Notes ahead of the TUC march, Saturday October 20th

Sadly I can’t be in London on Saturday to take part in the TUC march. Here are some basic points of practical advice for the day and a few brief thoughts about what will immediately follow.

Firstly, I’m not the only one who can’t be there: whether because of disability, cost, work commitments, caring commitments, or personal reasons to avoid such an event, many people who would like to be there won’t be. These are exactly the issues that should be at the heart of our fight, and those who are absent should be remembered as part of that fight as much as those who are present.

The day might turn out like last year’s TUC march on March 26th, which was long and hectic, full of the unexpected, or it might be like last year’s NCAFC march on November 9th, which was a slow and orderly walk through central London with an overbearing police escort. Be prepared for either; take drink, take food, take sensible footwear, etc. If you can switch to a cheap handset, that can be damaged, lost or confiscated without causing too much distress, do so. If you can switch to a clean SIM that doesn’t have all your information on it, so much the better.

Take the phone number of GBC Legal Support: 07946 541 511. Write this on your skin so that it can’t be lost or taken away from you. This is important not only if you yourself have legal difficulties but also if you witness anyone else being stopped, harassed, searched, beaten, arrested etc (if you do witness this sort of thing, try to film or photograph it and get hold of shoulder numbers of the officers involved). Having the number on your arm does not mean that you are looking for trouble; it’s just a sensible and necessary precaution. The mass arrest at Fortnum and Mason’s last year demonstrates how even the most benign of protesters can find themselves arrested, and the defendants campaign that was organised to look after them shows how important legal support groups like GBC are. It is also wise to have the number of a solicitor and possibly an emergency contact.

Liberty will be providing legal observers on the day. It is important to know that Liberty’s legal observers will pass on information about protesters to the police. It is therefore wise to keep some distance from them. Similarly, bear in mind that all coppers on the day will be gathering information. This is one of the prime agendas of the friendly Liaison Officers who try to strike up conversations. Act as you feel best, but I advise that chatting to cops, especially on protest days like this, is not wise.

It is advisable to wear a mask, or at least be prepared to cover your face. The police’s Forward Intelligence Team will be out recording all day and will be trying to gather as much information as they can about people who attend protests. This is footage and information that they will keep and will have control over, and they will use it for their purposes. Under section 60AA of the Public Order Act an officer can ask you to remove a facial covering, but until that point it is perfectly legal. Additionally, obscuring the FIT’s view of other protesters with banners and placards is a noble and righteous thing to do

GBC have more information about protests, arrests and legal support on their website, and will be distributing ‘bust cards’ with quick summaries of your rights on the day.

I would like as many people as possible to go to the Boycott Workfare action, which will be meeting at 2:30 at Oxford Circus. Workfare is one of the biggest threats to employment rights and the well-being of working class people in this country and it is not being adequately addressed by either the TUC or Labour Party. The only way to beat it is through grassroots mobilisation, so make this big. Your alternative is walking to Hyde Park and listening to some speeches.

This might be an important issue: Despite all being out on the same march, people will come with strikingly different agendas and ideologies. In the face of the law, the media and the reactionary backlash that attends any major protest, we need to rekindle the sense of sincere solidarity that sustained us through the intense period of protests in the Winter of 2010/2011. People are marching because they’re angry, because the lives that they were promised haven’t materialised, because they’re finding it harder and harder to cope. That anger will be visible in many different forms. Following the protest, the police, the government, the TUC and the media will all construct their own version of events; their interests are not the same as ours, their agenda is not our agenda. Life is getting increasingly difficult, the actions of the government and the capitalist class are having increasingly devastating effects on us and, though we all know marching won’t change things, coming together and sticking together is the only real hope we have. Each day it becomes truer and truer that all we have left is each other. I have no idea how the day will turn out, but whatever happens, keep each other safe.

Shakespeare 2012

THE CULTURAL IS POLITICAL

The Globe to Globe season has seen each of Shakespeare’s plays performed by companies from around the world in their own languages, and has allowed for some genuinely interesting theatrical events. The programming avoided the self-congratulatory pretense of global unity and all nations coming together in the name of theatre that one might have expected from such an event (especially one so closely bound up with the Olympics), and instead met its political context head on. We saw Cymbeline, a play about sovereignty, nationhood and independence, played by a company from the newly formed nation of South Sudan. Timon of Athens, a stark look at wealth and debt in ancient Greece was staged by a German company. Contemporary political tensions were brought to the fore in a Greek Pericles and an Italian Julius Caesar, by the inclusion on the bill of the Belarus Free Theatre’s King Lear and, perhaps most notably, by an Israeli production of The Merchant of Venice. This last performance became the site of protest by pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli demonstrators, as is critically documented and discussed in this excellent review by Peter Kirwan.

The ‘airport-style security’ Kirwan encountered was not unique to performances of The Merchant of Venice, though; people were ‘randomly’ searched and had bags confiscated for most of the season. This may have been in anticipation of nationalist protest or terrorism, but it is more likely that security staff were on the lookout for anything similar to the Reclaim Shakespeare Company, who in recent months have playfully disrupted RSC performances in Stratford Upon Avon. These protests have been targeted against the sponsors BP, and, like Liberate Tate and other groups before it, do well to frustrate attempts by major energy companies to redeem their tarnished brands by associating them with the arts.

Perhaps the obvious conclusion to all this is that Shakespeare is currently political in a way that was not previously the case; that the plays, as Kirwan concludes with The Merchant of Venice, have a contemporary relevance and can shed light on current situations, existing still as a vital and essential political voice in modern times. This is to some extent true: many of the questions Shakespeare concerned himself with remain unresolved and performance of the plays continues to provide space to critically consider them. More urgent than this, though, is the ongoing existence of Shakespeare as a cultural artifact and the way it is used as a totem for various forms of heritage. The biggest audience Shakespeare’s verse will receive this Summer will not come from theatre productions, and not even from the upcoming BBC films, but when Mark Rylance recites from The Tempest as part of Danny Boyle’s Olympic games opening ceremony.

Early reports of this show describe a mishmash of icons of Britishness. The inclusion of live animals will harken back to a romanticised and mythologised notion of some shared past of pre-industrial arable subsistence while model clouds dispensing artificial rain will demonstrate our famous self deprecating humour by affectionately invoking the sodden ‘British Summer’. In what may be an attempt at subverting traditional images of British national identity, or at least at including some modern ones, the show will feature two mosh pits: one representing Glastonbury festival (?), the other the last night of the Proms (?!?), which will, it is hoped, ‘do battle’ (?!?!?!). The barrel will be finally scraped with such establishment staples as James Bond, Sir Paul McCartney and, of course, Shakespeare.

Used without permission.

For The Bard this is nothing new; the plays and poems of Shakespeare, the idea of ‘Shakespeare’ itself as a cultural commodity, have played one of the greatest roles in the continuing reproduction of British (or more commonly English) national identity. Possibly the most frequently cited individual example of this is that ‘rousing call to arms during World War II’^[1], the 1944 film of Henry V, a play ‘regarded by the British government as ideal patriotic wartime propaganda’, which Laurence Olivier was released from military service to direct and star in (albeit with the text ‘discreetly trimmed to fit the war effort’)^[2]. The role of Shakespeare in the discourse of conservatism is not limited to specific performances of his plays. It is curious that so many people believe that ‘our national poet’ was born on April 23rd, St. George’s day, when no certain proof of this exists. During the expansion of the British Empire, Shakespeare came to be an emblem not just of English patriotism but of civilisation itself, to be exported to where it was seen as needed. Laurence Wright’s examination of Shakespeare in South Africa dwells on this reality:

The presence of Shakespeare in South africa is a fact of colonial history. He was imposed on the country, along with many other facets of large-scale globalizing society, as an integral part of the deeply one-sided colonial exchange: ownership of the land, gems, minerals and other raw materials for christianity, ‘civilization’ and western education. … He became an important part of South africa’s colonial education and culture, as was the case throughout the British Empire.

Writing in 1840, the essayist Thomas Carlyle grounds his gushing idolatry of Shakespeare in On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History by regarding him as a ‘real, marketable, tangibly useful possession’ of the British Empire:

England, before long, this Island of ours, will hold but a small fraction of the English: in America, in New Holland, east and west to the very Antipodes, there will be a Saxondom covering great spaces of the Globe. And now, what is it that can keep all these together into virtually one Nation, so that they do not fall out and fight, but live at peace, in brotherlike intercourse, helping one another? … Here, I say, is an English King, whom no time or chance, Parliament or combination of Parliaments, can dethrone! This King Shakspeare, does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying-signs; indestructible; really more valuable in that point of view than any other means or appliance whatsoever? We can fancy him as radiant aloft over all the Nations of Englishmen, a thousand years hence. From Paramatta, from New York, wheresoever, under what sort of Parish-Constable soever, English men and women are, they will say to one another: “Yes, this Shakspeare is ours; we produced him, we speak and think by him; we are of one blood and kind with him.”

For Harry, England and St. George!

Returning to the Olympics opening ceremony, Shakespeare is being used as part of a much broader program of conservative ideology, where the preservation and expansion of privilege is obfuscated by the deployment of notions of heritage, tradition and shared history. In a very literal sense the capitalist class system is reproduced, and so too are the mythologies and ideological propaganda that justify it. There is a myth around the Olympics, just as there was around the Jubilee and the Royal Wedding, that it represents a great moment of national unity in which everyone pulls together and collectively enjoys the event. Danny Boyle talks of how ‘the volunteers most beautifully express this Olympic ideal. They give up their time for free. Some of them have got a lot of spare time because they haven’t got jobs, some of them haven’t got much. But they give up their time, and try to present something that is the best of all of us.’ Boyle’s comments demonstrate a total obliviousness to the contentious political context of unpaid labour at the moment, in light of the controversial work program, which has been exacerbated by the scandal of Jubilee stewards working unpaid on the promise of paid work at the Olympics. Instead the event is presented to us as though it were a somehow apolitical celebration of all that is great about Britain; a celebration of a national identity which transcends the political arena, transcends trifling concerns about wages and budget and austerity, and instead strives for something much greater. At the centre of this are Shakespeare’s words:

Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.

How best do we respond to this use of Shakespeare for conservative ends? First, we can approach it on its own terms. The passage Boyle intends to use comes from Act III, Scene ii of The Tempest and is spoken by the monstrous slave Caliban. It ends with the chilling resolution that ‘when I waked / I cried to dream again’, which neatly contextualises it within the play’s ongoing consideration of reality and illusion. The island’s magic is at once wonderful and dangerous, all pervasive and transient – it quite deliberately reflects the theatre it was written for, in which things are in a constant state of simultaneously existing and not existing. The Tempest is also a play about power and dominance, specifically about slavery and colonialism. It is a play which presents many problems, but retreats from them further and further into its own ultimately meaningless theatricality. In a dark way it is an apt choice; The Tempest shows us, just as events of great performative spectacle do, the power to control, subjugate and disenfranchise that lies in the creation of illusion and the total investment in the unreal. The ‘Britishness’ and the ‘Olympic ideal’ that Danny Boyle seeks to capture are no more meaningful than the ‘noises, sounds and sweet airs’ that his ceremony quotes from: an unreal theatrical representation of something that is itself unreal. In the play, unlike the political world we live in, this tension is resolved and the deception is laid bare before the audience; the magic gives way to a gesture of honesty. How wonderful it would be for Danny Boyle, Sebastian Coe, Boris Johnson and the rest of the professional perpetrators of the Olympic myth to disavow themselves of their manipulation and illusion and beg of us our forgiveness as Prospero does, acknowledging the utter immateriality of what they have presented.

In her excellent book on this subject, Performing Nostalgia, Susan Bennett refers to ‘the invocation of lines (or basterdized versions) from [Shakespeare’s] plays that are plundered for their capacity to mean in particular ways’^[3]. Similarly, Margot Heinemann talks of taking lines ‘wholly out of dramatic context, disregarding entirely the conflicts of values and action that surround them in the plays’. Many of us are familiar with Shakespeare’s description of England as

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise;
This fortress, built by nature for herself,
Against infection, and the hand of war;
This happy breed of men, this little world;
This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Less commonly quoted are the closing lines of that speech:

England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watr’y Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots, and rotten parchment bonds:
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life,
How happy then were my ensuing death!

Richard II, Act II scene i

Though his writing exists as a repository of useful quotations from which one can pluck a witty or passionate aphorism to support any argument, Shakespeare seldom said what those who quote him want. He did not offer the uncritical praise of England or of tradition and heritage that politicians, pundits and advertisers attempt to use him for, but ultimately this doesn’t matter. Shakespeare’s existence as a cultural force is far more than the collected words of his plays and poems. Bennett recognises that ‘Shakespeare, simply put, has a normative value … His availability to be enlisted in the regressive discourses of the New Right is without question’^[4] What we have learned is that simply reassessing the dramatic meaning of Shakespeare’s words and arguing our own interpretation does little to combat the conservative appropriation of them. Heinemann quotes Nigel Lawson, Chancellor the Exchequer under Thatcher, as claiming that ‘Shakespeare was a Tory, without any doubt’, and she observes that ‘To hear Shakespeare cited directly in the context of cutting the health service and reducing taxation on the well-to-do is unnerving … We see more clearly what the struggle over the meaning of Shakespeare is really about’. There should be no confusion about the stakes; to be able to draft in Shakespeare as supporting one’s agenda is to claim significant weight and prestige, to appropriate the power of the English establishment and the authority of ‘our’ national poet. Heinemann argues the rousing insistence that we must ‘not hand Shakespeare over as a reactionary writer to be used or misused by the defenders of capitalism in decay’, and she is absolutely correct. We should not surrender Shakespeare to the right, and should not disregard the political content of his plays and poems, but to try to present (as she suggests) a 400 year old playwright as a progressive voice is dubious at best, and risks reinforcing the very conservatism that we wish to invalidate. The challenge that faces us is to find ways to resist the use of Shakespeare as a tool of conservative ideology; to resist the exploitation of Shakespeare in the continued reproduction of regressive ideals of culture and tradition which do nothing but preserve the privileges and divisions of the past.

* * *

[1] Carolyn Jess-Cooke Shakespeare on Film (Great Britain: Wallflower Press, 2007) p. 78.

[2] Steven Jay Sneider (ed.) 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die (Britain: Cassell Illustrated, 2007) p. 202.

[3] Susan Bennett Performing Nostalgia (Britain: Routledge, 1996) p.35-36.

[4] Ibid. p. 37.

Some people are gay. Get over it!

So, there are some adverts on the sides of buses, and there were going to be some responses but Boris Johnson has stopped them, and then there was some reaction. There are a few salient things to learn from this.

Firstly, we can always count on politicians to exploit some controversy to make themselves look good, especially less than a month before and election (when did Boris last speak out, let alone act, over homophobic, transphobic etc adverts?). Secondly, the level of understanding around queer identities demonstrated by the mainstream media and their bloggers is woefully inadequate. Thirdly, we have learned that there is no point being moderate in an attempt to avoid being divisive.

I sincerely cannot think of a slogan that is more benign and inoffensive to sum up the current state of gay acceptance than ‘Some people are gay. Get over it!’. Perhaps ‘Some people are queer’, so as not to ignore people who are not part of the heterosexual hegemony but do not identify as ‘gay’ (this issue is an essential criticism of much of Stonewall’s politics). One could argue that the exhortation to ‘Get over it!’ is somewhat confrontational (if, that is, one had a particularly sheltered impression of political confrontation) but really it just provides a basic solution to the issue of homophobia; no change of attitudes, no education, no pressure not to be homophobic – simply to get over the fact that some people are gay. On some level, while a poster campaign lends prominence to the debate, the actual message seeks to take the fundamental questions of homophobia and queer identities off the table. This is not, in and of itself, a bad thing; a simple, concise message which provides a practical political solution of social tolerance and making homosexuality an unremarkable personality trait has some value; rather than saying ‘your attitudes to homosexuality are wrong’ the campaign suggests the more pragmatic ‘homosexuality need not be an issue’ (leaving aside debates over who the target audience is).

In spite of this seemingly deliberately inoffensive simplicity, when the (inevitable) homophobic response appeared there were those who acted as though Stonewall had invited it by picking the wrong message. This, too, was inevitable. There will always be those who, purporting to be sympathetic to the struggle of oppressed groups, will criticise them for being too aggressive in their methods and rhetoric. What we can usefully learn from this obnoxious response is that there is little point in trying to be moderate, inoffensive and concessionary. There is always an urge when presenting political campaigns against bigotry to be appear nice and relatable and non-aggressive. People are often timid about seeming too militant, for fear of ‘losing the PR war’. This needs to be seriously questioned. I have no interest in meeting bigots half way. If reactionary conservatives and condescending liberals are going to condemn a campaign approach no matter how many steps one takes to mitigate any offense caused, campaigners need stop being so accommodating.

I quote Graham Linehan’s tweet at the top of this article not because I agree with it but because it demonstrates a fundamental aspect of this kind of political dispute. Stonewall’s pro-acceptance posters are treated as part of a broader dialogue and, because the involvement of the homophobes has made it all rather unsavoury, it is one that many people would simply like to go away. Things would be much simpler, it is implied, if Stonewall hadn’t been so provocative with their adverts; the homophobes would never have responded and the whole thing could have been avoided. I’m not suggesting that Linehan is homophobic or seriously wants pro-acceptance bus adverts to be banned (and I beg you not to get in touch with me about this), but that this illustrates a common response; the idea that victims of persecution should try to avoid inviting further abuse. Needless to say, this is the wrong approach. These adverts did little more than assert, visibly and prominently, the existence of gay people. If this invites criticism for being divisive, if this invites criticism for provoking a homophobic backlash, then it has been demonstrated to us (again) that there is no point pursuing this capitulatory liberal agenda of inoffensive moderacy. Be bold, radical, militant, aggressive. If assertiveness offends, be offensive.

The NHS, Protest and Guilt

A few very obvious points on the NHS:

The Health and Social Care Bill is going to pass and over the coming years it will have a catestrophic effect on the quality and provision of healthcare in the country. Even if Labour are elected in 2015 and Andy Burnham makes good on his promise to undo the legislation, the damage will already have been done and the wheels of privatisation (which were, yes, set grinding under the previous Labour government) will be spinning too fast to stop. The NHS is a political anomaly and I don’t believe it could exist again. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.
The bill is going to pass. The bill was always going to pass. The government has a three line whip, which supersedes public pressure. The bill is going to pass because by this stage its failure to do so would be a defeat the Coalition could not recover from. The bill is going to pass because its proposed reforms are already being put into place and there’s no going back. No amount of writing to MPs and Peers, no amount of signatures on a petition, no amount of candle light vigils, no amount of protests and rallies are going to change this.

This has been obvious for some time (though the more terrifying details and confirmation of our more pesimistic fears have been coming thick and fast in recent weeks). So, where was the left? There has been a lot of talk about how ashamed we should all be for our failure to stop this bill. ‘How will we look our children in the eyes and tell them that we failed?’ etc. There has been a lot of talk of people ‘doing everything they can’ (which in practise usually means writings to Peers and signing a petition). Out of this have come an entirely undeserved sense of sanctimony from some, and an equally undeserved sense of guilt from others.

Some people’s frustration over this political inevitability has manifested itself in a poorly disguised contempt for the public for allowing this to happen. ‘If you’re not prepared to fight for it, you don’t deserve free healthcare’ the hateful mantra runs. This is bullshit. To lay the blame for this toxic legislation at the feet of those who have tried to oppose it, or those who didn’t know it was happening at all, is dull and obnoxious. The government (in collusion with private health firms) wrote this bill, they are forcing it through, they are to blame. Many people I know are afriad of what the future holds which, frankly, is sensible, but too many of us are compounding that stress with guilt for failure to act. All of the forms of protest we have available to us to stop a piece of legislation being passed can be boiled down to simply asking the people with the power to act in as we want them. If they choose not to listen (as they have done, consistently), we have no further way to compell them.

Part of the desire to blame ineffective campaigners rather than an uncaring government may stem from a refusal to accept powerlessness within our Parliamentary system. It’s preferable to think that we just dropped the ball this time around than that we never stand a chance of winning, perhaps. The truth is, the government doesn’t need our approval to get things done. If you don’t like the government’s NHS reforms, don’t vote for them again at the next election. That’s it; that’s your democratic power; that’s the recourse that’s open to you if you work within the system. It’s in three years time. How many staff and patients will have had their lives changed in that time?

If this farcical travesty of a legislative process can be good for anything, let it be that we can no longer have any delusions about our power within a representative democracy. Stop blaming ourselves; we never stood a chance. This was their battleground, they set the terms and they always win. If we really want to fight them, we need to think, dream and act much bigger.

Notes from a Pessimist

“And, my friends, in this story you have a history of this entire movement. First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.”

From a 1918 US trade union address by Nicholas Klein

It is important to stay optimistic during sustained bouts of political activism, because it is a tiring and frequently dispiriting endeavour. It is important to find things, even minor ones, to be optimistic about, because the intellectual and physical drain of combating deeply entrenched injustice must be met with a defiant strength of purpose. It is important to stay optimistic because it is so easy to lose a grip on one’s mental well being that we sometimes don’t notice it happened. However, in the spirit of avoiding the disappointment and disheartenment, and of maintaining one’s optimism, it is important not to be naive.

While much has been made of the validity of a campaign with no initial specific demands, it is important to have some idea of what victory might look and feel like. For the occupy movement, victory is change; be it reform in the highest echelons of the banking and finance industries or total restructuring of society’s political and economic relationships. Some of the following might be good, some are arguably essential, but it’s a long road to a perfect world and none have ever walked it, so some perspective is important. Despite persistent belief to the contrary, these are not victory:

• Getting positive attention from the media
• Getting negative attention from the media
• Getting support from passers by
• Obeying the law while the state is breaking it
• Getting arrested
• Getting stopped, disrupted, kettled or beaten by the police
• Performing the most impressive banner drop, street theatre or spectacular stunt
• Mass mobilisation
• Kind words from leaders
• Placatory compromise
• Getting ignored
• Getting ridiculed
• Getting attacked
• Getting burned
• Having monuments built to you
• Enjoying yourself

Where Have All The Protest Songs Gone?

“Where have all the protest songs gone?”, Eleanor Margolis laments in the New Statesman this week. Margolis recounts a trip to the End of the Road festival where she saw Robin Ince introduce Grace Petrie, “a guitar-wielding 20-something” who played a set of protest songs; defiant songs both about the agendas and ideals of modern protester movements and about protests themselves, after which an unimpressed Margolis went home and penned a piece in which she asked “where have all the protest songs gone”. Well, as the first commenter on the article pointedly and rightly mentions, the place to look for protest music is not the comedy tent of the End of the Road festival, but the fact that hard edged political music filtered even into this arena, falling into Margolis’ lap without her needing to look for it, indicates that perhaps there isn’t such a dearth of protest music after all. Before Margolis gets to her point she makes a few snide remarks about the performance, and before I get to mine I’m going to briefly address them, not only because they are specifically unfair but also because there is a broader issue.

In Margolis’ eyes, Petrie’s set was a series of “painfully earnest protest songs”. I’ve seen Grace Petrie play live; it’s a stunning, moving, inspiring and thought provoking experience. This is perhaps because she writes songs like ‘Emily Davidson Blues’ and ‘Tonne of Bricks’ which tackle the difficult politics of protest vandalism, violence and sentencing. The demonisation of politically conscious students, our problematic cultural values and the hypocrisy of the legal systemare subjects I’ve written on before, but never with the talent to set to music. These are difficult ideas, and they are important for activists. Margolis, I would tactfully suggest, might not fully relate to the student protest experience articulated in these lyrics in quite the same way I do. Grace Petrie’s music is unashamed in its idealism, determination and ideology. Margolis writes as the kind of achingly self-deprecating lefty journalist who must describe a festival as a “small, boutique-y gathering of beardy Guardian readers” in order to excuse herself from being there. While I find Petrie’s performances gripping and honest, Margolis considered it “so sickeningly worthy that I nearly choked on my falafel burger”. Perhaps because she was trying to eat it ironically.

Margolis’ assertion that “the whole performance seemed to cling for its life to another era” is where we get to the real point, though I think she has missed it. The problem that we have with the question “where have all the protest songs gone” is a problem that pervades attitudes to protest and the culture of protest both within and without the activist community, which is expecting modern activity to fall into the patterns of the past. Grace Petrie herself articulated the hypocrisy at the heart of this in a tweet to me:

@MediocreDave The 2 criticisms I hear: a) we need protest music for TODAY and b) People writing protest songs belong in another era

Memorials

Today is a good day to talk about statues.

Charlie Gilmour has just been sent down for 16 months for violent disorder during student fees riots. He notoriously swung from a union flag hanging from the Cenotaph before later harassing some royal cars, smashing up Topshop, concealing a mannequin’s leg and angrily refusing to eat cake. As the Mail puts it, ‘although Gilmour was not sentenced for his behaviour at the Cenotaph, he was told his actions were ‘reprehensible’.’

The Judge in this case, Nicholas Price QC, was quite clear, though, that Gilmour’s actions at the “empty tomb”, despite not being the crime he was prosecuted for, had certainly been reflected in the sentence. He was explicit in highlighting that Gilmour’s reckless behaviour was made significantly worse by the cultural significance of the space he did it in.

“For a young man of your intelligence and education and background to profess to not know what the Cenotaph represents defies belief,” he said.
“You have shown disrespect to those who gave the ultimate sacrifice, to those who fell defending this country.”
But Gilmour was given some credit for apologising for his actions.
“You expressed yourself in a fitting way when you said how deeply ashamed you are for what is, as you acknowledge, the terrible insult to those who gave their lives,” the judge said.

BBC

For Price, it is inconceivable that an intelligent person could fail to understand the importance of the memorial. Everyone knows what it represents, and in failing to give it the reverence it is seen to deserve, Gilmour has disrespected our war dead with an insult which penetrates right to the heart of our national values.

The soldiers died, Gilmour was told, to protect his freedom and the freedom of all in this country. It is because they gave their life that Gilmour has the right to peaceful protest, and so not only did he disrespect their memory by using the flag as a rope swing, but also by failing to live within the limits of the freedom they apparently won. And this is where I start to lose my footing with established wisdom on the subject. Firstly, because of the obvious obliviousness on the part of the Judge to the irony both of lecturing a man about the privileges of freedom while simultaneously condemning his behaviour and curtailing his liberty and of chastising him for his failure to remain peaceful in the same breath as recalling the example set by soldiers in a war. Secondly, and more unsettlingly, because when one looks at the situation afresh, nothing seems more disrespectful to the thousands of dead than, decades later, to appropriate their suffering as a tool with which to admonish a foolish man for his drunken idiocy. The reverence that Price expected, the reverence we are instructed to feel about those killed in combat is a function of the gross hypocrisy surrounding the issue. At the heart of this hypocrisy is the problem of statues, monuments and artifacts of commemoration.

Today, the Queen, our head of state, unveiled a new statue to honour the work done by the men and women of Bletchley Park during the second world war. These were the nation’s best cryptographers, logicians and mathematicians and, by creating what is sometimes regarded as the world’s first computer, they were able to crack the Enigma machine’s code, which was a decisive moment in the course of the war. Little mention today was made of the fate of Alan Turing, one of the most significant thinkers of Bletchley Park. Turing was gay, and because homosexuality was a crime he was given the choice between prison or ‘treatment’ in the form of female hormones which amounted to chemical castration, which he accepted. Eventually he was found dead from cyanide poisoning, in what is presumed to be suicide. Neither Gordon Brown’s 2009 apology on behalf of the British government nor today’s statue can undo the suffering that was inflicted on Turing by a state whose ill-conceived values he was unable to live by. What we instead witness is an effort to disguise the sordid ideology on which we have built so much of our society behind a whitewash of reverence, ‘respect’ and patriotism. By honouring the work of the Bletchley Park team, the establishment is merely exploiting their legacy to celebrate itself. Turing is best known today for lending his name to the Turing Test, a means of identifying artificial intelligence. Turing enables us to differentiate between genuine humanity and its mere cynical imitation.

The Cenotaph, as our primary war monument, is possibly the most focused example of the self-serving and dishonest logic of commemoration. The inherently false values are perhaps best expressed in three words engraved on one side: “THE GLORIOUS DEAD”. Why, we must ask ourselves, is there not a monument to our glorious living? There is a legend that when the Cenotaph was unveiled soldiers who had returned from the war impoverished, wounded and hungry remarked ‘we asked for bread and you gave us stone’. Consider those words for a moment, and you begin to understand the truly chilling nature of war memorials. When sleeping rough in Westminster is criminalised in September, a proportion of the homeless people the Police will be moving along will be ex-soldiers who we will claim to honour in November. They can’t sleep in the Cenotaph. The state’s failure to adequately provide for veterans reveals its appreciation for soldiers’ sacrifices to be little more than a pose. The glorious living are an inconvenience, the glorious dead are a tool. They are to be celebrated, because their memory is a short hand for the values which keep us in line. Today, their deaths were used to criticise a twit because he had played on the cold stone with which we celebrate their suffering, and their memory was appropriated in the courts to add generations of emotional weight to the establishment’s artificial distinction between ‘proper protest’ and that which deviates from what is acceptable by providing a genuinely confrontational challenge to the state’s authority. Is this what those men died for? I suspect it probably is.

Every major war shapes our attitudes to war itself. In the days of empire, war was glorious and masculine. In the 20th century WWI and WWII were honourable, noble, righteous, necessary. As we watched Vietnam the tide began to turn, as we started to weigh up the moral authority with which the Western powers engaged overseas, the demographic of the men who died and the atrocities that were committed against indigenous people. For many of us raised on Iraq, war is an expensive, misguided, illegitimate affair, as much an assault on the decency and character of a people by their government as on one nation by another. Is it any wonder that those who engineer war are so keen to remind us of The Great War? Is it any wonder that we still talk in outdated terms of ‘trenches’, ‘the front’ and ‘no man’s land’? Is it any wonder that the symbol of our remembrance is the poppy of 1918, not the deserts or the oil fields of 2011?

Jon Snow sparked a modicum of controversy in November for declining to wear a poppy on television in the weeks leading to the 11th, as he found the gesture lost its meaning if it became just another unthinking habit. TV studios have baskets of poppies on stand by so that everyone who is to appear on camera can be fitted with one, ensuring that a consistent and unconfrontational set of values are presented at all times. Wearing a poppy to ‘remember’ the dead has become a default for the public figures who appear within the mainstream media, a cultural trend to which one conforms. The ubiquitous prevalence of poppies is, to any student of symbols and their political potency, disquieting. They hang, pinned to the lapels of every apolitical figure, as an uncritical invocation of horrific bloodshed nestled harmlessly into everyday life, or plastered all over crosses in what could almost be taken as a deliberately cold and humourless pun on religion as the ‘opiate of the masses’. They are a totem, a prop, a signifier which tells onlookers that the wearer is compassionate and caring about soldiers’ deaths but they fail to do anything to prompt deeper thought. There are those who seek to counter this without appearing unfeeling by sporting a white poppy for peace, rejecting the militaristic jingoism and the glorification of war that is suggested by the red poppy and instead embodying the only fitting sentiment that could adorn a sincere war memorial; ‘this must never happen again’.

War memorials are dishonest. They are a way to satisfy our guilt and our concerns whilst allowing us to excuse ourselves from addressing the real tragedy. Stone is an imperfect material with which to express genuine sorrow or gratitude. War memorials are a cultural shorthand for a sentiment that we no longer bother to feel. They are a two minutes silence, when what is required is a scream. They are an exploitation of tragedy. They are a celebration of death. We should not celebrate the casualties of war. We, who have the luxury of not being soldiers, should not take a second’s pleasure, satisfaction or pride in their suffering.

This morning I was prompted to remember the provocative and flippant intellectualism of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys:

“All the mourning’s veiled the truth; it’s not ‘lest we forget’ it’s ‘lest we remember’. See, that’s what all this is about; the memorials, the Cenotaph, the two-minutes silence, because there is no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.”

Bread and Circuses

With a widely reported [though deeply unlikely] estimated global audience of over two billion, almost a third of the population of the planet was expected to watch the marriage of Prince William to Catherine Middleton on 29th April 2011. As a piece of popular spectacle, few events can ever rival this broad and diverse audience, and in some respects, with its rehearsed structure, basis in tradition, powerful visual images, communal music and inclusivity, the royal wedding can be read as a phenomenal piece of popular theatre. Allain and Harvie discuss a definition of popular theatre that takes into account hugely successful commercial ventures which exploit popular theatrical forms and attract a wide audience, offering Cirque du Soleil or the Abba musical Mamma Mia as ready examples:

These examples point to the need to make a distinction (even if this formula is not rigid and the gap is sometimes bridged) between popular commercial theatre and, at the opposite end of the spectrum, popular theatre that has an overt political agenda.^[1]

In discussing a working definition of popular theatre Allain and Harvie are right to suggest dichotomised thinking, as the term ‘popular’ can readily be applied to both large scale national (and international) events and small scale local ones. It encompasses the openly propagandistic and the consciously apolitical, groups the commercial with the anti-capitalist and incorporates the technically proficient, the rehearsed and the engrossing alongside the crude, the improvised and the alienating. Demonstrably, it is not a single dichotomy which separates different popular performances but a multitude of spectra. The two opposing modes of popular theatre that Allain and Harvie suggest are specifically flawed, as their distinction presupposes that popular ‘commercial’ theatre (which we can take to mean theatre that is concerned with entertainment and a broad appeal and does not seek to undermine or alter the status-quo) is unlikely to have a political agenda, and also because there is no obvious place for an event such as the modern British royal wedding, which does not neatly fall into either of the two extremes or onto the continuum between them. The event is not commercial though it is an open display of wealth and privilege. Nor does it claim any political agenda, though events such as these, as will be argued here, can easily be appropriated for political utility. When the state (or any aspect of the establishment) conducts popular performance events which are stylistically indebted to popular theatre traditions and invite the public to engage as participants and spectators, problematic questions arise with regards to reconciling the event’s ‘popular’ status with its anti-subversive, non-transgressive nature.

The royal wedding can be seen in its contemporary context as one of many defining moments of an era in which the staging of popular performance events dominates political discourse in this country. The ideological and economic actions taken by the government have met with stiff opposition, an opposition which has frequently manifested itself in popular performance. Groups such as UK Uncut have sought to temporarily redefine public spaces (specifically commercial ones) into spaces of performance, often choosing to theme actions around certain issues or ideas. Through the introduction of props and performance, a targeted shop or bank might be ‘turned’ into a library, a school, a creche, etc in an attempt to draw a link through the performance event between their financial practises and funding cuts to those services. Returning popular performance to the marketplace, campaigners dressed as surgeons, superheroes and Santa Claus have occupied commercial spaces while yet others have staged poetry readings, stand up comedy gigs or concerts. Similarly, activists operating under the banner NHS Direct Action have staged the agit-prop skit Death of the NHS, in which a vampiric Andrew Lansley causes the deaths of screaming and bloodied patients while draining doctors and nurses, outside various government buildings. One interesting staple of popular performance that has been witnessed on many protests is the clown, with many people choosing (apparently independently) to dress up in conventional (or subverted) clown make up and costume, both to criticise the establishment and to affectionately satirise other protesters.

In a more extreme example, those using ‘black bloc’ tactics have codified a clearly defined costume of all black clothes, their faces covered, while props such as flares, coloured smoke, paint-bombs and spray cans are used to create a public spectacle in which they demonstrate, through the symbolic destruction of icons of capitalism (such as bank branches), their capacity to alter the world they operate within. Mass events, most notably the 500,000 strong TUC march through central London on March 26th 2011, have featured less conscious performances by individuals but still exemplify many traditional aspects of popular performance, including brightly coloured props and costume, subversive humour, songs, widely known chants (a ubiquitous feature of performative activism) and, most obviously and significantly, a deliberately broad appeal. In some regards these represent a midpoint between the unlicensed demonstrations of smaller groups and the large scale events organised by the state.

State events have a great capacity to draw people together for communal expression. In a quasi-carnivalesque way people are authorised to act outside of the normal bounds of acceptable behaviour with the rules temporarily relaxed. There is another dimension to the positive role of these popular events, and one that is of significant importance to understanding Prince William’s wedding, coming, as it did, at a time of national difficulty. Arch and Marschner, in their history of British royal weddings, touch on the social significance they can have, specifically the uplifting effect on a nation’s mood. Princess Anne’s marriage in 1973 is recorded as a major national event:

Colour television pictures, an explosion of souvenirs and the relief – articulated by newspapers and magazines – that such a colourful event could still take place in a country where social disorder and economic decline seemed poised to plumb new depths, seem, in retrospect, the salient features of the occasion. ^[2]

This sentiment was directly echoed by David Cameron who declared of the engagement ‘it’s great to have a piece of unadulterated good news that everyone can celebrate … I’m sure that’s how the whole country feels, and I’m sure it’ll be something when the country will come together’. Arch and Marschner remember Princess Anne’s wedding as a welcome event of buoyant elation:

In Britain – where the government had just declared a state of emergency, considering the current situation in the coal and electricity industries a threat to the essentials of the life of the community – the splendour of the occasion worked its familiar magic, and the newspapers reported that both the fuel crisis and the state of emergency were forgotten. ^[3]

While there are many who regard these popular events as merciful reprieve from difficult times, more sober critics present the exact same phenomena as an indictment. Ian Jack, writing in Newsweek, similarly remarks of Prince Charles’ marriage to Lady Diana that

The bells rang out, the guns saluted, and Diana rode to her nuptials in a glass carriage, but the celebration came as a relief and a distraction to a country beleaguered by social division and unrest [IRA hunger strikes, race riots in Brixton and Toxteth, and, like now, 2.5 million unemployed with the number rising].

In Satire X, written in the first or second century AD, the Roman polemicist Juvenal suggested that the public, who once had democratic power over their leaders, had ‘pulled in their horns, there’s only two things that concern them: Bread and Games [also frequently translated as circuses].’ ^[4] That is to say, the people had become complacent about their political agency and were disengaged to the point that their only concerns were their immediate needs, ‘bread’, and diverting entertainment, the ‘games’ or ‘circuses’. The phrase has been developed in modern usage to refer to a deliberate attempt by the state to distract the public by providing these pieces of grand popular theatre, and in this vein has been appropriated by the activist performance group Bread and Puppet and the anti-Olympic games campaign group Bread Not Circuses (the political exploitation of various Olympic events is a persistent observation, most notably about the 1936 games in Berlin).

If there is a political usefulness in these events, it lies in their capacity to fully transform a communal mood. Allain and Harvie observe this in the age of modern broadcasting by considering one of the most important popular spectacles of recent decades:

Lady Diana’s funeral is just another example of how a local event becomes global spectacle when it is constructed by the vast resources of the world’s media. … The fact that, even though the live events were shown so extensively on television, thousands of people still felt the need to visit the palace in person or sign condolence books says much about the value placed on liveness and actual participation, however vicarious, in such events. ^[5]

The same was surely also true of Prince William’s wedding. Many people attended the event in London while many more expressed their own involvement by hosting parties, watching the television broadcast communally and dressing in specific costume for the occasion. It is not unreasonable to claim that for the weekend surrounding the wedding it was the dominant focus of the public’s attention.
The writer Ben Goldacre was quick to condemn the government for exploiting the distracting influence of the event, declaring that the Department of Health had won the ‘prize for burying bad news’ when they made a potentially unpopular announcement regarding increased cuts to NHS funding. This pronouncement is a simplification of the situation, though, and the full extent of his accusations (and the observations of Juvenal) can be be better understood when viewed in the context of the conflicted nature of popular theatre.

On the 28th April, the day before the wedding, Chris Knight, Anthropology professor and amateur exponent of political street theatre, was arrested, along with two others, for his intention to stage a mock public execution of Prince Andrew in effigy using a prop guillotine. The same afternoon, Charlie Veitch of performance activism group The Love Police was also arrested, for his stated intention to publicly voice his anti-royalist sentiment (though his specific plans were not revealed). All were arrested on ‘suspicion of conspiracy to cause public nuisance and breach of the peace.’ On the day of the wedding, a number of arrests were carried out in central London, including one by plain-clothed officers of a street performer while he was singing ‘we all live in a fascist regime’, adding an almost enjoyable irony to the performance. Veitch, Knight et al were detained in police custody for almost twenty four hours (the legal limit) and then released without charge. They had effectively been kept off of the street for the duration of the royal wedding, rendering their planned performances impossible.

Though the events, with their intended symbolic opposition, could not take place, they did contribute to a greater symbolic impression of the situation: just as the government and monarchy were engaging in a piece of popular theatre on a huge scale, enjoyed by millions across the world and uniting its audience in a sense of celebration, the Metropolitan Police were carrying out a coordinated operation to remove dissenting voices from the event. Popular theatre cannot be reduced to one single definable function, but the events of April 28th-29th 2011 demonstrate two extremes of the way it can operate. Official events, organised or sanctioned by authority, can legitimately bring people together, as was noted above, and enable them to communally express celebration, grief, remembrance, thanksgiving etc but, unlike the unlicensed, illegitimate performance of protest and political street theatre, they are unable to express dissatisfaction, radicalism and rage. In this age of dejection and dissidence, with a public torn between a desire to forget their societal troubles and an impulse to challenge them head on, the role of popular performance in public space is in flux. After the royal wedding, Assistant Commissioner Lyne Owens expressed the honour and privilege of being involved in a ‘fantastic day of pageantry and celebration’, and underscored the importance of events on the horizon from their perspective:

…today’s success should convince people that the Met is well able to handle next year’s Diamond Jubilee and the Olympic Games.

The disparity between theatre with a broad appeal and theatre that is consciously in the interests of the population will not be resolved, but analysis of the performance practises exhibited over the coming months and the social context they exist in will see it sharply defined. The future is uncertain, but with regards to social attitudes to government and the role of those who seek to find creative methods to voice dissent, Juvenal’s words already seem eerily prophetic:

Time was when their plebiscite elected Generals, Heads of State, commanders of legions: but now they’ve pulled in their horns, there’s only two things that concern them: Bread and Circuses.

‘I hear that many are to be purged.’

‘That’s right, they’re turning the heat on, and no mistake.’

*  *  *

[1] Paul Allain and Jen Harvie The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance (Oxford: Routledge, 2006) p. 190.

[2] Nigel Arch and Joanna Marschner The Royal Wedding Dresses: The Splendour of Royal Marriage Across Five Centuries (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1990) p. 127.

[3] Ibid. p. 127.

[4] Juvenal The Sixteen Satires (Middlesex: Penguin Classics, 1974) p.  207.

[5] Paul Allain and Jen Harvie The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance (Oxford: Routledge, 2006) p. 102, 103.