by I Fought the Law- A Riotous Romp in Search of British Democracy (epub)
As the train pulled away from London Bridge, half an hour late, my mobile phone rang. It was John. I answered with an immediate apology.
‘I’m really sorry, John, I’m going to be late.’
‘Oh fuck,’ he replied.
‘We’ll have fun, though. I’ll buy you some lunch.’
‘Beer, Dan, beer. See you soon.’
I was hoping that John would be able to put the picnickers into some kind of historical context for me. Prasanth had told me that he thought demonstrators were true patriots despite always being portrayed as extremists in the newspapers. The dictionary defines a patriot as someone who is devoted to his country. Some may argue that devotion is following England’s football or cricket teams across the world, or cheering wildly as the Queen rushes past in a bulletproof limousine, but for me, being prepared to get arrested to defend the principle of free speech is a bit closer to the mark. I had come to the conclusion that far from being a bunch of idealistic radicals, these people were just fulfilling their roles as citizens. The seventy-two-year-old holding back part of his tax in protest against the war, the medical officer refusing to go on active service, they were just the tip of the iceberg. But why were people everywhere suddenly beginning to take a stand? It wasn’t just the war in Iraq. Pensioners were refusing to pay council tax, demonstrations were being held against roads, airports, hospital closures and out-of-town supermarket developments. Was there something in the air? Where was this spirit coming from? Why were so many people beginning to feel they were under attack? Perhaps it was nothing new. Perhaps it has always been happening under the surface. Were these people just the latest examples of a pattern of behaviour going back centuries? John was just the person to give me some answers.
An hour later I spotted him in the waiting room at Bedford station. ‘Ah, there you are.’ He slapped me on the back. We walked into town for an all-you-can-eat Chinese and then made straight for a Wetherspoon pub called Pilgrim’s Progress. John looked through the window at the beers they had on that day and didn’t look impressed. ‘There’s another one up the road, let’s see what they’ve got.’ So off we went further into the town.
As we walked, people made no attempt to hide their surprise as John ambled along the pavement. Six foot five with long, wild, grey hair and an enormous beard, he’s a hard man to ignore. It was John’s physical presence that always got him his acting jobs, rather than any specific acting ability. ‘I specialize in tramps, drunks and maniacs,’ he told me once. Although it was just the beard that got him booked on Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway. One member of the studio audience had written in to Jim'll Fix It at the age of eight asking to throw a custard pie in someone’s beard. John fulfilled the childhood dream live on TV thirty years later. He’d also been a vagrant for Graham Norton. ‘It’s not very dignified,’ he told me a few weeks afterwards, ‘but you pay the bills any way you can.’
We found a quiet corner in a suitable pub and sat down with our frothing pints.
‘What’s all this bollocks about then, Dan?’ he boomed, and drained his glass. I went back to the bar, got him another pint, sat back down and asked him what he made of the reputation British people had for having a stiff upper lip and being too timid to complain. He leant forward and raised his eyebrows, staring at me intently through his bushy grey face. ‘A very quick glance at historical records will prove that that is total nonsense. That was actually the thinking behind the little pamphlet I produced called The Primer of English Violence™ which was just a simple chronological list of all disturbances from 1485 to 1974. The amount of material I assembled, which was by no means exhaustive, showed that there was rarely more than ten years without some kind of uprising, disturbance, riot or revolt of some kind. In fact, it’s not been a tranquil five hundred-odd years at all. You see, it’s in our blood to stand up against tyranny.’
I told him what Prasanth had said about British democracy being the gold standard and that I was beginning to think that the protesters I’d met, and the ones I kept reading about in the newspapers, were true patriots. He began to grin.
‘Well, first you’ve got to understand what being British, or in reality what being English, means. The Scots and the Welsh would take issue with us all being lumped in together. Daniel Defoe wrote a wonderful poem about the True-Born Englishman where he says we’re the mongrels of the world. You see, there’s no such thing as the English. There’s no true race of English. We’re all a bit of this, a bit of that and a bit of the kitchen sink. You know, there’s no English. It’s wonderful, vitriolic stuff. If English means anything, it means everyone. This is why it’s so absurd for all these nationalistic c**ts to bang on about racial purity all the time. Apart from their point of view being objectionable crap in the first place, it also proves that they haven’t got the slightest clue about the nation they claim to be so passionate about.’
Being seen as a ‘nationalistic c**t’, as John so eloquently put it, always seemed to me to be the biggest stumbling block to anyone seeking to display any sense of national pride. The idea of reclaiming patriotism around a sense of liberty was an idea that had long appealed to me. Many people take a dim view of the British Empire and the numerous atrocities it has been associated with, but a national identity existed long before Britannia ruled the waves. The ‘Empire’ was the recorded empire of the ruling class: the aristocracy, the monarchy, the entrepreneurs of the Industrial Revolution. The selling of our labour by the hour in ‘dark satanic mills’ and factories, rather than the medieval practice of being more in control of your working life, was the beginning of our current way of doing things. In order to force people away from their lives as artisans, where many had incomes' from different sorts of ‘jobs’ rather than the insecurity of one full-time occupation, the Church was brought in to preach hellfire and damnation from the pulpit to anyone who refused to enter the mills and factories of the new industrial age. In Britain today there are many campaigns each year to increase the number of bank holidays to bring us in line with the rest of Europe. In the days of ‘Saint Monday’ the idea that you couldn’t just decide for yourself whether you went to work or not would have seemed absurd. In the early years of the Industrial Revolution people didn’t need state-sanctioned public holidays because they only bothered going back to work on a Monday if their wage packet had run out. Work was seen then as a necessary evil that stopped you doing what you wanted to do rather than a ‘virtue’ in itself, as propagated by the Protestant work ethic that enslaved the vast majority of people in poorly paid, clock-watching jobs. As you can imagine, ‘Saint Monday’ didn’t last long. The mill owners abhorred the notion that people should expect to be in control of their own lives. How ironic that the ‘progress’ of the industrial age has brought us to today where we have less control over our time than we had in 1760.25
When Gandhi told the people of India to burn Lancashire cloth and to weave their own cotton as a symbolic rejection of the Empire, the people in the slums of Britain supported him, appreciating only too well the reality of the Empire for those who were propping it up. When Gandhi came to England to discuss Indian independence it was no coincidence that he decided to lodge in the slums of the East End where he was welcomed with open arms. The unrecorded voice of Albion was as undocumented back in the days of Empire as it is today.
I returned from the bar swaying slightly, but with more frothing ale in my arms. As I sat down, John continued.
‘The idea of English patriotism coalesced around the figure of John Bull. Now he’s a tricky one, because on the one hand he was the epitome of the brain-dead thug brandishing a cudgel to make his case. Nevertheless, he is still also the perfect image of English common sense -common sense being what the common people have. Forget democracy, it’s a much more powerful sense, the common sense, shared by everybody in the country, everybody in society. It’s embedded in the character. It’s a very odd phrase when you think about it. One that we take for granted.’
Now I may be
naive about the economy but I’m even more so when it comes to democracy. I know it’s important, but I haven’t seen much evidence of it in my lifetime. As we all know, in a democracy everyone not in prison who is over eighteen gets a vote. But under our current electoral system, unless you live in an area where the government’s majority is under threat, no-one actually cares who you vote for. So living in a democracy, while it sounds wonderful, principled and ideal, doesn’t always mean that your voice gets heard, unless, as I said, you live in one of the ‘swing seats’ Peter Snow’s always talking about on TV. Labour held on to power in the 2005 elections by getting 22 per cent of the possible vote. It’s hardly a ringing endorsement from the British people when 78 per cent of us either voted for someone else or couldn’t be bothered to vote at all.
We don’t actually live in a democracy anyway. The power of your vote depends on your constituency. For example, if you live in the less populous far reaches of Scotland your single vote is a greater proportion of the vote as a whole in your constituency than it would be in Deptford, the constituency where I live. So one vote is not always of equal value to another, which surely is supposed to be one of the cornerstones of ‘democracy’. Then, of course, we still have the House of Lords, which is not elected at all. All of this is so well known that I risk ridicule for writing it here, but these are the facts that so many of us seem happy to forget when we idealize our ‘democracy’. To combat this, many people, including the Liberal Democrats, advocate the introduction of proportional representation — where one vote really is equal to another. But successive governments have thrown out the idea as unworkable, and it seems unlikely that the Liberal Democrats will come to power under the current rules and implement PR any time soon.
Common sense, on the other hand, is something we all share whether we vote or not. There is no official national forum to discuss what it is or what we all mean by it, but it is the one thing we rely on to protect our communities from the questionable actions of our democracy. At the moment common sense sits, fuming but impotent, in every house up and down the nation. It only seems to mobilize when a crisis occurs that forces people to take a stand in the small amount of time they have left when they get back from work - if a hospital is threatened with closure, for example, or a planned mobile phone mast threatens a local community. This is the closest our common sense ever gets to our political leaders, usually in the form of a defiant but unsuccessful attempt to halt a centralized government policy that has little or no consideration for local circumstances. When you think about it, these kinds of demonstrations are simply expressions of the public feeling the machinations of our democracy so efficiently manage to ignore. It seems a waste only to harness these thoughts, passions and ideas at a moment of crisis and not use that common sense opinion to give people more control of their lives at a local level. But as no practical legal means to protect your community actually exists (see chapters 4 and 6), when this collective common sense does mobilize for a local cause it nearly always ends in failure. It is hardly surprising, then, that people have less and less faith in the system, and interest in politics as a whole breaks down.
I returned, yet again, from the bar, flushed and grinning wildly, with more beer in my hands. John and I were working our way through our fifth (or was it sixth?) pint when he began to explain more about the True-Born Englishman.
‘A good way to explain the idea of the True-Born Englishman is the famous Hogarth picture Gin Lane. It’s not widely realized that it is part of a pair. Gin Lane is bad but the other one, Beer Street, is good. And Beer Street is an equally tremendous print. People think Hogarth was having a go at alcohol in general with Gin Lane, but gin was what was causing all the problems, not beer. Everything in Beer Street is paradise. The only one not having a good time in Beer Street is the pawnbroker, because beer is part of the true English birthright. They used to drink beer all the time! They had small beer, which was virtually non-alcoholic, but it was much safer to drink than water. Drinking water back then could kill you, but beer was safe. There was also the belief, which I learned from an academic a few years ago, that wine was seen by the English as being associated with Catholic Europe, whereas hops made beer, which was Protestant and English. So you also had this split between Beer-Good-Protestant and Wine-Bad-Catholic.
‘This takes us to the other birthright of the True-Born Englishman - to defy tyranny, which was most clearly shown when England broke from Rome [in the sixteenth century]. England became the first world power to be non-Catholic. There had been non-Catholic outbreaks before, but England was the first sovereign state not to acknowledge the authority of Rome, which is why Rome tried to send Jesuits to undermine it, why the Armada was sent, why the Pope said he would bless anyone who assassinated Queen Elizabeth. So all this Protestant stuff, this isn’t Ian Paisley speaking, this is our orthodox history that used to be taught in schools, which is now overlooked in the multifaith era. There’s nothing wrong with that, but this stuff used to be the proud boast of the orthodox view and it was taught up until the 1940s. It inspired the whole of the Churchillian period. It is an image we always cast ourselves in. We stand alone against tyranny. We stood alone against Napoleon, we stood alone against Hitler, and Thatcher tried to position herself standing alone against the communist menace until Reagan joined her.
‘So the rights of the True-Born Englishman are to drink beer and defy authority. To defy tyranny whatever its guise. If tyranny raises its head it’s our duty to challenge it and to fight it until it’s overthrown. So your protesters are fulfilling their proper destiny. They are the ones carrying out England’s role. They’re the ones, wherever they might have been born, being true to England’s history, its character, its heritage and its culture.
‘I’ll give you one good example of what I mean. 1848. was a year of revolutions in Europe. We didn’t have one in England; the best we had was the Chartists’ petition, which failed. Now most of the revolutions in Europe were put down by the military, and in Hungary, Kossuth’s independent uprising was suppressed by a real butcher general called Haynau. Haynau came over to England for an official tour of London and part of his tour was around the Barclay and Perkins Brewery in Southwark. Well, the draymen there heard who he was and they went mad. They got hold of him and beat the living shit out of him. As far as they were concerned he was a butcher so they beat the crap out of him and he had to be rescued. Palmerston [the Prime Minister at the time] sent a perfunctory apology to Haynau, but then extended a very warm welcome to Kossuth. This pissed the Queen off no end but made Palmerston very popular in the country at large. So as late as the mid-nineteenth century it was still there. It’s still there to this day, but it was more noticeable then. Can you imagine the British Prime Minister welcoming the head of the democratic movement in China, if there is one, like that today? So your fellow with the gold standard, I love that. The idea that anybody who didn’t behave decently who came to England would get the shit beaten out of them is something to be proud of. That’s why we’ve got this reputation. Today, of course, those draymen would no doubt be labelled mindless thugs or terrorists.’
Being told that being English actually means being part of an inclusive mongrel race that has always thrived on diversity, and that your right and duty as a member of that race is to stand up against tyranny whatever its guise -government, corporations or anyone who tries to exploit you or take away your freedom - and drink large amounts of beer (rather than gin, or its modern equivalents, alcopops, flavoured vodka and those luminous shots you can buy in dodgy nightclubs), was all of great comfort to me. That was an idea of national identity I could get on board with.
The map into Albion was beginning to take shape. It was a place that felt like home. A tolerant country where people from all over the world are welcome, where you don’t take any crap from people trying to exploit you, and where you have as much fun as possible, largely, though not exclusively, through drinking beer. That’s my idea of Albion. Let’s celebrate those p
rinciples next time it’s 23 April.
Having discussed the overthrowing of tyranny, John and I decided to continue our exploration of the other part of our birthright and get thoroughly and defiantly pissed. I fell asleep on the train home, missed my stop and ended up in Brighton. I didn’t stumble through my front door until two in the morning.
A few days later I was back in Parliament Square. Mark Barrett had phoned me to say that Cindy Sheehan was going to meet Brian Haw as part of her publicity trip to Britain. Cindy had become the most prominent anti-war campaigner in America after camping outside George Bush’s compound in Texas, demanding an audience with the man she blamed for the loss of her son, a soldier who had died in Iraq. There was a great commotion in the square. A mob of people surrounded an inspector and ten police officers and there were press everywhere. People shouted at the police but they remained deliberate and calm. Most of the people were arguing that they were there to meet Cindy Sheehan and had no intention of protesting. One of them pointed out that there were no banners and no-one was chanting. The policeman told them calmly that in his view it was an unauthorized protest and that unless everyone left within half an hour they would all be arrested. Mark handed me a ‘Protest Permit Holders Only’ sign the picnickers had made and was immediately rounded on by a policeman who gave him one of the leaflets explaining that he had just broken the law. Mark took it from him and smiled.
Behind him, things were becoming increasingly fraught. People were trying to talk calmly but their frustration was clear. One of the women I’d seen at die first meeting who looked like a schoolteacher was doing her best not to lose her temper with a policeman: ‘It’s not a protest, we are allowed to stand here to wait for Cindy Sheehan. You have no right to threaten us with arrest! This is a public area! We are committing no crime!’ The police backed off and stood away from the crowd, but they had made their intent clear. More officers appeared on the edges of the square. We all had half an hour to leave or the arrests would begin.