A few hundred yards away is Hyde Park, where hundreds of thousands who have stayed to listen to the speeches hear civil service union leader Mark Serwotka call for a general strike. Ed Miliband makes a speech. He is not so well received, and by now the networks are split-screening him with something more televisual.
Anarchists have gathered outside the Ritz Hotel on Piccadilly, pelting and daubing the famous landmark. A few doors down, hundreds of UK Uncut activists invade the upmarket grocer’s Fortnum & Mason. This moment—which unfolds across my Twitter feed, with people messaging from inside Fortnum’s and from within Ed Miliband’s press team—turns out to be the crest of the wave of protest that began at Millbank in November. After this climax comes the crisis.
The police kettled the Fortnum’s protesters and, as night fell, 145 of them were arrested one by one. Many were held for the full twenty-four hours allowed by law and then released, in paper jumpsuits like terror suspects, their clothes impounded.
No serious act of violence had been committed at Fortnum’s, though some protesters had chalked messages on the shop front. But there had been a mass outbreak of Black Bloc violence and destruction elsewhere. Virtually none of the Bloc had been arrested—but almost all of Fortnum’s invaders had.
This posed, point-blank, two problems for the core of activists who had launched UK Uncut. Did they condone or condemn the actions of the Black Bloc, and how would they now function, since most of them were on bail? Of the total of 201 protesters arrested over the entire day, 145 were at Fortnum & Mason. At time of writing, all but thirty have seen all charges dropped.
Meanwhile, in Hyde Park, half a million trade unionists began drifting away to their coaches, oblivious to—but later horrified to learn— what the Black Bloc had done. Half a million low-paid public servants had been eclipsed by the actions of four hundred people: the news bulletins were dominated by images of masked kids, broken windows and a smouldering wicker horse in Oxford Circus.
Towards the English Summer
In the period between Millbank and the trade-union demonstration of 26 March 2011, three social forces had been on the streets that we will meet time and again in the new global unrest: enraged students, youth from the urban underclass, and the big battalions of organized labour. In each phase, social media had helped the movement grow with dizzying rapidity.
The police, still smarting from the condemnation of their tactics at the G20 Summit in 2009, were in crisis. First, they had failed to anticipate Millbank, and their repeated use of kettling had radicalized large numbers of young people. Soon, the News of the World phone-hacking scandal would end the careers of London’s two top policemen, and the Met would stumble into the 2011 summer of riots seemingly directionless.
But the protest movement was also in crisis. Students got wrapped up in their exams; the trade unions began negotiations over pensions; the small group of activists behind UK Uncut went into a defensive huddle; and the anarchists engaged in mutual recrimination, the Black Bloc openly declaring their ‘right’ to be violent. The momentum had gone.
Meanwhile, a third demographic group had gone missing. The urban youth crept back to their estates where, as spring turned into summer, they cranked up the Grime. They pondered the meaning of all the Situationist slogans they had heard, and watched as the Met Police leadership self-destructed during the Murdoch scandal. Then, in August, as a shaken political class retreated to the Tuscan hills, the urban poor staged an insurrection of their own.
After police shot alleged gang member Mark Duggan, on 6 August 2011, riots erupted in thirty English towns and cities. Despite the relatively small-scale participation in the uprisings, they were concentrated and devastating, leading to widespread looting and arson. In the first two days, in most places, police lost control of the streets. In some areas, where the rioting overlapped with ethnic tension between black youths and Asian or Turkish small businessmen, the latter formed protection squads, which found themselves also in tension with law enforcement.
It became clear the rioters across Britain had organized through social media; above all the Blackberry instant messaging service.
Though occasionally led by organized crime, and often by the disorganized petty criminals who form the youth gang fraternity, the overwhelming social characteristic of those arrested was poverty. The events, whose precise significance is still being disputed by criminolo-gists and social theorists, formed a coda to the British winter of discontent.
Because—from Millbank to the summer riots—the scale of British discontent looks small beside the Arab Spring, it’s been possible to ignore its significance. But it was significant, both sociologically and politically. Not only did it demonstrate the almost total disconnect between official politics and large sections of young people; it was also the moment that protest methods once known to a committed few were adopted by the uncommitted mass. But it also showed how, in developed societies, organized labour is still capable of channelling and overwhelming the more chaotic, spontaneous protests.
And it was an advance preview of the problem which youthful, socially networked, horizontalist movements would have everywhere once things got serious: the absence of strategy, the absence of a line of communication through which to speak to the union-organized workers. The limits, in short, of ‘propaganda of the deed’.
Despite all this, what was obvious by late 2010 is that we were dealing with something new: something produced by bigger changes in society. But what?
So, Why Did It Kick Off? The Social Roots of the New Unrest
If the Arab Spring had happened in isolation, it might have been categorized as a belated aftershock of 1989; if the student unrest had been part of the normal cycle of youth revolt, it could have been quickly forgotten. But as the momentum gathered, from Iran to Santa Cruz, to London, Athens and Cairo, the events carried too much that was new in them to ignore.
The media began a frantic search for parallels. Nigel Inkster, former director of operations for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, told me: ‘It’s a revolutionary wave, like 1848.’ Others found analogies with 1968 or the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In late January 2011 I sat with veteran reporters in the newsroom of a major TV network and discussed whether this was Egypt’s 1905 or its 1917.
As I will argue, there are strong parallels—above all with 1848, and with the wave of discontent that preceded 1914. But there is something in the air that defies historical parallels: something new to do with technology, behaviour and popular culture. As well as a flowering of collective action in defence of democracy, and a resurgence of the struggles of the poor and oppressed, what’s going on is also about the expanded power of the individual.
For the first time in decades, people are using methods of protest that do not seem archaic or at odds with the modern contemporary world; the protesters seem more in tune with modernity than the methods of their rulers. Sociologist Keith Kahn-Harris calls what we’re seeing the ‘movement without a name’:
A trend, a direction, an idea-virus, a meme, a source of energy that can be traced through a large number of spaces and projects. It is also a way of thinking and acting: an agility, an adaptability, a refusal to accept the world as it is, a refusal to get stuck into fixed patterns of thought.1
Why is it happening now? Ultimately, the explanation lies in three big social changes: in the demographics of revolt, in technology and in human behaviour itself. And without ignoring the specifics of Europe, North Africa or the global south, I will attempt here to summarize (as in the original ‘Twenty Reasons’ blog) what is common to these situations.
The graduate with no future
At the centre of all the protest movements is a new sociological type: the graduate with no future.
In