Their Mobs & Our Protests
The right-wing media is full of bellicose Tories including the Prime Minister saying that Palestinian protests are ‘aggressive mobs’ that are apparently threatening democracy. Yet more measures are planned to ‘crack down’ on protest, except for ones that the Tories support such as farmers of course
Before she was sacked as Home Secretary Suella Braverman said Palestinian protests were ‘hate marches’ and protesters an ‘intimidating mob’, which is also what the reactionary thinker Edmund Burke said about the French Revolution. She then summoned up far right and fascist groups who duly appeared and attacked police at the Cenotaph on Armistice Day.
Meanwhile crowds of many hundreds of thousands have continued to march peacefully calling for a ceasefire in Gaza in central London.
Historically speaking, not a phrase likely to be found on the lips of Braverman or Sunak, one person’s mob is another person’s crowd
For example protesting outside the house of someone who has transgressed many people’s understanding of what might be termed a ‘moral economy’ is a British tradition stretching back over many centuries. It was not however by any means always politically progressive, so controversy over it is also something not recent. An anti-war crowd was to be found protesting outside President Biden’s private house recently reflecting deep tensions being caused by Gaza in the US.
As the great historian of nineteenth century protest George Rude underlined what reactionaries thought was a mob was in many cases simply a peaceful crowd making reasonable points. If one wants to look for a mob, the activities of the Bullingdon Club are a good place to start.
While George Rude saw in protests, up to and including riots, the work of the crowd, with broadly progressive intentions and outcomes, E.P. Thompson was less happy with this formulation. He suggested that riots could also contain reactionary elements and the crowd involved in the Gordon Riots in 1780 would be an obvious example.
Thompson’s work on food riots points to the reality that the threat of a protest was often more effective than an actual riot. It could cause a reduction in the price of bread or the distribution of hoarded food. When riots did, quite rarely, occur very much the same impact was to be found. Hidden food was seized and distributed at low price.
There were other, more obviously political riots, often associated with the Chartists in the 1840s. The Chartists were an organised political force that most certainly did not support riots. It was rather the wider Chartist crowd that participated in such activities, often after provocation from the authorities.
There has been a lot more research and wider perspectives on the crowd since Thompson and Rude looked at the matter in the 1960s and 1970s. Crowds are viewed from the perspective of safety risk management and from psychology as well as history.
Historical research however can provide useful context by looking at who the individuals involved in mob or crowd protests
This post first appeared in the Morning Star
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