Cavalry Charges

The previous day in central London, along with squads of riot-suited, armed Territorial Support Group (TSG) officers, the Metropolitan Police had deployed the perversely antiquated military tactic of cavalry charges against the crowd of BLM protesters. The Met’s mounted division select their horses for size and strength, and they can weigh up to a ton each.

They were spurred into the throng without warning — a cavalry unleashed during heavy rain, on the slippery Whitehall asphalt, against a crowd comprised largely of teenagers attending their first-ever protest. At one terrifying moment, a police horse that had unseated its rider bolted, confused, through the delicate human figures that scattered beneath it.

One protester, nineteen-year-old nursing student Jessie Tieti Mawutu, was knocked unconscious and then trampled by the horse. She was lucky to survive. The police did not offer any medical support to Mawutu, leaving that to the crowd.

The Met subsequently told her that they could not be held responsible and issued a statement blithely saying that “the horse, which was uninjured, made its way back to the nearby stables.” A subsequent Netpol report into the policing of the BLM protests that summer found that “excessive use of force, including baton charges, horse charges, pepper spray and violent arrest were commonly reported and well-evidenced.”

It was June 2020 in an uncanny Britain: the Covid-19 transmission rate was still very high, a vaccine was still six months away, and hundreds of people were still dying from the disease every day. Britain was still officially locked down — pubs and restaurants were closed, households were not allowed to mix, and offices, nonessential shops, and city centers were all deserted, as they had been for three months.

And yet here were tens of thousands of young people on the streets of central London, bristling with righteous anger, protesting in solidarity with the murdered African American George Floyd, and denouncing Britain’s own colonial history. Meanwhile far-right groups of self-appointed “statue defenders” gathered in equally fractious counterdemos, rucking with the police.

Official Channels

More often than the “great men” of statuary like Edward Colston, it is crowds of ordinary people who make history, although ordinary people are rarely represented on plinths in the public squares that are their natural home. The toppling of Colston’s statue was a moment of intense relief that followed decades of patient local campaigning for the statue’s removal, or at least its recontextualization.

“What about going through the official channels?!” screamed the defenders of propriety and order in the aftermath of June 7, 2020. Wearied by this prevailing stupidity, campaigners explained that they had tried these official channels for years and found them to be unyielding. What they discovered instead was — and there’s no way this won’t sound corny, but it is undeniably true — their own collective power to effect political change.

Barely a handful of people actively pulled down the statue, but they were able to do it with the support of the assembled crowd of thousands roaring them on. Over the following six months, almost seventy public tributes to slave owners and other traffickers in human misery, including plaques, statues, and street names, were modified or had explanatory plaques added.

Not everyone shared the giddy joy and pride of the Bristol BLM crowd and their supporters. In response to the Colston action, anyone with any power seemed to be reading — as they always do — directly from Gustave Le Bon’s nineteenth-century work The Crowd.

What the Bristol protesters had done was “sheer vandalism and disorder,” said Home Secretary Priti Patel: “mob rule, completely out of kilter with the rule of law.” Policing Minister Kit Malthouse also called it “mob rule.” Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared the protests had been “hijacked by extremists.” Keir Starmer condemned the action as “completely wrong.”

In a rare but commendable outbreak of good sense from someone in his position, Avon and Somerset’s (white) police chief, Andy Bennett, risked opprobrium from his paymasters and refrained from sending officers to intervene, saying he understood why it had happened: the statue had “caused the black community quite a lot of angst.”

The local paper got it too — the Bristol Post editor Mike Norton wrote that the city had “been in denial for decades” and “brought upon itself” the drama. In a poll of the paper’s readers, 61 percent backed the protesters, with only 20 percent saying the statue should have stayed in place.

For the majority of the British press, however, this was undemocratic, unthinking thuggery. Even if you agreed with the (seemingly contentious) point that our cities should not uncritically glorify slave owners, this was the wrong way to go about it: “LAWLESS & RECKLESS” screamed the front page of the Daily Mail.

When the four Colston protesters charged with criminal damage were eventually cleared by a jury of their peers, Transport Minister Grant Shapps described this due legal process as, you guessed it, “mob rule.” Boris Johnson said that statue-topplers should not “change our history.”

Crowd Politics

To Colston’s heirs in the British establishment, the statue toppling was sinister, violent, and Stalinist in character, and even, apparently, a threat to freedom of speech, despite the fact it seemed to be bringing to the fore Bristolian voices that had never been heard before. “You can’t just cut history off at the mains. History is history. You can’t edit or censor it,” said former Conservative MP Nicholas Soames, the grandson of Winston Churchill, a man whose voice has never been in want of a microphone.

Colston’s statue was sent to the bottom of the river Avon, just as tens of thousands of African people had ended up at the bottom of the Atlantic, dumped over the side of his boats. His company transported more than one hundred thousand people as slaves from West Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas, and more than twenty-thousand died along the way. Cities like Bristol, Liverpool, London, and Glasgow are garlanded with beautiful buildings, homes, and churches that were built with money made on the backs of enslaved people.

The 2020 Bristol crowd had done more than any reverential statue to educate the general public about Edward Colston’s life, and about how the Britain we live in now came to be the way it is. I don’t mind telling you I’d never heard of Colston or his crimes until the Bristol crowd intervened; all of their efforts were generating “more history, not less,” as a friend put it to me.

The actions of protest crowds have a tendency to draw out revealing opinions from pundits and politicians. What appears as an expression of “people power” to crowd members and supporters will be dismissed as shallow groupthink and thuggery by their enemies. To be a protester is to be smug and self-righteous, and uninterested in the serious business of political power.

Indeed, the pejorative label ascribed to the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn by his detractors, notably Keir Starmer and Tony Blair, is that it consigned itself to being merely “a party of protest,” more interested in “virtue signaling” than realpolitik, and thus remained outside the norms of effective politics.

The crowd politics of public protest on the one hand, and the formal politics of bureaucracies and committee meetings on the other, are held to be in direct opposition to each other, and only the latter carries any legitimacy with the establishment.

Blaming the Victims

Political crowds are still regarded by those in power in the same way as they were in the nineteenth century. Le Bon’s formative explanations of their behavior have persisted into our own age. The only real change to the narrative over time is that every politician, police commander, right-wing broadcaster, or newspaper will now pay lip service to the idea that “of course, peaceful protest is a legitimate part of any functioning democracy. I’ve got no problem with peaceful protest!” 

It is a desultory caveat issued before the inevitable “but” screeches into the sentence like a van of riot police. Condemnation is never far away. To the enemies of the crowd, every peaceful protest crowd is liable to become a violent mob, composed of naive rubes who don’t understand the issue at hand — particularly if the perennial folk devils of “outside agitators,” “a minority of extremists,” “anarchists,” “vandals,” “yobs,” or “criminals hell-bent on violence” infiltrate the crowd, “masquerading” as peaceful protesters and corrupting the guileless masses from within.

There are several recurring themes and motifs to the way that the police, political class, and media tend to respond to protest crowds. They will significantly lowball the size of a protest, because the greater the numbers on the streets, the greater the potential legitimacy of the argument. For all that the establishment now pays lip service to “the vital role peaceful protest plays in a democracy” (yadda yadda), its ideal would be a world without any protests at all, because that would vindicate the status quo over which it presides.

They will exaggerate the danger posed by the crowd, often inventing things out of whole cloth to do so. “It is no exaggeration to say the sky was black with missiles,” said the senior commanding officer at Orgreave, Assistant Chief Anthony Clements — exaggerating, and wildly, to justify sending horses charging into the crowd.

As part of his defamation of the 2010 student protesters, David Cameron told the public that police officers had been “dragged off horses and beaten” in Parliament Square. This was a flagrant lie, originating with the Met, who were later forced to pay £50,000 in compensation to the two protesters they had accused of doing so after it was finally disproved in court. Cameron has never retracted or apologized.

They will slander, hound, and maliciously prosecute the very protesters who have been hurt by wanton police violence — to muddy the waters, to troll and demoralize their victims, or some combination of the above. Take Eric Newbiggin, who was photographed with blood pouring down his face after the police assaulted him at Orgreave in 1984, before they charged him with rioting. He was later acquitted.

In the Parliament Square kettle in 2010 was a twenty-year-old student, Alfie Meadows: he was truncheoned in the head by a riot police officer and very nearly killed, and then, as he lay in hospital with brain damage, charged with violent disorder. He was prosecuted, tried, retried, and found not guilty in 2013.

Finally, a full twelve years after the near-fatal assault, in 2023 the Met was forced to apologize and pay him substantial damages. The force informed Meadows that “despite extensive inquiries,” they just could not work out which officer had assaulted him, so none could be held accountable.

This Time It’s Different

It is a process which repeats itself over and over. Six women who attended the 2021 candlelit vigil for Sarah Everard were aggressively arrested, handcuffed on the ground, and then charged; these charges were finally dropped a year later. Two of the women, Patsy Stevenson and Dania Al-Obeid, pursued counterclaims and were awarded substantial damages by the Met.

It happens so often, and the charges are so frequently and transparently vexatious, that one can only assume such prosecutions are not a systemic failure by the police and Crown Prosecution Service but in fact a conscious tactic and a key part of the propaganda battle against protesters. “There’s no smoke without fire” is very far from being a central tenet of the English legal system, but if you are an institution like the Met, capable of fanning smoke around everywhere, having your obfuscations and lies taken up with zeal and repeated uncritically by large swaths of the media, it certainly makes the truth harder to discern.

As part of this, the police will also use what Professor Paul Gilroy has called “the golden hour” after an outrage of their own making, the short window available to fix the narrative in aspic and in their favor — a moment when credulous journalists will happily print whatever allegations they are fed, thanks to an excess of trust and an absence of time and energy to corroborate the police line.

Any debunking in the weeks, months, or years that follow the event inevitably reaches far fewer people, so this approach always constitutes a net gain for the state, reputationally speaking. Lie first, have the record corrected months later, and shrug, because the press has stopped paying attention and the public has forgotten.

One final theme, regarding more militant protests or riots, is the establishment’s refusal to accept that those involved might have had a legitimate reason — or any reason — to leave the house in the first place. Stephen Reicher has observed that opinion-formers are almost always willing to concede, and perhaps even applaud, the “meaningful” political motivations that explain historic rioting. Those motives could include racism, poverty, or gender inequality, but the event has to have taken place at least a few decades ago: anything similar but recent is mindless thuggery, which must be condemned completely and immediately.

In the past, goes the received wisdom, people protested against injustice with clear-eyed, righteous indignation; but not anymore. This time it’s different — this time it’s invalid, without context, without reason or morality. See, for example the Suffragettes — now sanitized in their behavior and held up as sweet, pious heroes in children’s books and on coffee mugs. Both their misogynistic demonization at the time as deranged harpies and their extensive campaign of targeted arson and attacks on property have been forgotten.

The same goes for the sanitization and sanctification of the heroes and history of the American civil rights movement — now celebrated from a safe-enough distance, with any militancy or socialist principles airbrushed from the picture. This historic lag in the understanding of riots is no accident, and it has a clear political imperative.

In order to maintain the legitimacy of the established order, it is vital that the Le Bon version of events is repeated loud and clear, and no attempt is made to understand the motivations of rioters until the dust has long since settled and the government ministers, newspaper editors, and police chiefs are dozing gently in the House of Lords.