Arrests of people protesting about genocide won’t stop the protests, any more than State action to stop freedom of the press in the 1820s did
On Saturday 6th September the Met Police say that they arrested 890 people for protesting largely under a Defend Our Juries basis for mentioning words about Palestine that the Government doesn’t like, although anyone relying on the Met to be accurate or tell the truth may be disappointed. The officer in charge on 6th September tweeted that 20,000 had attended the in fact several hundred thousand strong 30th London march for Palestine. It was a tactic first used with the Chartists on 10th April 1848 (20,000 is a favourite Met number it seems) and it hasn’t aged well.
It was one of the biggest exercises of wasting police time and resources in recent years (The Met are specialists). Given that reports suggest well over a thousand people joined the protest the Met’s proclaimed plan to arrest everyone failed. Their trademark thuggish behaviour was also on display. It’s also worth noting that at similar protests around the UK very few arrests took place. Ultimately Top Plod Rowley must take responsibility for yet another Met debacle. His departure is very long overdue, although unless and until the Met is actually reformed (as several official reports have demanded) a replacement is unlikely to be an improvement.
It’s clear that more protesters will step forward. There is a well-known precedent in British history.
Around the period of Peterloo in 1819 the (Tory) Government was determined to crack down on radical opinion and calls for democratic rights. Prosecutions for seditious libel were common and the taxes on knowledge(levied on newspapers) saw the rise of an unstamped, illegal press. Many who published it went to jail, but that didn’t stop publication.
One of the best known was the freethinker Richard Carlile. In the early 1820s he ran a radical bookshop in Fleet Street known as the Temple of Reason. Carlile was frequently jailed but he had an important principle: THE SHOP IN FLEET STREET WILL NOT BE CLOSED AS A MATTER OF COURSE’
It wasn’t. Before the Government gave in 150 volunteers, shopmen, printers, newsvendors, had been jailed and served over 200 years of imprisonment between them.
Whose were these people? E P Thompson noted in the Making of the English Working Class:
The men and women who came forward were, in nearly every case, entirely unknown to Carlile. They simply came out of London; or arrived on the coach from Lincolnshire, Dorset, Liverpool and Leeds. They came out of a culture.
Interestingly though Thompson was also clear that while those who broke the law and fought for press freedom were part of the rise of a radical working class movement, they themselves were not usually workers, with the power to organise and challenge capital at the point of production, but artisans.
However the reading culture they promoted and developed fed into the rising working class movement and was one of the motors for Chartism from the later 1830s.
Perhaps the protests on mentioning words that must not be mentioned won’t change the world but they might help create a movement that does
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