yes, I hate how subservient and meek the populace is. We really need to strike more and hold seriously debilitating protests over matters such as the cost of living crisis, the self serving nature of the tory vermin and of the ever-expanding profits of corporations and their oligarchs.
Isn’t it now illegal to protest? Didn’t Priti do something to stop people protesting?
The only major protest in my teen/adult life was the stop the Iraq war one.
Million people.
Didn’t work.
No. We have had many protests.
A million turned out to protest against Brexit, and it didn’t help.
All the climate protests, I think the jury is still out on those.
Those BLM protests in Bristol though, may have actually done something.
I feel like proteste don’t actually work, the government never listens anyway. It’s like we hear you but we don’t care.
We could probably do with taking some lessons from the French they realy know how to protest and get shit done
There is no point in protesting anywhere outside of London. The government just ignores it.
British people have a terminal case of class deference. No matter how bad things get, it’s ultimately justified because the wealthy and privileged are the only ones who *really* matter deep down. People feel embarrassed about protesting properly because they don’t want to seem like the weird kid who doesn’t understand that the prom queen is out of his league. Obviously you can pay lip service to fighting injustice, but if you actually were going to do anything about it, most British people would feel mortified. Class anxiety has turned us into a nation of simpering people pleasers when it comes to the privileged. The ruling elite have played an absolute blinder, frankly.
A majority of the public are content enough that they don’t protest or kick off at all. The only groups that do are the young and middle class retirees, and their protests are weak and ineffectual.
Far more time and thought is devoted to dumb placards or costumes than there is to actionable goals or organisation. It’s church for people who believe themselves too good for church. The vast majority of protests even take place on the weekend.
There is a myopic view that if you wander through city centers and wave placards the government will eventually capitulate and give you what you what you want. *This will never happen.* It is a wrong view fermented by the incredibly sanitised portrayal of the CRM, enabled by a government that wants to cripple threats to its apparatus.
If you want to get change, you have to hurt somebody, and that somebody has to be meaningful. All protests do now is just hurt random bozos driving through town.
No but the cost of living makes it too expensive to take the time off to go to prison if I ever want a mortgage
The only way a protest will bring about any change, is the one that disrupts the billionaires going about their business. Protesting in a way that stops the normal folk from just going about their business will just lose you support for the protestors. Look at how angry people got with people “protesting” on the M25.
It’s gotten a bit harder to organise people since they made peaceful protests a criminal offence.
We protest but we do so peacefully. You won’t see protests like the Gilet Jaunes in France but that does not mean we do not know how to turn up. We could riot if we wanted to, however people are still too OK for that to happen (at least for the most part). Give it a couple of months and there will be enough people in dire straits for more serious protests to occur.
I’ve been on protest. Unless synchronised with meaningful political organisation they are just about giving the people who attend the satisfaction of a very vocal expression of their opposition. Which is masturbatory.
This is why black block lads have been tearing up every G7/20 protest for decades and globalisation has rumbled on merrily like it always did. Or whatever it was those guys were about.
Protest is straightforward and feels good; politics is hard, glacially slow, and requires compromising with people that you don’t agree with in order to outplay people that you don’t agree with even more. Hopefully over a time you push the needle in the right direction, and then the next generation picks up the torch and in 100 years all these tiny steps might actually add up to something that looks like a slow revolution.
Significant parts of even the social democratic left are culturally unable to choose the later and get extremely angry at the mere suggestion, because they’ve uncritically inherited revolutionary romanticism from a bunch of dead Marxists who lived almost 200 years ago in very different socio-political conditions. This is tragically ironic for a political tendency that prides itself on searching social criticism and the ability to spot ideology.
So any protest remains divorced from any tangible political alternative, and therefore completely ineffectual.
But by all means, click ‘Attending’ on the fb page from that sticker you saw on a lamppost outside SOAS.
Surely this time it will work.
We have forgotten that peaceful protest doesn’t work and pretty much every single civil rights movement only succeeded thanks to violence that significant disruption to those in power. Women getting the vote, the civil rights movement against racism in the US, gay rights, etc etc, all had violent and disruptive protest as at least part of how they succeeded.
I don’t think British people ever learned to… one of the most famously passive, servile populations on Earth.
Protests don’t work because people organising them do so like it’s a goddamn school fete. Get permission from the police to protest in Westminster square, on a Saturday when nobody is in parliament, brink their thermos flasks and homemade packed lunch, zero disruption whatsoever. It’s like a fucking family day out.
Unfortunately when people do protest and cause disruption the public turns against them because they don’t like being inconvenienced.
If something is unorganised or angry and turns into a riot then all the NIMBY middle class people get out their brooms in defiance against the working class for making a mess.
The public really only have themselves to blame. Brits like to take the piss out of the French but at least they know how to actually fucking protest. This country is a joke by comparison. “Mustn’t cause a scene”.
The British have no protested and gained anything. Each concession given after the 1800s was a pacification to avoid any collapse of the status quo, and it worked.
No.
It’s just the fact if you go protest, there are so many people just meeting what they deem comfortable and tied down by loans etc, that if they lost there job due to protesting they would be bankrupt.
It’s like the UK govt has done debt trap diplomacy, except it’s not another country, it’s there people, promising them the better life is just around the corner but not quite giving it to them, but just enough they will vote for them.
Are we allowed to protest? The last one I remember was a fuel price protest that had the support of most adults, The second one wasn’t allowed to happen and it fizzled away. With young people not being as politically active as previous generations the two seem to mean that the Govt. is no longer answerable to the electorate.
We are having our right to protest slowly erroded. It’s not just that we are not protesting (and if we are. Morons like antinvaxxers are ruining it for everyone) it’s that nobody knows what you’re allowed to do any more.
Why don’t we just all agree to cancel our Direct Debits to our energy suppliers instead of endless marching and protesting?
Everyone on earth has forgotten how to protest.
Because as soon as someone does have the bollocks to protest you get a load of doylems crying about being stuck in traffic.
25 comments
yes, I hate how subservient and meek the populace is. We really need to strike more and hold seriously debilitating protests over matters such as the cost of living crisis, the self serving nature of the tory vermin and of the ever-expanding profits of corporations and their oligarchs.
No: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/may/13/glasgow-residents-surround-and-block-immigration-van-from-leaving-street
Isn’t it now illegal to protest? Didn’t Priti do something to stop people protesting?
The only major protest in my teen/adult life was the stop the Iraq war one.
Million people.
Didn’t work.
No. We have had many protests.
A million turned out to protest against Brexit, and it didn’t help.
All the climate protests, I think the jury is still out on those.
Those BLM protests in Bristol though, may have actually done something.
I feel like proteste don’t actually work, the government never listens anyway. It’s like we hear you but we don’t care.
We could probably do with taking some lessons from the French they realy know how to protest and get shit done
There is no point in protesting anywhere outside of London. The government just ignores it.
British people have a terminal case of class deference. No matter how bad things get, it’s ultimately justified because the wealthy and privileged are the only ones who *really* matter deep down. People feel embarrassed about protesting properly because they don’t want to seem like the weird kid who doesn’t understand that the prom queen is out of his league. Obviously you can pay lip service to fighting injustice, but if you actually were going to do anything about it, most British people would feel mortified. Class anxiety has turned us into a nation of simpering people pleasers when it comes to the privileged. The ruling elite have played an absolute blinder, frankly.
A majority of the public are content enough that they don’t protest or kick off at all. The only groups that do are the young and middle class retirees, and their protests are weak and ineffectual.
Far more time and thought is devoted to dumb placards or costumes than there is to actionable goals or organisation. It’s church for people who believe themselves too good for church. The vast majority of protests even take place on the weekend.
There is a myopic view that if you wander through city centers and wave placards the government will eventually capitulate and give you what you what you want. *This will never happen.* It is a wrong view fermented by the incredibly sanitised portrayal of the CRM, enabled by a government that wants to cripple threats to its apparatus.
If you want to get change, you have to hurt somebody, and that somebody has to be meaningful. All protests do now is just hurt random bozos driving through town.
No but the cost of living makes it too expensive to take the time off to go to prison if I ever want a mortgage
The only way a protest will bring about any change, is the one that disrupts the billionaires going about their business. Protesting in a way that stops the normal folk from just going about their business will just lose you support for the protestors. Look at how angry people got with people “protesting” on the M25.
It’s gotten a bit harder to organise people since they made peaceful protests a criminal offence.
We protest but we do so peacefully. You won’t see protests like the Gilet Jaunes in France but that does not mean we do not know how to turn up. We could riot if we wanted to, however people are still too OK for that to happen (at least for the most part). Give it a couple of months and there will be enough people in dire straits for more serious protests to occur.
I’ve been on protest. Unless synchronised with meaningful political organisation they are just about giving the people who attend the satisfaction of a very vocal expression of their opposition. Which is masturbatory.
This is why black block lads have been tearing up every G7/20 protest for decades and globalisation has rumbled on merrily like it always did. Or whatever it was those guys were about.
Protest is straightforward and feels good; politics is hard, glacially slow, and requires compromising with people that you don’t agree with in order to outplay people that you don’t agree with even more. Hopefully over a time you push the needle in the right direction, and then the next generation picks up the torch and in 100 years all these tiny steps might actually add up to something that looks like a slow revolution.
Significant parts of even the social democratic left are culturally unable to choose the later and get extremely angry at the mere suggestion, because they’ve uncritically inherited revolutionary romanticism from a bunch of dead Marxists who lived almost 200 years ago in very different socio-political conditions. This is tragically ironic for a political tendency that prides itself on searching social criticism and the ability to spot ideology.
So any protest remains divorced from any tangible political alternative, and therefore completely ineffectual.
But by all means, click ‘Attending’ on the fb page from that sticker you saw on a lamppost outside SOAS.
Surely this time it will work.
We have forgotten that peaceful protest doesn’t work and pretty much every single civil rights movement only succeeded thanks to violence that significant disruption to those in power. Women getting the vote, the civil rights movement against racism in the US, gay rights, etc etc, all had violent and disruptive protest as at least part of how they succeeded.
I don’t think British people ever learned to… one of the most famously passive, servile populations on Earth.
Protests don’t work because people organising them do so like it’s a goddamn school fete. Get permission from the police to protest in Westminster square, on a Saturday when nobody is in parliament, brink their thermos flasks and homemade packed lunch, zero disruption whatsoever. It’s like a fucking family day out.
Unfortunately when people do protest and cause disruption the public turns against them because they don’t like being inconvenienced.
If something is unorganised or angry and turns into a riot then all the NIMBY middle class people get out their brooms in defiance against the working class for making a mess.
The public really only have themselves to blame. Brits like to take the piss out of the French but at least they know how to actually fucking protest. This country is a joke by comparison. “Mustn’t cause a scene”.
The British have no protested and gained anything. Each concession given after the 1800s was a pacification to avoid any collapse of the status quo, and it worked.
No.
It’s just the fact if you go protest, there are so many people just meeting what they deem comfortable and tied down by loans etc, that if they lost there job due to protesting they would be bankrupt.
It’s like the UK govt has done debt trap diplomacy, except it’s not another country, it’s there people, promising them the better life is just around the corner but not quite giving it to them, but just enough they will vote for them.
Are we allowed to protest? The last one I remember was a fuel price protest that had the support of most adults, The second one wasn’t allowed to happen and it fizzled away. With young people not being as politically active as previous generations the two seem to mean that the Govt. is no longer answerable to the electorate.
We are having our right to protest slowly erroded. It’s not just that we are not protesting (and if we are. Morons like antinvaxxers are ruining it for everyone) it’s that nobody knows what you’re allowed to do any more.
Why don’t we just all agree to cancel our Direct Debits to our energy suppliers instead of endless marching and protesting?
Everyone on earth has forgotten how to protest.
Because as soon as someone does have the bollocks to protest you get a load of doylems crying about being stuck in traffic.