Boris Johnson & Rough Music. The booing continues (now in Glasgow)
As I note in an article in the Morning Star when Boris Johnson first became PM in 2019 his first few days as Premier were notable for a chorus of protest where ever he appeared.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/boris-johnson-faces-rough-music-a-great-british-tradition
The tradition has been renewed when Johnson arrived (by train!) at Glasgow Central station on Wednesday.
Admittedly the report is in the SNP ultra-paper The National and one suspects the booers may have been SNP related but that is all part of the tradition.
One name for this is Rough Music, a community custom, where transgressors against a generally held moral code were singled out for ridicule. It was by no means a universally progressive tradition, as E P Thompson study into it (Customs in Common) made clear.
A tradition of effigies and sometimes the burning of them fed into the wider area of charivari or rough music a wider form of protest, involving discordant music and general uproar.
According to the social historian Robert Storch in reaction to the 1872 Licensing Act it was almost decided in Exeter to burn an effigy of the Home Secretary but instead there was a chorus of groans. From the 1870s Storch notes shopworkers burnt effigies of employers who refused to join in with early closing times
As late as 1887 an inmate of Chelsea Workhouse was charged with making an effigy of the master as a protest about poor food. The judge in the Police Court, aquitting the inmate, told the master ‘public characters like you don’t mind a little ridicule. It’s the penalty of greatness.
Perhaps Boris Johnson, great or not, will grasp the point. But probably not.
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