Exclusive Dealing & Boycotts from the Chartists to South Africa & Palestine
On the last Saturday of 2023 I joined a protest outside Barclays Bank in Central Cardiff. The protest was over Barclays investments with companies that make weapons for Israel. I’m not sure if I was the oldest person present but I had a chat with several protesters about similar protests that had taken place 50 years ago over the same Bank and its then links with apartheid South Africa.
They probably regarded me as a relic of a bygone age of protest(!)but I well recall meetings as a student union officer in the 1970s with various men in suits from Barclays who arrived to find out why we were boycotting the Bank.
They had the excuse then, perhaps, that you could only find out about apartheid South Africa by searching out media reports or attending anti-apartheid events. When it comes to Gaza, they need only look at their smart phones.
Even so the tactic currently called BDS has a long history stretching back at least to the Chartist movement in the 1830s and 1840s. The Chartists used the tactic of what they termed Exclusive Dealing. That is they would only use shops, traders and pubs that supported the Chartist demand for the vote.
Such boycotts are carried out individually of course but crucially in the context of collective campaigning. They are not often the decisive factor in achieving change but they are important to building the movements that do achieve it.
Collective campaigning against injustice is something disliked by most Tories on most occasions. The Commons on Wednesday 10th January gave a third reading to a Bill that aims to prevent public bodies from boycotting goods and services from countries because of their human rights records.
The Bill has been promoted by Gove for factional and ideological reasons and while it passed, Labour opposed it and eight senior Tories voted against. Objections were not only that it is an infringement of free speech and peaceful political activity but that it includes territories illegally occupied by Israel as part of that country. That contravenes international law, not something obviously that bothers Gove.
Boycotts in particular by local authorities of South African goods played a part in ending apartheid but not even Thatcher thought about banning them.
It underlines that historically the Chartist tactic of exclusive dealing, although it had a number of motivations, was a powerful one.
Update
McDonalds have admitted that boycotts due to its links with Israel have made it miss a key sales target
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