Crash Bang Wallace
Libertarian political blog from Mark Wallace; political opinion, breaking news and exclusivesHow close are we to seeing an anti-cuts terrorist group?
Posted on March 29, 2011It’s pretty clear now that Saturday’s riots – like most riots – were counterproductive for the anti-cuts movement. That’s good news; had the public somehow been moved to support violence and vandalism there would be something very wrong indeed.
It does raise a serious concern, though. How will the hard core of anti-cutters and so-called anarchists (who actually want a bigger state, which is far from anarchism as you can get) react as their failure becomes clear?
The psychology of these agitators is complex but worrying. They have a persecution complex, they fetishise violence and crime and they are utterly convinced that everyone agrees with them, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
In their world, any Government that doesn’t do what they want must be a Gaddafi-style dictatorship, and any indication that the public don’t back them is a sign of an oppressive bourgeois establishment who are just as bad as the totalitarian Government. They seem increasingly divorced from the real world and antipathetic to wider society.
Add into that the hefty leavening of sociopaths who gravitate toward extremism and wanton destruction and you have a potent mix.
I fear that this core – not, I should emphasise, the wider halo movement around them – could easily tip over the edge from public order crime to much more sinister activities.
They have already started widening their list of targets whom they judge legitimate – just look at the absurd attack on charity-owned Fortnum & Mason.
Only a few years ago, SHAC (Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty) were following scientists and investors far down the business chain to their homes and attacking and intimidating them and their families. Plenty of people in the anti-cuts hard core will be students of that terror campaign – and even the small core of the anti-cuts mob have more people and resources than SHAC.
Back in the 1960s and 70s, on the Continent a mass leftwing movement spawned groups with a very similar psychology and rhetoric to the rioters we see in Britain today. Their response to failure after failure was to become more and more extreme – shedding those who thought they were going to far, and following their “war against society” philosophy to its logical conclusion: terrorism.
It’s not inevitable – it may not happen in this case, or if it does it could be stopped – but we don’t seem too far at all from spawning a Baader Meinhof Gang or a Red Brigades for the 21st Century.
That’s a scary prospect, and everyone, from the police and the Government to the Unions, UKuncut and the vast majority of peaceful, democratic anti-cutters, must work together to nip any tendency like that in the bud.
A good start would be for the Left to denounce the violence we saw on Saturday – something UKuncut signally failed to do on Newsnight last night.
Join me at the Free Tibet march tomorrow
Posted on March 11, 2011Yesterday was the 10th of March – the 52nd anniversary of the 1959 Tibetan Uprising, in which over 80,000 Tibetans were killed by the Chinese authorities for daring to demand liberty an self-determination.
As a supporter of the Free Tibet movement, I’ll be helping to commemorate that event and support Tibetans’ demands for freedom at a march tomorrow, Saturday 12th March, from Victoria to the Chinese Embassy in Portland Place. The full details, times and route are online here. If you’d like to come along too, either I’ll see you there or comment below or tweet at me, and we can arrange to meet.
For those of you who haven’t been to such an event before, the Free Tibet movement is brilliant – a friendly alliance of Tibetan exiles, Buddhists, hippies and anti-Communist freedom activists pulling together in a common cause. If you’re free tomorrow, please come along.
Six lessons from the student riots
Posted on December 10, 2010In the aftermath of the tuition fees vote, what are the lessons we can learn now that the blood has been mopped up, the flares have sputtered out and the Ayes and Noes have been counted?
1) It was indeed a stupid idea to leave the Trafalgar Square Christmas Tree in place during a pyromaniac riot. As I warned yesterday, the poor old tree did get set on fire.
2) Police communication still leaves a hell of a lot to be desired. The reputation of the police has been shielded somewhat by the appalling behaviour of the rioters they are fighting against. Their failure to communicate why they employ particular tactics, such as cavalry charges or pulling individuals from the crowd, is a serious problem that stirs up future trouble. While the first student riot began peacefully and kicked off later, apparently yesterday’s march saw protesters attacking the police from the get-go – they need to try to defuse that tension, not fuel it through further confusion.
3) The rioters themselves don’t really know what their movement is. I don’t buy this NUS line that the troublemakers are all Socialist Worker infiltrators. The entire SWP membership could fit into a camper van with room to spare, while the rioters yesterday filled Parliament square to the brim. Plenty of those interviewed at the protests have indeed been students or at college. However, the mob is a confused one.
Some claim to be anarchists, but are campaigning for more state power. Others claim to be socialists, but spend their time destroying public property. Others are just “Gap Yah” kids who are doing what everyone else is doing because it’s fun (though take it from me, being kettled is mostly boring). They have a broad anti-cuts dogma, but there is little to no coherence so far.
4) The Government has failed to communicate its key messages. The amount of misinformation and misunderstanding about the fees proposals is massive. Even protesters interviewed in the kettle yesterday were largely unaware of the fact that no-one will pay anything back until they earn £21,000 a year, for example. The battle to discuss these as graduate fees rather than student fees was lost early on, too.
The launch of the Facts on Fees site on Wednesday showed that Ministers belatedly realised and acknowledged all this, but by then it was far too late. For many political campaigns the battle is fought in terms of perceptions with language as the weapon – just having a good policy is not enough to win.
5) Violence gets you noticed but it doesn’t get you listened to. The riots have certainly made headlines, and there are plenty of good-looking photos from each event, but ultimately MPs still voted in favour of the plans.
I feel sorry for those students who did the right thing and actually argued with their brains rather than their fists. Those debating with MPs in central lobby were contaminated by the knuckleheads out attacking the Cenotaph on Whitehall through no fault of their own. In fact, I know that some MPs shifted from No to abstention or from abstention to Yes because they actively did not want to be seen to be giving in to thugs. At minimum violence is irrelevant, and at most it is totally discrediting to their case.
6) This is war. These riots have set a precedent – we can expect more and more protests to turn out this way in future. The half-baked ideology of “No cuts to anything” that many of those in attendance were espousing gives an incredibly wide range of topics to fight on, and they clearly have acquired a taste for violence and arson. I wish that wasn’t the case, although strategically it would be stupid not to acknowledge that it’s quite helpful to have the Left building themselves such an unpleasant reputation. There will be more blood and fire in the next few years of spending cuts – but the worse the deficit deniers behave, the stronger and more dedicated to pushing ahead the Government must become.
Where Red Reynolds gets her intel on China
Posted on October 29, 2010Guido reports today the pro-Communism views of Emma Reynolds MP, the Shadow Junior Foreign Minister who last night told the Oxford Union that “China’s control and command approach is something to be admired”.
She has the good fortune to be in the comfortable position of admiring China’s approach to government from afar, from the safety of a democracy which still remains largely free (despite the best efforts of many of her colleagues). I find it impossible to understand how anyone who knows the first thing about the murder, torture and oppression which form essential foundations of China’s “control and command” approach could be anything but disgusted by it.
There’s no excuse for being uninformed on the topic – it’s common knowledge what depths of inhumanity the Chinese Communist Party has sunk to. Reynolds might be expected to know even more than most, seeing as she is the Treasurer of the All Party Parliamentary Group on China.
The APPG must discuss civil liberties, surely? Sadly, not according to a search of their website…
Oh dear. Well how about searching for “freedom”?
Ah – I’m starting to spot a pattern here.