So long, 2010. Welcome in, shortly, 2011. To be honest, it is hard to be enthusiastic about the approaching year. It seems that it will bring with it a period of social distress, industrial action and popular disgruntlement that will accord with the worst experienced during either the 1970s and 1980s.
Even if you are in broad agreement with the thrust of present government policy, that is not a welcome thought.
It seems obvious for this blog to compare current levels of popular anger with those demonstrated in 1381. (At least, it does when the Evening Standard calls and asks you to, anyway.)
And although it is quite difficult and probably rather fatuous to make anything more than superficial comparisons between the conditions that preceded and surrounded the Peasants’ Revolt and those that we see on the streets today, there are some very basic similarities.
The following points have occurred to me:
1. There is now, and was then, a general hostility towards a political elite that is regarded as a self-interested, self-protecting class. In 1381 there was violent protest against a political class at large, which encompassed men in central government, local government and office-holders of all varieties. We have seen a similar strain developing this year, which is traceable back at least as far as the scandal concerning parliamentary expenses, which broke back in 2009. I should think that one of the reasons that Ed Miliband has proved so utterly feeble as leader of the Labour party is that he either cannot or dare not try to position himself in line with popular discontent, since he knows he himself - as a career politician - is one of the marked men.
2. A feeling of general outrage that the rich are forcing the poor to pay for a financial catastrophe for which they bore no responsibility. This was very much the order of the day in 1381. Government had been widely seen as corrupt and financially incompetent since the mid-1370s. England’s public finances were in disarray due to catastrophic mismanagement (the war with France) that was seen to have been cooked up by a privileged few and paid for, through poll taxes, by the struggling masses. Now, the public finances are in a mess due to a global recession, blamed widely on the ultra-rich banking classes. Public spending cuts are widely viewed to be as regressive as poll taxes - thus creating a similar feeling today as there was in 1381. To wit: the rich got us into this mess; now they’re making the poor buy us out of it. The analysis is pretty dodgy in both cases, but it’s easy to understand and also to believe.
3. If revolt comes, it will probably be a lower middle-class revolt, not a working class revolt. The rebellion in 1381 was led by artisans, village constables and parish priests, and furthered by city apprentices. It had much to do with the crushed hopes of the aspirant middling sort, and was not an early rise of the proles. When I look at the protesters on the streets of London now - be it the UK Uncut lot or the tuition fee protesters - I see students and politically articulate young people. Some of them might identify themselves as working class, but they are clearly a rung above the lowest levels of society, who never tend to rebel in any age, as they are too busy trying to survive the next 24 hours.
4. The gleeful involvement of troublemakers. Every revolt attracts the rent-a-mob. There were plenty involved in the 1381 revolt who just wanted to smash things up a bit. Ditto today.
5. Xenophobia. One of the most savage acts that took place in 1381 was the massacre of London’s Flemish merchants. Was this undertaken by the Kent/Essex rebels? I very much doubt it - it smacked of the London mob, who hated foreigners as a rule and took the opportunity to behead a few. Today, the largely Left-wing protests against tax loopholes, big business, student fees etc do not seem to have attracted the involvement of those racist movements alive in the UK and represented politically by nationalist parties like the EDL or BNP. But it would not be too great a stretch, should we face the nightmare scenario of a general strike/mass, general anti-government protest, to see the anti-immigration skein of political discontent in the UK start to entwine with the anti-cuts/anti-capitalist/anti-government thread.
I’m sure there are some more superficial similarities to be noted. I’ll jot them down here as and when they occur.
In the meantime, and having said all that, have a very merry Christmas. Let’s worry about the new year when we get there!
Dan
The face of protest
London, 26 March 2011: If you watch the news tonight, you’ll probably see images of ‘anarchists’ (read: a hotchpotch of criminals, vandals and thugs) smashing up the Ritz, throwing paint at Topman, smashing the window of a Porsche dealership, throwing paint-bombs at the police and generally doing a lot of other fairly disagreeable rampaging.
These are the images that will represent a day of demonstrations against the coalition government.
And yet. According to most reporters on the ground in London, the people causing criminal damage and wreaking havoc on the city constitute only a tiny minority of the 400,000 demonstrators who have come to the capital to protest government policy towards tax and public spending.
I suppose it was ever thus. Read the chronicle accounts of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, and you are struck immediately by very similar, if more extreme headlines: the sack of the Savoy (then a palace, not a hotel, but very arguably the Ritz of its day); attacks on super-wealthy London merchants suspected of corrupt political collusion; violent, murderous attacks on government officials and, yes, a lot of other fairly disagreeable rampaging.
In 1381 the worst violence was perpetrated by a similarly small, violent and criminal element of the rebels. They were the rebels that remained longest in London, committed the most barbaric acts and were eventually slaughtered with the greatest prejudice by the government.
What one hears very little about when the news gets made (and when history is written) is the vast herds of non-violent protesters, who have political grievances but wish to express them noisily, peacefully and within the law.
The thing about those protesters, be they public sector workers in 2011 or over-taxed rural landowners in 1381, is that what they do is interesting but essentially quite boring.
Or to put it another way: we would rather read about a nutter chucking a bin through the window of the Vodafone store and a mad priest chopping the archbishop of Canterbury’s head off, than a mildly cheesed-off ordinary Joe exercising his right to protest (as is now) and then going home.
I’m not saying that’s right. I’m saying that’s the news for you. And that’s history too, to an extent. We get our kicks from studying the exceptional and the extreme.
PS I should probably say at this point that if you want to know more about 1381, and thus learn a little more about where we stand in 2011, then you can buy my book, here.