Brendan O’Neill calls for riots: he should be careful what he wishes for
Former self-styled Marxist, now right-wing Editor of Spiked On-Line Brendan O’Neill has called on Politics Live (27th September) for there to be riots. Riots from below cant be organised but they can, up to a point, be promoted by authority.
Perhaps Mr O’Neill has in mind an official mob informally sponsored by Dominic Cummings similar in some ways to the Gordon rioters. Mr O’Neill should however be careful what he wishes for. The Gordon rioters may have started out as a reactionary mob but some at least turned into a revolutionary crowd quite out of control of their original sponsors.
The world is more complex than Mr O’Neill imagines
The desire to reduce history to one thing or another thing but too often not nuance or, both things, is probably growing in the age of social media. It does not however accord with the complexities of reality where issues constantly ebb, flow and interact.
E.P Thompson wrote about the Gordon Riots of 1780 in central London in the Making of the English Working Class. The rioters were officially sanctioned in the sense that they were raising a reactionary demand to Parliament against Catholic toleration.
Thompson notes: the riots were directed in the first place against Catholic chapels and the houses of wealthy Catholics, then against prominent personalities in authority- including Lord Chief Justice Mansfield and the Archbishop of York.. then against prisons- whose inmates were released- and finally culminated in an attack on the Bank (of England) itself’.
At this point official toleration ended and the army were called out.
As Thompson notes, we have here something of a mixture of manipulated mob and revolutionary crowd’
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