthen it, have a desired result or lead to a surprising one.
The general definition of a riot is a demonstration which turns violent due either to provocation or aggressive aims. The protest movement invokes Peterloo and the poll tax, but things have not always been so clear-cut. Protests have been a counterweight to oppression, or an opportunity for plunder and revenge, or a conduit for passion and anger. American President Calvin Coolidge said: “The only difference between a mob and a trained army is organisation.”
Rioting featured in all the British revolutions which overthrew absolute rulers and created our imperfect form of parliamentary democracy. It was part of the tidal waves of history and the smaller ripples of localised disputes. The instigators were generally the oppressed. Martin Luther King said: “A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.”
But the cause was not always noble. A London mob marked the coronation of Richard I in 1189 by massacring the Jewish community. The 18th century saw riots against Roman Catholics, the Irish, dissenters, foreign actors, gin tax, bawdy houses, the naturalisation of Jews, French footmen and a change in the calendar as well as against high food prices, enclosures and greedy industrialists. In 1789, the anti-Catholic riots in London whipped up by a retired naval officer, Lord George Gordon, involved a 50,000-strong mob, raged for five days, destroyed Catholic churches and homes and left 285 dead, 173 wounded and 139 arrested – 24 of whom were later hanged.
The Gordon riots were put down by military might in defence of the intended victims. In the decades that followed, the reverse was true. The 19th century opened with the titanic struggle against Napoleon and continued on the home front with a bloody period of civil insurrection and repression. The sheer pace of the Industrial Revolution sparked a revolt against the machines. The Luddites lost their clashes with the state and scores were hanged in 1812. An influx of veterans swelled the ranks of the unemployed once Bonaparte was finally defeated. The corn laws and a disastrous harvest caused famine among the working classes, and there was a growing clamour for electoral reform boosted by newspapers which were read avidly by the newly literate. Riots, marches and monster rallies shook the ruling elite and pushed it into increasingly draconian counter-measures.
A march on London by the Blanketeers was ambushed before the men had travelled far from Manchester and local jails were packed. Panicky magistrates, drunken militia and over-zealous cavalry caused the Peterloo Massacre in which at least 15 men, women and children were killed and up to 500 injured. Radicals were driven underground while guerrilla violence erupted in the countryside during the 1831 “Captain Swing” riots in which threshing machines were broken and property was destroyed. Again, the state’s response was terrible – 19 rioters were executed, 644 imprisoned and 505 transported to Australia for between seven years and life. The following year, protests over efforts to block the reform bill exploded in Bristol. Two days of mayhem saw the city centre gutted by fire, cavalry charging over cobbled squares, mansions looted and upward of 100 dead.
Many working men realised their hopes of salvation lay, not with sporadic rioting, but by self-help through trade unions. Strikes, rather than undisciplined rampage, were the chosen weapon. Given the weight of political oppression, however, that route could be just as dangerous. Striking ironworkers, weavers and colliers were shot or attacked by cavalry charges. The men of Tolpuddle were transported when they swore oaths to form their own combine. Such suppression cowed but could not crush the embryonic trade union movement. That came together with the reformists in the so-called Plug Plot riots of 1842 – Britain’s first general strike. Events started among Staffordshire coalminers and spread to textile factories across the north of the country as workers downed tools and removed plugs from boilers to shut down plants. The fight for better pay and conditions became inextricably linked to the right to vote. Strikers clashed violently with soldiers and police, mills were besieged and burned to the ground. There was the whiff of anarchy and the authorities responded as they had always done – with mass arrests. The remaining strikers were starved into submission. But the spark of organised resistance had been lit and continued to flare for generations until both union recognition and universal adult suffrage were achieved.
It was a long and bitter struggle on many fronts, and the ruling elites gave ground just inch by inch. Flaring passion and partisan reporting not unnaturally gave rise to many working-class and leftist myths. It was not the smashing of windows, rioting or other behaviour verging on terrorism which gave women the vote, but the need for female labour to fill the gaps left by men fighting in the First World War.
Winston Churchill did not send troops into south Wales in 1910 to massacre miners at Tonypandy. He risked his career by keeping troops out of the valleys – a move recognised and appreciated by union leaders. There was rioting, there were fierce battles with police in which one man died from a baton blow, but there was no massacre. A year later, however, Churchill did send in troops to break a national strike by dockers and railway workers. Two gunboats and a cruiser were anchored threateningly in the Mersey, cavalry charges in Liverpool left two strikers and one police officer dead, and there were further violent clashes in Glasgow and Cardiff. Why the myth of Tonypandy remains iconic, while that bloodier conflict is largely forgotten, is a mystery.
The 1936 Battle of Cable Street was between anti-fascist protesters and police only – Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts, having got the publicity they craved, obeyed police instructions to retire and cancel their planned march through London’s East End. In more modern times, there has been controversy over most urban battlefields. The Brixton riots can be seen as a turf war between two gangs of hyped up, violent young men – one side wearing uniforms. The 1981Toxteth riots and other “copycats” which quickly followed blurred the line between blatant criminality and protest against the excesses of Thatcherism.
Even the 1990 poll tax riot is not quite as many believe. It certainly brought together most sectors of society, including the more affluent, by focusing on one clearly unfair and historically unpopular tax. But Margaret Thatcher had ignored burning cities through much of her premiership and had positively thrived during the miners’ strike when vast swathes of the country were militarised and turned into virtual no-go areas for dissent. Rather, it was a growing realisation within the Tories’ own ranks – loyalists and the personally ambitious, pro- and anti-Europeans – that her time was up. The scrapping of the hated tax was a triumph for organised resistance that may well have happened anyway.
Subsequent mass demonstrations have been qualified failures. Two million marched in London against the invasion of Iraq. Tony Blair ignored it and was re-elected at the subsequent general election. G4 and other demos have been two diffuse to make a difference – anarchists alongside greens, Trots alongside mainstream Labour, hooligans alongside idealists. The same was true of the Countryside Alliance demos, which saw apparent common cause made between foxhunters, rural shopkeepers, postal services, the UK Independence Party and the Socialist Workers Party. Too many messages mean no results.
Students and public sector workers are now facing up to the reality of mass protest in the modern age of rolling 24-hour news agendas, a fickle and often apathetic electorate and the increased sophistication of police surveillance and control tactics. In that context, a single fire extinguisher thrown from a rooftop – and repeatedly shown on television – can change public opinion. That has not happened yet with the students, partly because of the scale of public anger at the coalition’s broken promises.
But it was the killing of a cab driver by striking miners which finally sparked the collapse of the 1984-85 miners strike, not the Battle of Orgreave. That, together with the savage murder of a police officer on London’s Broadwater Farm state, was the exception to the rule. Most fatalities up to the G20 riot have been among protestors.
And that brings us to the trickiest question of all: is violence justified? Without violence, or at least vandalism, a demonstration is not a riot. But a peaceful demo can easily turn violent due to adrenalin-rush excitement, genuine anger, panic in a crush, police provocation and infiltration by both the extreme fringes and agents provocateur. In the long struggle for social justice, the working classes have been let down by self-appointed leaders, trade union barons and Parliament. The brickbat may not be cricket, but Britain would be a different place without it.
Riots are ugly, but so are wars. Like the soldier, a social and political reformer might be standing shoulder to shoulder with a drunkard or a thief, but that does not diminish his or her courage or the righteousness of their cause.
Overseas, violent demonstrations have toppled regimes. South Africa is a notable example, as are the 1989 riots across Germany which, after troops refused to fire on their own citizens, led to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. But there are no parallels with the here and now, nor is there public appetite for such action against the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition which appears to be collapsing under the weight of its own inherent structural weaknesses.
Historically, riot as a weapon against poverty and exploitation which could kill the body became an expression of rage against a poverty of expectation which can kill the spirit. Whether violence can be justified in that ongoing struggle in our more comfortable, risk-averse age remains debatable. The closeness of history makes it ever more uncomfortable.
Ian Hernon is the author Riot! Civil Insurrection from Peterloo to the Present Day published by Pluto Press (2006, £15.99)
