Why Britain does not revolt

While anti-austerity demonstrations and protests have broken out in countries of Southern Europe, Britain appears to be remarkably quiescent in the face of a regime of austerity imposed during one of its longest recessions. Jeremy Seabrook explains why.

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WHY does the wave of unrest affecting much of Europe, West Asia and other parts of the world fail to break on the shores of Britain? We have been through the longest recession for more than a century, incomes have failed to keep pace with inflation, benefits to the poor and unemployed have been cut and a new punitive mood stalks the land. Surely this is a recipe for popular agitation and demonstrations.

Apparently  not. According to a government survey of national well-being, Britain became a happier place in the year to mid-2013; an index of contentment which was partly ascribed to the Olympics and partly to the jubilee year of the Queen's accession to the throne.

This does not suggest there were no serious disturbances in Britain Britain in recent years, as the riots of 2011 attest, following the police shooting of Mark Duggan in North London. Looting and arson took place over several nights, mainly in London and the Midlands. What began as a protest at the killing of yet another black man by the police turned into an orgy of trashing cars and shops. Expensive goods were taken, but so too were trivial items: some people were charged with the theft of items such as bottled water and toilet paper.

There has been a long tradition of rioting in Britain, including the 'king and country' mob in the 18th century, anti-industrial riots in the early and mid-19th century, labour agitation in Trafalgar Square in the 1890s, the General Strike in 1926, and more recently, in 1980 in Brixton and Toxteth, and in the early 2000s, in the northern towns.

Other political demonstrations have certainly not been absent; most memorably, there were the two million people who demonstrated against the Iraq war in 2003. In 2010, students protested against a rise in tuition fees, and central London was the scene of widespread and damaging agitation. Disability groups have consistently kept vigil against new stringent tests on capacity to work, while the notorious 'bedroom tax' - which penalised people living in social housing if they had a spare bedroom (even if such a room was required for the care of a sick or disabled family member) - has also led to passionate and vocal protest. People have gathered in numbers to show solidarity with the resistance in Syria; local groups have tried to prevent 'fracking' in many parts of Britain.

None of this, however, adds up to the angry crowds seen on the streets of Athens, Madrid or Paris, let alone the throngs which have filled Cairo, Istanbul, Tunis or Bahrain. There has been no coordinated campaign against the UK government's 'austerity' programme (least of all by the nominal Opposition), and no popular upsurge against growing social injustice and inequality.

Of course, the British remain in thrall to their own myths - we are a tolerant people, phlegmatic and pragmatic, slow to anger, but, as the old imperial image has it, 'if the tail of the lion is tweaked once too often, the beast becomes implacable.' We also like to think we are masters of under-statement, believe in fair play and have sympathy for the 'underdog'.

An element of truth may lurk in these fables. But deeper reasons inhibit the British from reacting. As the first industrial society, Britain passed through a long period of economic violence, when a wasting peasantry was compelled into the manufacturing and mining centres of the early 19th century, and subjected to appalling degradation in living and working conditions. It is impossible to overstate the coercive nature of that upheaval. It was accomplished with limited public disorder, although the period was punctuated by disturbances, from the machine-breaking Luddites to the Swing riots in the 1830s against threshing machines. Far more characteristic were law-abiding demonstrations - the peaceful cotton operatives of Manchester, cut down by the cavalry in what became known as 'Peterloo' in 1819; and the Chartists who, after their great Petition was rejected by Parliament for the last time in 1848 (despite the persistence of a 'physical force' minority), meekly dispersed and went home. The trades unions, like political parties of labour, have been anxious to show their respectability and observance of constitutional proprieties.

There is a dissonance between rhetoric of recession, economic calamity and austerity and the direct experience of a majority of the people. Just as the 1930s was a time of retrenchment and unemployment, it was also a deeply conservative period: fear rarely precipitates radical change, as Auden understood when he wrote of that 'low, dishonest decade' in his poem, '1 September 1939'.  Today, unemployment has not risen as expected: people have accepted wage cuts in order to keep their jobs. Incomes have fallen, workers are on 'zero-hours' contracts, but the idea persists that if we keep our heads down, the storm will blow over.

At the same time, the very rich have been spectacularly adroit in furthering their own self-enrichment. That this has not rejuvenated what used to be called 'the politics of envy' puzzles some observers. But the rich have been transformed in the eyes of the people, rehabilitated from an era in which they were regarded as hyenas, bloodsuckers or vultures, monopolists of the necessities of the poor: they have become wealth-creators, the generators of riches, whose golden touch permits our survival. They are now benefactors and philanthropists, and we are all dependants, pensioners of their tireless exertions.

Secondly, the British have had a long time to get used to the slow, insistent 'naturalisation' of capitalism. From the early industrial era, when Edmund Burke described 'the laws of commerce' as 'the laws of nature which are the laws of God', the enthusiasts of Political Economy have sought to represent capitalism as a natural phenomenon. It alone understands 'human nature', in its full egotistical, greedy spirit, which it is uniquely qualified to turn into social good. Primitive magic may be at work in this eccentric belief-system, but this only reinforces the savants of the free market; and the success of neoliberalism since 1980 represents the second coming of the ideology of early industrialism. It is all familiar; and people accept it as an old friend, rather than question it as an ideological aberration.

The decay of any alternative socialist model also plays a role in the relative quietism of the British people. The long-term consequences of Thatcher's victory over organised labour, and the extinction of the industrial base which gave it life, are also significant. The most alluring 'alternative' for the voters of Britain is no longer the Left, but is represented by the Right, the Far Right and the Even Further Right. It is the United Kingdom Independence Party, not Labour, that threatens the erosion of the Conservative vote. And to the right of them lurk the British National Party and the English Defence League; sinister emblems of a still-unresolved relationship between Empire and the essential contribution to the British economy of emigres from those sometime subject places.

The outlet on the Right for the spleen, xenophobia and thwarted imperial itch of the British contains anger that might otherwise have been directed at ruling elites. These can always be replaced by even fiercer opponents of migration, welfare and Europe, the diabolic trinity of popular hatred. Our insularity is a last defence against a world we do not like very much; and we think, delusion though it may be, that we are self-reliant, independent and, in the unfortunate sporting metaphor, punching above our weight in the world.

The poor in Britain have also become a minority. This is a far cry from the days when the poor were feared as a mutinous, dangerous majority of the people. That is all behind us. Once the poor were reduced to minority status, they were de-powered electorally. It is easy to create a sense of indignation against them among those who are not poor; and this adds to the burden of the humiliated and excluded - the long-term sick, the defeated and disturbed, the emotionally and mentally infirm, the frightened and despairing.

There are other elements: the power of the government and its media supporters to assist in an optimistic confection of a sunny version of Britain, irradiated by the self-satisfaction of the well-to-do. To the government's index of contentment, we should add victory on the rugby pitch in Australia, success in cricket, the first male victor at Wimbledon for three-quarters of a century, and winner of the Tour de France. Then there was the birth of a new heir to the throne, so that there are now three kings in waiting, a dynastic determinism that guarantees everything will go on as it is 'for ever'. As if that were not enough, the 'holy grail' of economic growth has been resumed, so that Cameron and Osborne can claim that the pain of austerity has worked, their prudence is vindicated, unlike the drifting entities of the eurozone. It is hard to assess the effect of perpetual hymning of British success on the public mood; it creates a conviction that things 'could be much worse'; while the idea that we have 'pulled through' also arouses memories of other moments of adversity, especially that of the Blitz, when we stood alone and showed the world that 'Britain could take it'.

A whole psycho-history stands behind the quietism, the fatalism, the acceptance of the way things are. If Britain is a deeply conservative place, this is because violent coercive change has been thrust upon the people ever since the early industrial era. People want a quiet life, even if that means the fragile and always threatened stability of a system that demands constant flux, mobility and change.

There is more. The convergence between Britain and the United States is growing. The worship of wealth and celebrity, the absence of any popular ideological conviction; the acceptance that whatever happens in America will duly find its way to Britain, whether drive-by shootings, mass killings in public places, or even popular speech and social customs - until recently, nobody in Britain had heard of trick or treat at Hallowe'en or School Proms, even for children leaving primary school. Our eyes are constantly turned towards the West, from where blow the mysterious zephyrs of development.

The idea lives on that we live in a favoured isle, unaffected by extremism, either climatic or ideological; that we are temperate, fair-minded and tolerant; that our institutions are rock-solid and that we, mother of parliaments, 'gave' the world democracy. It may be complacent, even delusional; but it is a tenacious belief, and would need something far more disastrous than mere economic downturn to drive the people of Britain onto the streets.                                                 

Jeremy Seabrook is a freelance journalist based in the UK.

*Third World Resurgence No. 275, July 2013, pp 44-45