If public protest is any guide to public feeling, what can we learn from the Autumn of Discontent? That, for anyone in doubt, is the series of anti-Brexit demonstrations that began in London in September, and were due to continue on Saturday with regional rallies in each of the UK’s 12 European parliament constituencies.
For sense and civility, the remainers’ approach has, as always, much to teach the idiot rhetoricians of Brexit, recently heard blithering about a “tiger in the tank”. The latest round of anti-Brexit rallies will, say the organisers of the Cambridge event, “send a message to all our political representatives that the time has come to rethink the damaging path that the UK is now on, and say to them that we can and we must stop Brexit”.
Presumably, political representatives who insist that 52% of an advisory vote on an unknown outcome represents the settled will of the people are nonetheless believed – if they notice it’s happening – to be capable of a rally-induced epiphany. Possibly, even without the added magic of an Alastair Campbell or an AC Grayling, regional rallies can change hearts and minds. Perhaps the sort of people who have committed to this catastrophe could still contemplate a mild-looking crowd with interesting banners and feel something other than relief, that British disgust for irresponsible leadership expresses itself so differently from Eminem’s.
Is this the worst that can happen? Not Eminem’s “Fuck walkin’ on eggshells, I came to stomp” but, in the words of the remainers’ self-styled saviour Vince Cable, “We accept the negotiations are taking place, but at the end of it we want the British people to have a say.” Not “I’m drawing in the sand a line: you’re either for or against”, but a sequence of walks with a title referencing the opening line of Shakespeare’s Richard III.
For any Brexit-engineers with the emotional wherewithal to fear the scale of the public backlash – supposing the blame for their failures cannot be passed on – there may be actual consolation in these marches. There’s even something very British, for people who like to keep things very British, about activism that maintains the old protest tradition of being utterly disregarded. If media bias explains, up to a point, why the most prominently reported demonstration at the party conferences was Rees-Mogg- rather than Brexit-related, it’s also possible that anti-Brexit protesting, for all the energy and commitment of its participants, needs work.
Somewhere between the poll tax riots and hand-coloured signs saying “Don’t go Brexit my heart”, there must be non-violent forms of protest that demonstrate, less ignorably than rallies, that almost half the population – assuming it has not lapsed en masse into the approved “just get on with it” mindset – is feeling something stronger than piqued. If remainers can’t borrow the American musicians who have transformed mockery of Donald Trump into a ubiquitous art form, it shouldn’t be impossible for the inventiveness that creates playful signs on British marches to evolve into something more ambitious – and of more enduring embarrassment to its targets.
But since time for effective Brexit-shaming is, as Michel Barnier regularly reminds the British, running out, some protesting plagiarism could be unavoidable. Leaving until last a general strike by non-emergency-service remainers, it could be worth bearing in mind that, at 222 miles – according to Google Maps – the walk from Trafalgar Square to the European commission’s Berlaymont building in Brussels is not much shorter than the distance (240 miles) covered in Mahatma Gandhi’s 1930 Salt March, one of the most successful protests in history. That’s 66 hours start to finish, excluding breaks and the ferry. A Brexit version of Gandhi’s satyagraha, all the more forceful if it were completed by people under 30, would have the advantage, as with the Eminem video, of reminding the world how much of the country is being traduced, in our case by the Conservatives’ little battalion of thrill-seekers.
Then again, one possible explanation for the level of apparent Brexit resignation, among young individuals with most to lose from it, is that so many of them have committed, above all, to Jeremy Corbyn, whose negligence helped make it happen. Either way, the NUS website is currently prioritising the campaign “Say NO to single-use straws”. The recent unsympathetic treatment of a young British remainer, Madeleina Kay, protesting as Supergirl, also hints at possible security issues in Brussels were several thousand more to arrive.
Just when it might be needed, there’s further inspiration in an exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum, An Incomplete History of Protest, which greets visitors with WH Auden’s poem September 1, 1939: “The enlightenment driven away, / The habit-forming pain, / Mismanagement and grief: / We must suffer them all again.” Along with political art exhibits, the show details how artists have removed their work from galleries in protest, or demanded that it be shown only if accompanied by a specified text. In the case of the American artist Al Held, protesting against the Vietnam war in 1970, a black-bordered sign, 18in by 24in, was to read: “ART FOR LIFE … STOP THE WAR”. His point, he told the gallery, “is that paintings, rather than being removed, should be used affirmatively”.
Anti-Brexit musicians and other performers might want to build, if it wouldn’t destroy their careers, on the more recent affirmative actions of the New York Hamilton cast when they addressed Mike Pence, and of Daniel Barenboim, at this summer’s BBC Proms. The threat posed by Brexit to British orchestras was no excuse, the Sun indicated, for an intervention by this “anti-Brexit fanatic” on European culture. Not only that, his shameless conducting of Elgar was, you gathered, the Proms equivalent of taking a knee. A Spectator writer reeled from “the sheer discourtesy” and “left profoundly disappointed in him”.
Splendid. If they are to remind politicians – British and European – of their undiminished opposition to Brexit, Britain’s 48% or so need actively to generate this sort of intervention, along with equally discourteous activism by thousands of individuals not easily ridiculed as intellectuals, snowflakes or experts, and who won’t – unlike the Mail’s detested luvvies and metropolitan deplorables – just make things worse. In the absence of national representation the option is to surrender, or to protest with such gentility, or behind such clapped-out figureheads, that no one even notices. True, any observable passivity might be a faithful reflection of genuine indifference. Alternatively, the very size and variety of the remainer vote could be what militates against effective organising, including of sustained pressure on local MPs.
Activism, as Malcolm Gladwell once argued in a New Yorker article that exposed the limitations of social media, is hard work. “The civil rights movement was more like a military campaign than like a contagion.” That was in 2010: before the NFL protests, the bringing down of confederate statues, and a profusion of creative savagery of which Eminem’s is only the latest, if most triumphant, example. The preference here for planning petitions and Saturday marches does not, mercifully, have to be the end of it.
