Thursday 4 June 2020
Wednesday 3 June 2020
Making GDP the focus of a post-coronavirus economy would be a mistake
Growth often doesn’t benefit the people who need it – a green economy could create 1 million jobs writes Carys Roberts in The Guardian
The recovery must target well-paid, high-quality jobs, spread around the country. These must provide good work for those who have lost it as a result of Covid-19, as well as people previously locked out of the jobs market or at risk of being left behind on the journey to net zero. This is a more profound shift than it appears. Currently, stimulus packages aim to boost GDP, and jobs are a way to get there. But what matters is that ordinary people have access to secure incomes – both for themselves, and because this will ensure spending in the economy (people who need money are more likely to spend it) and a sustainable tax base. An alternative approach, for example, of loosening lending restrictions for mortgages, might boost GDP but would do so by increasing debt and raising house prices, benefitting the already wealthy while hurting people without wealth.
The recovery must involve a reconsideration of what is valuable in society. The pandemic has put into stark relief the extraordinary contribution of health and care workers, many of whom are women and migrants, and the essential support of key workers across the economy. The recovery must recognise that contribution in higher pay and better working conditions. So, too, the pandemic has caused conversations up and down the country about unpaid care work and who performs it. But the easing of lockdown has prioritised marketised activity over human relationships, which don’t require cash. You can visit your parents at home, but only if you want to purchase their house or clean it. The recovery should recognise and reflect what is important to people and valuable – not just economic activity.
Britons want quality of life indicators to take priority over economy
These goals are not in conflict but instead are inextricably linked. Achieving them requires and provides an opportunity to rethink an economy that doesn’t work for so many across the country or for future generations. We estimate that close to a million good jobs could be created in this new, green economy, with many more if we choose to invest in our social care system.
Talking about and targeting the “economy” as an abstraction masks the underlying shape and nature of the activity taking place underneath. It means we miss people: who loses out, and who benefits from the status quo being restored. Lockdown has found us in a collective moment of reimagining, but this will not last for ever: we should use it to ask what economic activity we want to rebuild, and what we could do without.
‘A green recovery does not mean adding on a few green job programmes to a larger, fossil-fuelled stimulus.’ Low Bentham Solar Park, North Yorkshire. Photograph: Peter Byrne/PA
The UK lockdown might be easing, but the path ahead for the economy will be long and difficult. Unemployment this quarter is likely to rise twice as fast as it did following the global financial crisis. Almost half of businesses that have taken up one of the government’s bounce-back loans do not expect to be able to pay it back.
It’s tempting in a crisis to want to do whatever it takes to get economic activity – measured by GDP – back to where it was before. But an overwhelming and singular focus on increasing GDP would be a mistake. GDP figures do not tell us who is benefitting from growth. GDP does not tell us whether environmental resources – and nature – are being dangerously depleted, and does not reflect the value of caring, much of which is performed by women.
Boris Johnson has called for the UK to “build back better”, but to use government resources and capacity most effectively and – more fundamentally – to take the opportunity to build a better kind of economy and society, we need to know what it is we want to rebuild. This is precisely the moment to think beyond a blind pursuit of GDP, about what kind of economic activity to bring back and prioritise, and what we could do without. Any stimulus package must be tailored to create not just any economic activity, but that which will serve society best. As a result, any recovery or spending plan should be scrutinised not just on its size, but what it is spent on.
This must be a green recovery. That does not mean adding on a few green job programmes to a larger, fossil-fuelled stimulus: the whole recovery package must accelerate the UK’s path to net-zero carbon and restore our natural environment, which is in crisis. Anything else risks emerging from one disaster only to accelerate headlong into another. As the government turns on the taps to boost the economy, there is a huge opportunity to fill the £30bn per year funding gap for green investment.
The UK lockdown might be easing, but the path ahead for the economy will be long and difficult. Unemployment this quarter is likely to rise twice as fast as it did following the global financial crisis. Almost half of businesses that have taken up one of the government’s bounce-back loans do not expect to be able to pay it back.
It’s tempting in a crisis to want to do whatever it takes to get economic activity – measured by GDP – back to where it was before. But an overwhelming and singular focus on increasing GDP would be a mistake. GDP figures do not tell us who is benefitting from growth. GDP does not tell us whether environmental resources – and nature – are being dangerously depleted, and does not reflect the value of caring, much of which is performed by women.
Boris Johnson has called for the UK to “build back better”, but to use government resources and capacity most effectively and – more fundamentally – to take the opportunity to build a better kind of economy and society, we need to know what it is we want to rebuild. This is precisely the moment to think beyond a blind pursuit of GDP, about what kind of economic activity to bring back and prioritise, and what we could do without. Any stimulus package must be tailored to create not just any economic activity, but that which will serve society best. As a result, any recovery or spending plan should be scrutinised not just on its size, but what it is spent on.
This must be a green recovery. That does not mean adding on a few green job programmes to a larger, fossil-fuelled stimulus: the whole recovery package must accelerate the UK’s path to net-zero carbon and restore our natural environment, which is in crisis. Anything else risks emerging from one disaster only to accelerate headlong into another. As the government turns on the taps to boost the economy, there is a huge opportunity to fill the £30bn per year funding gap for green investment.
The recovery must target well-paid, high-quality jobs, spread around the country. These must provide good work for those who have lost it as a result of Covid-19, as well as people previously locked out of the jobs market or at risk of being left behind on the journey to net zero. This is a more profound shift than it appears. Currently, stimulus packages aim to boost GDP, and jobs are a way to get there. But what matters is that ordinary people have access to secure incomes – both for themselves, and because this will ensure spending in the economy (people who need money are more likely to spend it) and a sustainable tax base. An alternative approach, for example, of loosening lending restrictions for mortgages, might boost GDP but would do so by increasing debt and raising house prices, benefitting the already wealthy while hurting people without wealth.
The recovery must involve a reconsideration of what is valuable in society. The pandemic has put into stark relief the extraordinary contribution of health and care workers, many of whom are women and migrants, and the essential support of key workers across the economy. The recovery must recognise that contribution in higher pay and better working conditions. So, too, the pandemic has caused conversations up and down the country about unpaid care work and who performs it. But the easing of lockdown has prioritised marketised activity over human relationships, which don’t require cash. You can visit your parents at home, but only if you want to purchase their house or clean it. The recovery should recognise and reflect what is important to people and valuable – not just economic activity.
Britons want quality of life indicators to take priority over economy
These goals are not in conflict but instead are inextricably linked. Achieving them requires and provides an opportunity to rethink an economy that doesn’t work for so many across the country or for future generations. We estimate that close to a million good jobs could be created in this new, green economy, with many more if we choose to invest in our social care system.
Talking about and targeting the “economy” as an abstraction masks the underlying shape and nature of the activity taking place underneath. It means we miss people: who loses out, and who benefits from the status quo being restored. Lockdown has found us in a collective moment of reimagining, but this will not last for ever: we should use it to ask what economic activity we want to rebuild, and what we could do without.
Tuesday 2 June 2020
The Power of Crowds
Even before the pandemic, mass gatherings were under threat from draconian laws and corporate seizure of public space. Yet history shows that the crowd always finds a way to return. By Dan Hancox in The Guardian
As lockdown loomed in March, I became obsessed with a football anthem for a team 400 miles away. I had read a news story about Edinburgh residents singing a Proclaimers song called Sunshine on Leith from their balconies. I didn’t know the song, and when I looked it up, I found a glorious video of 26,000 Hibernian fans singing it in a sun-drenched Hampden Park, after a long-hoped-for Scottish Cup win in 2016. Both teams had left the pitch, and the Rangers’ half of the stadium was empty. It looked like a concert in which the fans were simultaneously the performer and the audience.
I was entranced. I watched it again, and again. The sight and sound of this collective joy was transcendent: tens of thousands of green-and-white scarves held aloft, everyone belting out the song at the tops of their lungs. When the crowd hits the chorus, the volume levels on the shaky smartphone video blow their limit, exploding into a delirious roar of noise. I thought of something that one of the leaders of the nationwide “Tuneless Choirs” – specifically for people who can’t sing – once said: “If you get enough people singing together, with enough volume, it always sounds good.” Our individual failings are submerged; we become greater than the sum of our meagre parts. Anthems sung alone sound thin and absurd – think of the spectacle of a pop star bellowing the Star-Spangled Banner at the Super Bowl. Anthems need the warmth of harmony, or even the chafing of dissonance. They need the full sound of bodies brushing up against each other in pride, joy or righteousness.
Sunshine on Leith is ostensibly a love song, but in this instance, it wasn’t being sung to a lover, or to the victorious Hibs players, or to the football club, or to Leith – the 26,000 singers seemed to be addressing each other. In their many and varied voices, they had transformed it into a love song to the crowd: “While I’m worth my room on this Earth, I will be with you / While the chief puts sunshine on Leith, I’ll thank him for his work, and your birth and my birth.” In the YouTube comments, fans of other clubs, from Millwall to Lyon – and even Hibs’ arch-rivals Hearts – congratulate the Hibbies; not on the cup victory, not on the performance of the team, but that of the crowd. “Even the riot police horses shedding tears there,” observes one.
As the lockdown commenced, I found myself cueing up other songs that reminded me of crowds. In the way a single snatch of melody can instantly remind you of an ex, or an old friend, I wanted songs that reminded me of what it’s like to be with thousands of strangers. I listened to Drake’s Nice for What and Koffee’s Toast, which took me back to swaying tipsily in the crush of Notting Hill carnival, of being giddily overwhelmed, as the juddering sub-bass moved in waves through a million ribcages.
Perhaps this is too pessimistic. The 21st-century domestication of the crowd does not in itself snuff out its power. The experience of being part of a crowd can still change us in all manner of unexpected ways. If one thing should be retained from academics’ debunking of the myth of the crowd as a single beast with one brain and a thousand limbs, it is precisely that the diversity of the individuals within the crowd is what makes it so vital.
Far from behaving as one, everyone has different cooperation thresholds for participation, and there are some who by their nature will always be the first in the pool. For better or worse, crowds empower more shy or conservative people to do what they might not have done otherwise: to pronounce their political beliefs or proclaim their sexual orientation in public, to sing about their heartfelt feelings for Sergio Agüero, to occupy a bank, to throw a brick, to fight with strangers, to dance to Abba in the concourse of a major intercity railway station.
Being a crowd member is not a muscle that will atrophy through lack of use – our knack for it, and need for it, has a much longer history than the months we will be required to keep our physical distance. The desire to be part of the crowd is a part of who we are, and it will not be dispersed so easily.
As lockdown loomed in March, I became obsessed with a football anthem for a team 400 miles away. I had read a news story about Edinburgh residents singing a Proclaimers song called Sunshine on Leith from their balconies. I didn’t know the song, and when I looked it up, I found a glorious video of 26,000 Hibernian fans singing it in a sun-drenched Hampden Park, after a long-hoped-for Scottish Cup win in 2016. Both teams had left the pitch, and the Rangers’ half of the stadium was empty. It looked like a concert in which the fans were simultaneously the performer and the audience.
I was entranced. I watched it again, and again. The sight and sound of this collective joy was transcendent: tens of thousands of green-and-white scarves held aloft, everyone belting out the song at the tops of their lungs. When the crowd hits the chorus, the volume levels on the shaky smartphone video blow their limit, exploding into a delirious roar of noise. I thought of something that one of the leaders of the nationwide “Tuneless Choirs” – specifically for people who can’t sing – once said: “If you get enough people singing together, with enough volume, it always sounds good.” Our individual failings are submerged; we become greater than the sum of our meagre parts. Anthems sung alone sound thin and absurd – think of the spectacle of a pop star bellowing the Star-Spangled Banner at the Super Bowl. Anthems need the warmth of harmony, or even the chafing of dissonance. They need the full sound of bodies brushing up against each other in pride, joy or righteousness.
Sunshine on Leith is ostensibly a love song, but in this instance, it wasn’t being sung to a lover, or to the victorious Hibs players, or to the football club, or to Leith – the 26,000 singers seemed to be addressing each other. In their many and varied voices, they had transformed it into a love song to the crowd: “While I’m worth my room on this Earth, I will be with you / While the chief puts sunshine on Leith, I’ll thank him for his work, and your birth and my birth.” In the YouTube comments, fans of other clubs, from Millwall to Lyon – and even Hibs’ arch-rivals Hearts – congratulate the Hibbies; not on the cup victory, not on the performance of the team, but that of the crowd. “Even the riot police horses shedding tears there,” observes one.
As the lockdown commenced, I found myself cueing up other songs that reminded me of crowds. In the way a single snatch of melody can instantly remind you of an ex, or an old friend, I wanted songs that reminded me of what it’s like to be with thousands of strangers. I listened to Drake’s Nice for What and Koffee’s Toast, which took me back to swaying tipsily in the crush of Notting Hill carnival, of being giddily overwhelmed, as the juddering sub-bass moved in waves through a million ribcages.
Notting Hill carnival in 2012. Photograph: Miles Davies/Alamy Stock Photo
I missed the disinhibition of dancing in a dark, low-ceilinged club. I missed screaming into the cold winter air of the AFC Wimbledon terraces about an outrageous refereeing decision. I missed the joy of chanting and feeling my own thin voice being made whole by others joining it in unison. I missed the tingling mixture of anxiety and vertigo of the moment you first step out into a festival or football or carnival or protest crowd, a feeling of over-stimulation, the ripples of noise and colour jostling for your attention, the anticipation of being subsumed in the crowd and yet powered up by it – of losing a part of yourself, and your independence, and being glad to. I missed the strange alchemy of congregation, when your brain pulses with the validation of being with so many people who have chosen the same path. How could I be wrong? Look, all these people are here, too.
While many of us were missing crowds, the realities of Covid-19 meant they had taken on a completely new meaning. Gathering with others was suddenly, paradoxically antisocial: it suggested you were careless about viral transmission of a deadly disease, more interested in your own short-term social needs than the lives of strangers. The very sight of a crowd suddenly seemed alarming. We shook our heads at rumours of parties, and shared pictures of Cheltenham festival or the Stereophonics’ Cardiff gigs as if they were clips from horror films. Festivals, congregations, assemblies, raves, processions, choirs, rallies, demonstrations, audiences in stadiums, halls, clubs, theatres and cinemas – gatherings of any kind became fatal. As lockdown begins to ease, people are again gathering to socialise in parks and on beaches, and to rail against injustice in Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion protests, but crowds as we used to know them won’t be coming back for many months to come.
While the pandemic has made exceptional demands of us, even before the Covid-19 lockdown, crowds have been under threat. We were becoming ever more atomised, and pushed further into our homes, and crowds were becoming more domesticated, enclosed, surveilled and expensive to be a part of. Our opportunities to gather freely, in both senses of the word, have greatly diminished since the 90s. And yet, throughout human history, there has always been something pleasingly resilient about the crowd: however many new ways are found to disperse it, it will always find a way to reconvene.
Crowds have always had a bad rap: there is no gentle mob, no friendly pack. The same disinhibition that allows for moments of great joy can also enable grotesque crimes. The people who gathered to watch lynchings in the US, or recent attacks on Muslims by groups of Hindu nationalists in India, were not just bystanders but participants. Their presence and acquiescence helped make the violence possible. And just as the people at the back of the crowd empower those at the front, the reverse can be true. The hooligan firm leader who throws the first cafe chair across a moonlit plaza on a balmy European away day makes it easier for more timid members of the crowd to cross their own “cooperation threshold” and join in.
Even celebratory or worshipful crowds can go wrong, and when they do, they generate an unmatched horror. Few things strike fear like the the idea of mass panic, few words as chilling as “caught up in a stampede” or “trampled to death”. The horror of the 96 dead at Hillsborough in 1989, or the 21 suffocated at the 2010 Berlin Love Parade, or the 2,400 killed in a crowd collapse at the 2015 Hajj, gnaws at something deep in our psyches. For some people, even a peaceful and orderly crowd can be scary, triggering intense anxiety or PTSD.
Informed by tragedies, uprisings and protests alike, for a long time crowds were seen as inherently dangerous and lobotomising. But during the past couple of decades, thanks to work by social psychologists, behavioural scientists and anthropologists, a new understanding of the complexity of crowd behaviour has become increasingly influential.
I missed the disinhibition of dancing in a dark, low-ceilinged club. I missed screaming into the cold winter air of the AFC Wimbledon terraces about an outrageous refereeing decision. I missed the joy of chanting and feeling my own thin voice being made whole by others joining it in unison. I missed the tingling mixture of anxiety and vertigo of the moment you first step out into a festival or football or carnival or protest crowd, a feeling of over-stimulation, the ripples of noise and colour jostling for your attention, the anticipation of being subsumed in the crowd and yet powered up by it – of losing a part of yourself, and your independence, and being glad to. I missed the strange alchemy of congregation, when your brain pulses with the validation of being with so many people who have chosen the same path. How could I be wrong? Look, all these people are here, too.
While many of us were missing crowds, the realities of Covid-19 meant they had taken on a completely new meaning. Gathering with others was suddenly, paradoxically antisocial: it suggested you were careless about viral transmission of a deadly disease, more interested in your own short-term social needs than the lives of strangers. The very sight of a crowd suddenly seemed alarming. We shook our heads at rumours of parties, and shared pictures of Cheltenham festival or the Stereophonics’ Cardiff gigs as if they were clips from horror films. Festivals, congregations, assemblies, raves, processions, choirs, rallies, demonstrations, audiences in stadiums, halls, clubs, theatres and cinemas – gatherings of any kind became fatal. As lockdown begins to ease, people are again gathering to socialise in parks and on beaches, and to rail against injustice in Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion protests, but crowds as we used to know them won’t be coming back for many months to come.
While the pandemic has made exceptional demands of us, even before the Covid-19 lockdown, crowds have been under threat. We were becoming ever more atomised, and pushed further into our homes, and crowds were becoming more domesticated, enclosed, surveilled and expensive to be a part of. Our opportunities to gather freely, in both senses of the word, have greatly diminished since the 90s. And yet, throughout human history, there has always been something pleasingly resilient about the crowd: however many new ways are found to disperse it, it will always find a way to reconvene.
Crowds have always had a bad rap: there is no gentle mob, no friendly pack. The same disinhibition that allows for moments of great joy can also enable grotesque crimes. The people who gathered to watch lynchings in the US, or recent attacks on Muslims by groups of Hindu nationalists in India, were not just bystanders but participants. Their presence and acquiescence helped make the violence possible. And just as the people at the back of the crowd empower those at the front, the reverse can be true. The hooligan firm leader who throws the first cafe chair across a moonlit plaza on a balmy European away day makes it easier for more timid members of the crowd to cross their own “cooperation threshold” and join in.
Even celebratory or worshipful crowds can go wrong, and when they do, they generate an unmatched horror. Few things strike fear like the the idea of mass panic, few words as chilling as “caught up in a stampede” or “trampled to death”. The horror of the 96 dead at Hillsborough in 1989, or the 21 suffocated at the 2010 Berlin Love Parade, or the 2,400 killed in a crowd collapse at the 2015 Hajj, gnaws at something deep in our psyches. For some people, even a peaceful and orderly crowd can be scary, triggering intense anxiety or PTSD.
Informed by tragedies, uprisings and protests alike, for a long time crowds were seen as inherently dangerous and lobotomising. But during the past couple of decades, thanks to work by social psychologists, behavioural scientists and anthropologists, a new understanding of the complexity of crowd behaviour has become increasingly influential.
A depiction of the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in 1819, when cavalry charged on a crowd at a political rally. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
For most of us, a crowd can be an alluring thing, because the desire to be among the throng seems to be innate. Gathering together for ritualistic celebrations – dancing, chanting, festivalling, costuming, singing, marching – goes back almost as far as we have any record of human behaviour. In 2003, 13,000-year-old cave paintings were discovered in Nottinghamshire that seemed to show “conga lines” of dancing women. According to the archeologist Paul Pettitt, the paintings matched others across Europe, indicating that they were part of a continent-wide Paleolithic culture of collective singing and dancing.
In Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2007 book Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, she draws on the work of anthropologists including Robin Dunbar to argue that dancing and music-making was a social glue that helped stone-age families join together in groups larger than the family unit, to hunt and protect themselves from predators. For Ehrenreich, rituals of collective joy are as intrinsic to human development as speech. More recent experiments by Dunbar and his colleagues have suggested that the capacity of singing together to bond groups of strangers shows it “may have played a role in the evolutionary success of modern humans over their early relatives”.
The power of crowds has long fixated religious and secular leaders alike, who have sought to harness communal energy for their own glorification, or to tame mass gatherings when they start to take on a momentum of their own. Ehrenreich records the medieval Christian church’s long battle to eradicate unruly, ecstatic or immoderate dancing from the congregation. In later centuries, as the reformation and industrial revolution proceeded, festivals, feast days, sports, revels and ecstatic rituals of countless kinds were outlawed for their tendency to result in drunken, pagan or otherwise ungodly behaviour. Between the 17th and 20th centuries, there were “literally thousands of acts of legislation introduced which attempted to outlaw carnival and popular festivity from European life,” wrote Peter Stallybrass and Allon White in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression.
It wasn’t until the 19th century, as industrialising cities exploded in size, that the formal study of crowd psychology and herd behaviour emerged. Reflecting on the French Revolution a century earlier, thinkers such as Gustave Le Bon helped promote the idea that a crowd is always on the verge of becoming a mob. Stirred up by agitators, crowds could quickly turn to violence, sweeping up even good, upstanding citizens in their collective madness. “By the mere fact that he forms part of an organised crowd,” Le Bon wrote, “a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation.”
While the discipline of crowd psychology has moved on considerably since the days of Le Bon, these early theories still retain their hold, says Clifford Stott, a professor of social psychology at Keele University. Much of the media coverage of the riots that broke out across England in 2011 echoed the explanations of the 19th-century pioneers of crowd psychology: they were a pathological intrusion into civilised society, a contagion, spread by agitators, of the normally stable and contented body politic. Focus fell, in particular, on ill-defined “criminal gangs” stirring things up, possibly coordinating things via BlackBerry Messenger. The foot soldiers – 30,000 people were thought to have participated – were depicted as feral thugs. Hordes. Animals. The frontpage headlines were clear: “Rule of the mob”, “Yob rule”, “Flaming morons”. Purportedly liberal voices clamoured for David Cameron to send in the army. Shoot looters on sight. Wheel in the water cannon.
For most of us, a crowd can be an alluring thing, because the desire to be among the throng seems to be innate. Gathering together for ritualistic celebrations – dancing, chanting, festivalling, costuming, singing, marching – goes back almost as far as we have any record of human behaviour. In 2003, 13,000-year-old cave paintings were discovered in Nottinghamshire that seemed to show “conga lines” of dancing women. According to the archeologist Paul Pettitt, the paintings matched others across Europe, indicating that they were part of a continent-wide Paleolithic culture of collective singing and dancing.
In Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2007 book Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, she draws on the work of anthropologists including Robin Dunbar to argue that dancing and music-making was a social glue that helped stone-age families join together in groups larger than the family unit, to hunt and protect themselves from predators. For Ehrenreich, rituals of collective joy are as intrinsic to human development as speech. More recent experiments by Dunbar and his colleagues have suggested that the capacity of singing together to bond groups of strangers shows it “may have played a role in the evolutionary success of modern humans over their early relatives”.
The power of crowds has long fixated religious and secular leaders alike, who have sought to harness communal energy for their own glorification, or to tame mass gatherings when they start to take on a momentum of their own. Ehrenreich records the medieval Christian church’s long battle to eradicate unruly, ecstatic or immoderate dancing from the congregation. In later centuries, as the reformation and industrial revolution proceeded, festivals, feast days, sports, revels and ecstatic rituals of countless kinds were outlawed for their tendency to result in drunken, pagan or otherwise ungodly behaviour. Between the 17th and 20th centuries, there were “literally thousands of acts of legislation introduced which attempted to outlaw carnival and popular festivity from European life,” wrote Peter Stallybrass and Allon White in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression.
It wasn’t until the 19th century, as industrialising cities exploded in size, that the formal study of crowd psychology and herd behaviour emerged. Reflecting on the French Revolution a century earlier, thinkers such as Gustave Le Bon helped promote the idea that a crowd is always on the verge of becoming a mob. Stirred up by agitators, crowds could quickly turn to violence, sweeping up even good, upstanding citizens in their collective madness. “By the mere fact that he forms part of an organised crowd,” Le Bon wrote, “a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation.”
While the discipline of crowd psychology has moved on considerably since the days of Le Bon, these early theories still retain their hold, says Clifford Stott, a professor of social psychology at Keele University. Much of the media coverage of the riots that broke out across England in 2011 echoed the explanations of the 19th-century pioneers of crowd psychology: they were a pathological intrusion into civilised society, a contagion, spread by agitators, of the normally stable and contented body politic. Focus fell, in particular, on ill-defined “criminal gangs” stirring things up, possibly coordinating things via BlackBerry Messenger. The foot soldiers – 30,000 people were thought to have participated – were depicted as feral thugs. Hordes. Animals. The frontpage headlines were clear: “Rule of the mob”, “Yob rule”, “Flaming morons”. Purportedly liberal voices clamoured for David Cameron to send in the army. Shoot looters on sight. Wheel in the water cannon.
Riots in Hackney, east London in August 2011. Photograph: Luke Macgregor/Reuters
“What we need to recognise is that from a scientific perspective, classical [crowd] theory has no validity,” says Stott. “It doesn’t explain or predict the behaviours it purports to explain and predict. And yet everywhere you look, the narrative is still there.” The reason, he argues, is straightforward: “It’s very, very convenient for dominant and powerful groups,” Stott says. “It pathologises, decontextualises and renders meaningless crowd violence, and therefore legitimises its repression.” As Stott notes, by shifting the blame to the madness of crowds, it also conveniently allows the powerful to avoid scrutinising their own responsibility for the violence. Last week, when the US attorney general blamed “outside agitators” for stirring up violence, and Donald Trump referred to “professionally managed” “thugs”, they were drawing on exactly the ideas that Le Bon sketched out in the 19th century.
In recent decades, detailed analytical research has produced ever-more sophisticated insights into crowd behaviour, many of which disprove these long-standing assumptions. “Crowds have an amazing ability to police themselves, self-regulate, and actually display a lot of pro-social behaviour, supporting others in their group,” says Anne Templeton, an academic at Edinburgh University who studies crowd psychology. She points to the 2017 Manchester Arena terrorist attack, in which CCTV footage showed members of the public performing first aid on the wounded before emergency services arrived, and Mancunians rushed to provide food, shelter, transport and emotional support for the victims. “People provide an amazing amount of help in emergencies to people they don’t know, especially when they’re part of an in-group.”
Strange things happen to our brains when we’re in a crowd we’ve chosen to be part of, says Templeton. We don’t just feel happier and more confident, we also have a lower threshold of disgust. This is why festivalgoers will happily share drinks (and by dint of their proximity, sweat) with strangers, or Hajj pilgrims will share the sometimes bloody razors used to shave their heads. In a crowd, we feel safer from harm.
If we now have a better grasp of the complexity of crowd dynamics, the core truth about them is relatively simple: they have the potential to magnify both the good and bad in us. The loss of self in a crowd can lead to unthinkable violence, just as it can ecstatic transcendence. What is striking is that, in recent decades, the latter has troubled the British establishment every bit as much as the former.
‘The open crowd is the true crowd,” wrote Elias Canetti in his 1960 book Crowds and Power – “the crowd abandoning itself freely to its natural urge for growth”, rather than those hemmed in by authorities, limited in shape and size. The Sermon on the Mount, he writes, was delivered to an open crowd. The obsequious flock, the brainwashed cult, the army marching in lock-step, is a world away from a fluid, democratic, sometimes anarchic congregation of the people. These open crowds have become harder to find, and harder to keep open.
Contemporary Britain’s idea of the crowd was formed by two explosions in unruly mass culture at the end of the last century. First, by 70s and 80s football fandom and its manifold sins, and the avoidable tragedy of Hillsborough – a tragedy created by the authorities’ views of the crowd as animalistic thugs, a fear and loathing that permeated the media, police, political class and football authorities. And second, by the acid house explosion and rave scene of the late 80s and early 90s, a subcultural surge of illegal or at least illicit “free parties” in fields and warehouses across the country. Both cultures flourished in spite of widespread media demonisation, both fought the law – and in both cases, the law won. Things have never been the same since for people who wish to assemble on their own terms.
The policing, containment and enclosure of “free” raves is particularly instructive, suggesting that the authorities fear a happy crowd as much as a pitchfork-carrying one. For the novelist Hari Kunzru, reflecting on his 90s youth a few years ago, approaching the site of a rave, feeling “the bass pulsing up ahead, the excitement was almost unbearable. A mass of dancers lifting up like a single body … [an] ecstatic fantasy of community, a zone where we were networked with each other, rather than with the office switchboard.”
“What we need to recognise is that from a scientific perspective, classical [crowd] theory has no validity,” says Stott. “It doesn’t explain or predict the behaviours it purports to explain and predict. And yet everywhere you look, the narrative is still there.” The reason, he argues, is straightforward: “It’s very, very convenient for dominant and powerful groups,” Stott says. “It pathologises, decontextualises and renders meaningless crowd violence, and therefore legitimises its repression.” As Stott notes, by shifting the blame to the madness of crowds, it also conveniently allows the powerful to avoid scrutinising their own responsibility for the violence. Last week, when the US attorney general blamed “outside agitators” for stirring up violence, and Donald Trump referred to “professionally managed” “thugs”, they were drawing on exactly the ideas that Le Bon sketched out in the 19th century.
In recent decades, detailed analytical research has produced ever-more sophisticated insights into crowd behaviour, many of which disprove these long-standing assumptions. “Crowds have an amazing ability to police themselves, self-regulate, and actually display a lot of pro-social behaviour, supporting others in their group,” says Anne Templeton, an academic at Edinburgh University who studies crowd psychology. She points to the 2017 Manchester Arena terrorist attack, in which CCTV footage showed members of the public performing first aid on the wounded before emergency services arrived, and Mancunians rushed to provide food, shelter, transport and emotional support for the victims. “People provide an amazing amount of help in emergencies to people they don’t know, especially when they’re part of an in-group.”
Strange things happen to our brains when we’re in a crowd we’ve chosen to be part of, says Templeton. We don’t just feel happier and more confident, we also have a lower threshold of disgust. This is why festivalgoers will happily share drinks (and by dint of their proximity, sweat) with strangers, or Hajj pilgrims will share the sometimes bloody razors used to shave their heads. In a crowd, we feel safer from harm.
If we now have a better grasp of the complexity of crowd dynamics, the core truth about them is relatively simple: they have the potential to magnify both the good and bad in us. The loss of self in a crowd can lead to unthinkable violence, just as it can ecstatic transcendence. What is striking is that, in recent decades, the latter has troubled the British establishment every bit as much as the former.
‘The open crowd is the true crowd,” wrote Elias Canetti in his 1960 book Crowds and Power – “the crowd abandoning itself freely to its natural urge for growth”, rather than those hemmed in by authorities, limited in shape and size. The Sermon on the Mount, he writes, was delivered to an open crowd. The obsequious flock, the brainwashed cult, the army marching in lock-step, is a world away from a fluid, democratic, sometimes anarchic congregation of the people. These open crowds have become harder to find, and harder to keep open.
Contemporary Britain’s idea of the crowd was formed by two explosions in unruly mass culture at the end of the last century. First, by 70s and 80s football fandom and its manifold sins, and the avoidable tragedy of Hillsborough – a tragedy created by the authorities’ views of the crowd as animalistic thugs, a fear and loathing that permeated the media, police, political class and football authorities. And second, by the acid house explosion and rave scene of the late 80s and early 90s, a subcultural surge of illegal or at least illicit “free parties” in fields and warehouses across the country. Both cultures flourished in spite of widespread media demonisation, both fought the law – and in both cases, the law won. Things have never been the same since for people who wish to assemble on their own terms.
The policing, containment and enclosure of “free” raves is particularly instructive, suggesting that the authorities fear a happy crowd as much as a pitchfork-carrying one. For the novelist Hari Kunzru, reflecting on his 90s youth a few years ago, approaching the site of a rave, feeling “the bass pulsing up ahead, the excitement was almost unbearable. A mass of dancers lifting up like a single body … [an] ecstatic fantasy of community, a zone where we were networked with each other, rather than with the office switchboard.”
An acid house party in Berkshire in 1989. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock
The culmination of the rave era, and the beginning of its end, was the epochal 1992 Castlemorton Common festival, a week-long, outdoor free party in Worcestershire, with numbers in excess of 20,000. Writing about it in the Evening Standard, Anthony Burgess summed up the establishment mood, railing against “the megacrowd, reducing the individual intelligence to that of an amoeba”. One man’s escapist fantasy of community is another’s vision of civilisational collapse, and the Thatcher-into-Major-era junta of the tabloid press, police, landowners and the Conservative party made it their business to disperse rave’s congregation of squatters, dropouts, drug-takers, hippies, hunt saboteurs, anti-road protesters and travellers.
In 1994, parliament passed the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, which outlawed any open air, night-time public congregation around amplified music. “For this purpose,” the act specified, “‘music’ includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.” Any ambiguity about the target of the legislation was wiped away during the House of Lords debate on the bill. The Conservative deputy leader of the House, the hereditary peer Earl Ferrers, suggested an amendment “which would catch a rave party but would not also catch a Pavarotti concert, a barbecue or people having a dance in the early hours of the evening”. I do hope, replied another, that they would not risk jailing Pavarotti under the new legislation.
For the ravers, what had begun as a transcendent celebration turned into a question of the right to assemble in the first place. Before the bill passed into law, three elegiac “Kill the Bill” protest-parties took place in 1994, drawing tens of thousands, and culminating in October when bare-chested, dreadlocked protesters shook the gates of Downing Street to a soundtrack of whistles, cheers and repetitive beats. In archival video from that day, a protester clambers to the top of the gates and sits there nonchalantly smoking a fag, while police in short-sleeved shirts look on in horror. It is a telling time capsule, because it is hard to imagine any crowd of protesters getting this close to No 10 ever again.
The culmination of the rave era, and the beginning of its end, was the epochal 1992 Castlemorton Common festival, a week-long, outdoor free party in Worcestershire, with numbers in excess of 20,000. Writing about it in the Evening Standard, Anthony Burgess summed up the establishment mood, railing against “the megacrowd, reducing the individual intelligence to that of an amoeba”. One man’s escapist fantasy of community is another’s vision of civilisational collapse, and the Thatcher-into-Major-era junta of the tabloid press, police, landowners and the Conservative party made it their business to disperse rave’s congregation of squatters, dropouts, drug-takers, hippies, hunt saboteurs, anti-road protesters and travellers.
In 1994, parliament passed the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, which outlawed any open air, night-time public congregation around amplified music. “For this purpose,” the act specified, “‘music’ includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.” Any ambiguity about the target of the legislation was wiped away during the House of Lords debate on the bill. The Conservative deputy leader of the House, the hereditary peer Earl Ferrers, suggested an amendment “which would catch a rave party but would not also catch a Pavarotti concert, a barbecue or people having a dance in the early hours of the evening”. I do hope, replied another, that they would not risk jailing Pavarotti under the new legislation.
For the ravers, what had begun as a transcendent celebration turned into a question of the right to assemble in the first place. Before the bill passed into law, three elegiac “Kill the Bill” protest-parties took place in 1994, drawing tens of thousands, and culminating in October when bare-chested, dreadlocked protesters shook the gates of Downing Street to a soundtrack of whistles, cheers and repetitive beats. In archival video from that day, a protester clambers to the top of the gates and sits there nonchalantly smoking a fag, while police in short-sleeved shirts look on in horror. It is a telling time capsule, because it is hard to imagine any crowd of protesters getting this close to No 10 ever again.
Police bust a warehouse party circa 1997. Photograph: PYMCA/Universal Images Group/Getty
The Criminal Justice Act killed the free party scene, and like Hillsborough, its legacy is still felt to this day. In fact, it was only the beginning of a series of restrictions on free assembly. The past 25 years have been a challenging time for crowds, thanks to the rise of surveillance technology and privatisation of public space. During the 1990s, 78% of the Home Office crime prevention budget was spent on implementing CCTV – and a further £500m of public money was spent on it between 2000 and 2006. London became the most surveilled city in the world for a time, and even today no city outside China has more CCTV per head.
The explosion of CCTV is just one way the 21st-century city hampers the freedom of the crowd. Urban regeneration programmes are designed to channel us efficiently towards work and the shops – spaces built for Homo economicus, human beings interacting transactionally, rather as social citizens. What look like potential meeting grounds for crowds in the modern British city are often mirages: regeneration zones such as Spinningfields in Manchester, Liverpool One and More London have replaced genuine public spaces with privately owned public spaces. These are patrolled by security guards and underwritten by private rules and regulations, whereby the owners are perfectly entitled to ban gatherings and political protests, and move along whoever they like, whenever they like.
In 2011, when Occupy London attempted to set up camp in Paternoster Square, outside the London Stock Exchange, they were blocked by police barricades, enforcing an emergency high court injunction that established that the land was indeed private property. This was odd, the Observer’s architecture critic Rowan Moore wrote at the time, “as almost every architectural statement, planning application, and press release, in the protracted redevelopment of Paternoster Square, described this ‘private land’ as ‘public space’.”
If the average British city has undergone huge transformations since the Criminal Justice Act, then so have the people in it. Crowd behaviour in the 21st century has been conditioned by the new devices at our fingertips as much as the changing ground beneath our feet, or the laws that govern their movement. In his prescient 2002 book Smart Mobs, the critic Harold Rheingold identified new types of crowds that were able to act in concert even before they had met. He predicted a “social tsunami” to come from the next wave of mobile telecoms, pointing to the mass SMS chains in Manila that were used to coordinate the protests that overthrew the Philippine president Joseph Estrada in 2001.
While alienation and isolation are certainly hallmarks of modern life, when a crowd is needed, it springs into life. The 2009 Iran green revolution, the 2011 Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, the Spanish indignados and the 2013 Gezi Park protests in Turkey – all of these “movements of the squares” saw physical public space unexpectedly replenished with fresh, angry crowds that had established many of their initial networks and political education via the internet. “Online inspiration, offline perspiration”, as one slogan of the time put it.
These digitally enhanced tactics took over British streets in the winter of 2010, when student and anti-cuts protesters came out against the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition’s austerity policies and tripling of tuition fees. The police responded with the controversial crowd-control tactic of kettling – essentially imprisoning people outdoors between lines of riot police, without access to food, water, toilets, warm clothing or medical assistance, for hours at a time.
Kettling worked against the student protesters on several fronts, dampening their spirits, disincentivising future protests, riling up some to violence and thus delivering the government the PR victory they needed. “Is not the point of a kettle that it brings things to the boil?” David Lammy MP asked Theresa May, then the home secretary, at the time. But it also radicalised many of them, precisely because they had had their freedom to move restricted, pushing them to direct action tactics in defiance of the tactics proposed by the leaders of the National Union of Students.
The Criminal Justice Act killed the free party scene, and like Hillsborough, its legacy is still felt to this day. In fact, it was only the beginning of a series of restrictions on free assembly. The past 25 years have been a challenging time for crowds, thanks to the rise of surveillance technology and privatisation of public space. During the 1990s, 78% of the Home Office crime prevention budget was spent on implementing CCTV – and a further £500m of public money was spent on it between 2000 and 2006. London became the most surveilled city in the world for a time, and even today no city outside China has more CCTV per head.
The explosion of CCTV is just one way the 21st-century city hampers the freedom of the crowd. Urban regeneration programmes are designed to channel us efficiently towards work and the shops – spaces built for Homo economicus, human beings interacting transactionally, rather as social citizens. What look like potential meeting grounds for crowds in the modern British city are often mirages: regeneration zones such as Spinningfields in Manchester, Liverpool One and More London have replaced genuine public spaces with privately owned public spaces. These are patrolled by security guards and underwritten by private rules and regulations, whereby the owners are perfectly entitled to ban gatherings and political protests, and move along whoever they like, whenever they like.
In 2011, when Occupy London attempted to set up camp in Paternoster Square, outside the London Stock Exchange, they were blocked by police barricades, enforcing an emergency high court injunction that established that the land was indeed private property. This was odd, the Observer’s architecture critic Rowan Moore wrote at the time, “as almost every architectural statement, planning application, and press release, in the protracted redevelopment of Paternoster Square, described this ‘private land’ as ‘public space’.”
If the average British city has undergone huge transformations since the Criminal Justice Act, then so have the people in it. Crowd behaviour in the 21st century has been conditioned by the new devices at our fingertips as much as the changing ground beneath our feet, or the laws that govern their movement. In his prescient 2002 book Smart Mobs, the critic Harold Rheingold identified new types of crowds that were able to act in concert even before they had met. He predicted a “social tsunami” to come from the next wave of mobile telecoms, pointing to the mass SMS chains in Manila that were used to coordinate the protests that overthrew the Philippine president Joseph Estrada in 2001.
While alienation and isolation are certainly hallmarks of modern life, when a crowd is needed, it springs into life. The 2009 Iran green revolution, the 2011 Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, the Spanish indignados and the 2013 Gezi Park protests in Turkey – all of these “movements of the squares” saw physical public space unexpectedly replenished with fresh, angry crowds that had established many of their initial networks and political education via the internet. “Online inspiration, offline perspiration”, as one slogan of the time put it.
These digitally enhanced tactics took over British streets in the winter of 2010, when student and anti-cuts protesters came out against the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition’s austerity policies and tripling of tuition fees. The police responded with the controversial crowd-control tactic of kettling – essentially imprisoning people outdoors between lines of riot police, without access to food, water, toilets, warm clothing or medical assistance, for hours at a time.
Kettling worked against the student protesters on several fronts, dampening their spirits, disincentivising future protests, riling up some to violence and thus delivering the government the PR victory they needed. “Is not the point of a kettle that it brings things to the boil?” David Lammy MP asked Theresa May, then the home secretary, at the time. But it also radicalised many of them, precisely because they had had their freedom to move restricted, pushing them to direct action tactics in defiance of the tactics proposed by the leaders of the National Union of Students.
Mounted police drive their horses into protesters during student demonstrations in London in December 2010. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images
Academic Hannah Awcock attended the 2010 protests as a student, and now lectures on the history of protest at the University of Central Lancashire. She explained that throughout history, from the 1866 Hyde Park suffrage riots to the student demos, protest crowds have often pushed to go further than their organisers, or the authorities, will allow for. And yet, as febrile as the atmosphere around Brexit and austerity has been in the nine years since the student protests and London riots, large protests have appeared calmer, on the face of it at least. In the UK, “that really aggressive and confrontational policing that emerged post-9/11 seems to have diminished now,” Awcock said. “Maybe it’s because the protests themselves are less radical, but it’s also because there’s also been a turn towards more subtle methods of policing crowds, techniques like increased surveillance and intelligence gathering.”
The changes to crowd policing in the past decade owe a great deal to behind-the-scenes policy work by crowd psychologists. Clifford Stott has worked with police and football authorities for many years to discourage heavy-handed policing. One turning point, he told me, was the 2011 Liberal Democrat conference in Sheffield, where South Yorkshire police trialled Stott’s recommendations. Unlike Brighton, Liverpool, Birmingham or Manchester, the city was not used to hosting conferences for a party of government, and substantial student and anti-austerity protests were expected. In preparation, police established a new “dialogue unit” of Police Liaison Teams (PLTs) in blue tabards, recruiting individuals to move among the crowd talking to them, rather than policing in numbers from the outside.
“What we found was that these dialogue units were policing the police,” said Stott. “They were stopping unnecessary interventions. The PLTs were reassuring the commanders that an intervention wasn’t needed.” Instead of riot cops wading in, de-escalation and crowd self-regulation took over. Since then, Stott said, this approach has become more common. “Where the police have these capacities for dialogue and communication, there’s less disorder. It’s that simple.”
According to Ch Insp Melita Worswick of Greater Manchester police, this is part of a broader shift in crowd policing in the UK – away from the notion of enforcing “public order” towards an emphasis on public safety. “It’s really important to have the right people communicating with crowds,” she says. “This is about building on policing with consent, and knowing that if we don’t manage that right, it could result in disorder.” It’s also about learning to step back, rather than aggressively intervening at the first opportunity. “Sometimes taking no action is the right way,” says Worswick. It’s an approach that police in Glasgow have put into action for recent matches between Rangers and Celtic. Following advice from academics, they will now allow fans to jeer at each other for a while, because they know that’s part of the ritual, and won’t intervene unless it starts to get violent. Up to a point, at least, they trust the crowd members to self-regulate.
While this sounds like progress, the reality does not always match the rhetoric. Even Extinction Rebellion, which initially attempted to cultivate a friendly relationship with the police, and sought mass arrest as a tactic – later decried the Met’s “over-reach characterised by systematic discrimination, routine use of force, intimidation and physical harm” in hundreds of cases last year. Even more recently, the Met’s use of Covid-19 social-distancing legislation to make arrests at Sunday’s Black Lives Matter protest in London suggests that many elements in the police remain unwilling to step back from the crowd.
In place of the open crowd, nowadays we have come to understand a congregation of people primarily as a money-making opportunity. There is no greater evidence of the attenuated, monetised nature of the 21st-century crowd than the rise of the events industry. Events, in themselves, are of course not new inventions. But there are events, dear boy, and then there are Events: usually sponsored, probably with an admission fee, probably with a range of media partners, good for city-branding, good for tourism, orderly, pre-agreed, surveilled and dispersed at the agreed time. They have become an integral part of the contemporary city, and the reimagining of its citizens as income-generating instruments.
London & Partners, the public-private partnership set up by Boris Johnson in 2011 to promote the capital, estimates that event leisure tourism contributed £2.8bn to the city’s economy in 2015 alone, £644m of which was from overseas “events tourists”. Increasingly, people come not for the UK per se, but the things happening in it. Chief among these are sporting events, which generate more than 70% of major events-related spending in London (music is some way behind). Amid huge fanfare in the past few years, a growing number of major international NBA, NFL and MLB games have come to London. According to London & Partners, 250,000 people have attended “NFL on Regent Street”, which isn’t even an American Football game, just a promotional event for the idea of one.
Academic Hannah Awcock attended the 2010 protests as a student, and now lectures on the history of protest at the University of Central Lancashire. She explained that throughout history, from the 1866 Hyde Park suffrage riots to the student demos, protest crowds have often pushed to go further than their organisers, or the authorities, will allow for. And yet, as febrile as the atmosphere around Brexit and austerity has been in the nine years since the student protests and London riots, large protests have appeared calmer, on the face of it at least. In the UK, “that really aggressive and confrontational policing that emerged post-9/11 seems to have diminished now,” Awcock said. “Maybe it’s because the protests themselves are less radical, but it’s also because there’s also been a turn towards more subtle methods of policing crowds, techniques like increased surveillance and intelligence gathering.”
The changes to crowd policing in the past decade owe a great deal to behind-the-scenes policy work by crowd psychologists. Clifford Stott has worked with police and football authorities for many years to discourage heavy-handed policing. One turning point, he told me, was the 2011 Liberal Democrat conference in Sheffield, where South Yorkshire police trialled Stott’s recommendations. Unlike Brighton, Liverpool, Birmingham or Manchester, the city was not used to hosting conferences for a party of government, and substantial student and anti-austerity protests were expected. In preparation, police established a new “dialogue unit” of Police Liaison Teams (PLTs) in blue tabards, recruiting individuals to move among the crowd talking to them, rather than policing in numbers from the outside.
“What we found was that these dialogue units were policing the police,” said Stott. “They were stopping unnecessary interventions. The PLTs were reassuring the commanders that an intervention wasn’t needed.” Instead of riot cops wading in, de-escalation and crowd self-regulation took over. Since then, Stott said, this approach has become more common. “Where the police have these capacities for dialogue and communication, there’s less disorder. It’s that simple.”
According to Ch Insp Melita Worswick of Greater Manchester police, this is part of a broader shift in crowd policing in the UK – away from the notion of enforcing “public order” towards an emphasis on public safety. “It’s really important to have the right people communicating with crowds,” she says. “This is about building on policing with consent, and knowing that if we don’t manage that right, it could result in disorder.” It’s also about learning to step back, rather than aggressively intervening at the first opportunity. “Sometimes taking no action is the right way,” says Worswick. It’s an approach that police in Glasgow have put into action for recent matches between Rangers and Celtic. Following advice from academics, they will now allow fans to jeer at each other for a while, because they know that’s part of the ritual, and won’t intervene unless it starts to get violent. Up to a point, at least, they trust the crowd members to self-regulate.
While this sounds like progress, the reality does not always match the rhetoric. Even Extinction Rebellion, which initially attempted to cultivate a friendly relationship with the police, and sought mass arrest as a tactic – later decried the Met’s “over-reach characterised by systematic discrimination, routine use of force, intimidation and physical harm” in hundreds of cases last year. Even more recently, the Met’s use of Covid-19 social-distancing legislation to make arrests at Sunday’s Black Lives Matter protest in London suggests that many elements in the police remain unwilling to step back from the crowd.
In place of the open crowd, nowadays we have come to understand a congregation of people primarily as a money-making opportunity. There is no greater evidence of the attenuated, monetised nature of the 21st-century crowd than the rise of the events industry. Events, in themselves, are of course not new inventions. But there are events, dear boy, and then there are Events: usually sponsored, probably with an admission fee, probably with a range of media partners, good for city-branding, good for tourism, orderly, pre-agreed, surveilled and dispersed at the agreed time. They have become an integral part of the contemporary city, and the reimagining of its citizens as income-generating instruments.
London & Partners, the public-private partnership set up by Boris Johnson in 2011 to promote the capital, estimates that event leisure tourism contributed £2.8bn to the city’s economy in 2015 alone, £644m of which was from overseas “events tourists”. Increasingly, people come not for the UK per se, but the things happening in it. Chief among these are sporting events, which generate more than 70% of major events-related spending in London (music is some way behind). Amid huge fanfare in the past few years, a growing number of major international NBA, NFL and MLB games have come to London. According to London & Partners, 250,000 people have attended “NFL on Regent Street”, which isn’t even an American Football game, just a promotional event for the idea of one.
The plaza in front of City Hall in London, a privately owned and carefully controlled public space. Photograph: Steven Watt/Reuters
Where there are crowds, there are consumers, and in the absence of state support, commercial sponsorship (itself rebranded as “partnership”) tracks the events industry’s every move. Last year, the capital played host to the Virgin Money London Marathon, the Prudential RideLondon, the Guinness Six Nations and the EFG London Jazz Festival. Meanwhile, Pride in London somehow managed to rack up 73 “partners” in 2019, from headline sponsors Tesco to PlayStation, the Scouts, the London Stock Exchange, Revlon and Foxtons, amid criticisms that the politics has been drained out of it in favour of corporate “pinkwashing”.
It’s hard to refute the argument that the more carefully planned and managed a large event is, the safer it is for those inside it, and the more the crowd will enjoy it. Not only do you minimise the risk of injury or potential trouble, but everyone – not least the most vulnerable – benefits when you have accessibility for people with mobility issues, the right number of toilets, the right number of exits, the right transport access, good sightlines, food and water and childcare facilities. And a reasonable argument is often made by organisers of cultural festivals that sponsors pay for these things, and pay for events such as Notting Hill Carnival, Pride and Mela to stay free, and accessible to all. But it’s hard not to wonder if something is being lost along the way, in an era when venture capital-backed music video platform Boiler Room receives Arts Council funding to broker Notting Hill Carnival sponsorship deals and live-stream its intimate hedonism to the world; or popular, long-standing free community festivals such as south London’s Lambeth Country Show suddenly have a heavy security presence, prompting outrage and boycotts.
Where there are crowds, there are consumers, and in the absence of state support, commercial sponsorship (itself rebranded as “partnership”) tracks the events industry’s every move. Last year, the capital played host to the Virgin Money London Marathon, the Prudential RideLondon, the Guinness Six Nations and the EFG London Jazz Festival. Meanwhile, Pride in London somehow managed to rack up 73 “partners” in 2019, from headline sponsors Tesco to PlayStation, the Scouts, the London Stock Exchange, Revlon and Foxtons, amid criticisms that the politics has been drained out of it in favour of corporate “pinkwashing”.
It’s hard to refute the argument that the more carefully planned and managed a large event is, the safer it is for those inside it, and the more the crowd will enjoy it. Not only do you minimise the risk of injury or potential trouble, but everyone – not least the most vulnerable – benefits when you have accessibility for people with mobility issues, the right number of toilets, the right number of exits, the right transport access, good sightlines, food and water and childcare facilities. And a reasonable argument is often made by organisers of cultural festivals that sponsors pay for these things, and pay for events such as Notting Hill Carnival, Pride and Mela to stay free, and accessible to all. But it’s hard not to wonder if something is being lost along the way, in an era when venture capital-backed music video platform Boiler Room receives Arts Council funding to broker Notting Hill Carnival sponsorship deals and live-stream its intimate hedonism to the world; or popular, long-standing free community festivals such as south London’s Lambeth Country Show suddenly have a heavy security presence, prompting outrage and boycotts.
Perhaps this is too pessimistic. The 21st-century domestication of the crowd does not in itself snuff out its power. The experience of being part of a crowd can still change us in all manner of unexpected ways. If one thing should be retained from academics’ debunking of the myth of the crowd as a single beast with one brain and a thousand limbs, it is precisely that the diversity of the individuals within the crowd is what makes it so vital.
Far from behaving as one, everyone has different cooperation thresholds for participation, and there are some who by their nature will always be the first in the pool. For better or worse, crowds empower more shy or conservative people to do what they might not have done otherwise: to pronounce their political beliefs or proclaim their sexual orientation in public, to sing about their heartfelt feelings for Sergio Agüero, to occupy a bank, to throw a brick, to fight with strangers, to dance to Abba in the concourse of a major intercity railway station.
Being a crowd member is not a muscle that will atrophy through lack of use – our knack for it, and need for it, has a much longer history than the months we will be required to keep our physical distance. The desire to be part of the crowd is a part of who we are, and it will not be dispersed so easily.
The G20 should be leading the world out of the coronavirus crisis – but it's gone AWOL
In March it promised to support countries in need. Since then, virtual silence. Yet this pandemic requires bold, united leadership writes Gordon Brown in The Guardian
The G20’s video conference meeting in Brasilia on 26 March 26. Photograph: Marcos Correa/Brazilian Presidency/AFP via Getty Images
If coronavirus crosses all boundaries, so too must the war to vanquish it. But the G20, which calls itself the world’s premier international forum for international economic cooperation and should be at the centre of waging that war, has gone awol – absent without lending – with no plan to convene, online or otherwise, at any point in the next six months.
This is not just an abdication of responsibility; it is, potentially, a death sentence for the world’s poorest people, whose healthcare requires international aid and who the richest countries depend on to prevent a second wave of the disease hitting our shores.
On 26 March, just as the full force of the pandemic was becoming clear, the G20 promised “to use all available policy tools” to support countries in need. There would be a “swift implementation” of an emergency response, it said, and its efforts would be “amplified” over the coming weeks. As the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said at the time, emerging markets and developing nations needed at least $2.5tn (£2,000bn) in support. But with new Covid-19 cases round the world running above 100,000 a day and still to peak, the vacuum left by G20 inactivity means that allocations from the IMF and the World Bank to poorer countries will remain a fraction of what is required.
And yet the economic disruption, and the decline in hours worked across the world, is now equivalent to the loss of more than 300 million full-time jobs, according to the International Labour Organization. For the first time this century, global poverty is rising, and three decades of improving living standards are now in reverse. An additional 420 million more people will fall into extreme poverty and, according to the World Food Programme, 265 million face malnutrition. Developing economies and emerging markets have none of the fiscal room for manoeuvre that richer countries enjoy, and not surprisingly more than 100 such countries have applied to the IMF for emergency support.
The G20’s failure to meet is all the more disgraceful because the global response to Covid-19 should this month be moving from its first phase, the rescue operation, to its second, a comprehensive recovery plan – and at its heart there should be a globally coordinated stimulus with an agreed global growth plan.
To make this recovery sustainable the “green new deal” needs to go global; and to help pay for it, a coordinated blitz is required on the estimated $7.4tn hidden untaxed in offshore havens.
As a group of 200 former leaders state in today’s letter to the G20, the poorest countries need international aid within days, not weeks or months. Debt relief is the quickest way of releasing resources. Until now, sub-Saharan Africa has been spending more on debt repayments than on health. The $80bn owed by the 76 poorest nations should be waived until at least December 2021.
But poor countries also need direct cash support. The IMF should dip into its $35bn reserves, and the development banks should announce they are prepared to raise additional money.
A second trillion can be raised by issuing – as we did in the global financial crisis – new international money (known as special drawing rights), which can be converted into dollars or local currency. To their credit, European countries like the UK, France and Germany have already lent some of this money to poorer countries and, if the IMF agreed, $500bn could be issued immediately and $500bn more by 2022.
And we must declare now that any new vaccine and cure will be made freely available to all who need it – and resist US pressure by supporting the World Health Organization in its efforts to ensure the poorest nations do not lose out. This Thursday, at the pledging conference held for the global vaccine alliance in London, donor countries should contribute the $7bn needed to help make immunisation more widely available.
No country can eliminate infectious diseases unless all countries do so. And it is because we cannot deal with the health nor the economic emergency without bringing the whole world together that Donald Trump’s latest counterproposal – to parade a few favoured leaders in Washington in September – is no substitute for a G20 summit.
His event would exclude Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and most of Asia, and would represent only 2 billion of the world’s 7 billion people. Yet the lesson of history is that, at key moments of crisis, we require bold, united leadership, and to resist initiatives that will be seen as “divide and rule”.
So, it is time for the other 19 G20 members to demand an early summit, and avert what would be the greatest global social and economic policy failure of our generation.
If coronavirus crosses all boundaries, so too must the war to vanquish it. But the G20, which calls itself the world’s premier international forum for international economic cooperation and should be at the centre of waging that war, has gone awol – absent without lending – with no plan to convene, online or otherwise, at any point in the next six months.
This is not just an abdication of responsibility; it is, potentially, a death sentence for the world’s poorest people, whose healthcare requires international aid and who the richest countries depend on to prevent a second wave of the disease hitting our shores.
On 26 March, just as the full force of the pandemic was becoming clear, the G20 promised “to use all available policy tools” to support countries in need. There would be a “swift implementation” of an emergency response, it said, and its efforts would be “amplified” over the coming weeks. As the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said at the time, emerging markets and developing nations needed at least $2.5tn (£2,000bn) in support. But with new Covid-19 cases round the world running above 100,000 a day and still to peak, the vacuum left by G20 inactivity means that allocations from the IMF and the World Bank to poorer countries will remain a fraction of what is required.
And yet the economic disruption, and the decline in hours worked across the world, is now equivalent to the loss of more than 300 million full-time jobs, according to the International Labour Organization. For the first time this century, global poverty is rising, and three decades of improving living standards are now in reverse. An additional 420 million more people will fall into extreme poverty and, according to the World Food Programme, 265 million face malnutrition. Developing economies and emerging markets have none of the fiscal room for manoeuvre that richer countries enjoy, and not surprisingly more than 100 such countries have applied to the IMF for emergency support.
The G20’s failure to meet is all the more disgraceful because the global response to Covid-19 should this month be moving from its first phase, the rescue operation, to its second, a comprehensive recovery plan – and at its heart there should be a globally coordinated stimulus with an agreed global growth plan.
To make this recovery sustainable the “green new deal” needs to go global; and to help pay for it, a coordinated blitz is required on the estimated $7.4tn hidden untaxed in offshore havens.
As a group of 200 former leaders state in today’s letter to the G20, the poorest countries need international aid within days, not weeks or months. Debt relief is the quickest way of releasing resources. Until now, sub-Saharan Africa has been spending more on debt repayments than on health. The $80bn owed by the 76 poorest nations should be waived until at least December 2021.
But poor countries also need direct cash support. The IMF should dip into its $35bn reserves, and the development banks should announce they are prepared to raise additional money.
A second trillion can be raised by issuing – as we did in the global financial crisis – new international money (known as special drawing rights), which can be converted into dollars or local currency. To their credit, European countries like the UK, France and Germany have already lent some of this money to poorer countries and, if the IMF agreed, $500bn could be issued immediately and $500bn more by 2022.
And we must declare now that any new vaccine and cure will be made freely available to all who need it – and resist US pressure by supporting the World Health Organization in its efforts to ensure the poorest nations do not lose out. This Thursday, at the pledging conference held for the global vaccine alliance in London, donor countries should contribute the $7bn needed to help make immunisation more widely available.
No country can eliminate infectious diseases unless all countries do so. And it is because we cannot deal with the health nor the economic emergency without bringing the whole world together that Donald Trump’s latest counterproposal – to parade a few favoured leaders in Washington in September – is no substitute for a G20 summit.
His event would exclude Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and most of Asia, and would represent only 2 billion of the world’s 7 billion people. Yet the lesson of history is that, at key moments of crisis, we require bold, united leadership, and to resist initiatives that will be seen as “divide and rule”.
So, it is time for the other 19 G20 members to demand an early summit, and avert what would be the greatest global social and economic policy failure of our generation.
Monday 1 June 2020
Coronavirus is our chance to completely rethink what the economy is for
The pandemic has revealed the danger of prizing ‘efficiency’ above all else. The recent slowdown in our lives points to another way of doing things. Malcolm Bull in The Guardian
Illustration: Matt Kenyon/The Guardian
There’s been a lot of argument about how best to handle the coronavirus pandemic, but if there are two things on which most people currently agree, it’s that governments should have been better prepared, and that everyone should get back to work as soon as it is safe to do so. After all, it seems more or less self-evident that you need to be ready for unexpected contingencies – and that it is better for the economy to function at full capacity. More PPE would have saved doctors’ and nurses’ lives; more work means less unemployment and more growth.
But there is a catch to this, and it has been at the heart of political debate since Machiavelli. It is impossible to achieve both goals at once. Contingency planning requires unused capacity, whereas exploiting every opportunity to the full means losing the flexibility needed to respond to sudden changes of fortune.
It wasn’t until the mid-20th century that economists started to realise that it might be better to leave a bit of slack in the economy to help cope with exogenous shocks. In the years after the Great Depression, governments saw the problem as “idle men, idle land, idle machines and idle money”. But there were also economists, such as the Englishman William Hutt, who went against the Keynesian consensus and pointed out that there were some things – fire extinguishers, for example – that were valuable precisely because they were never used. Having large stocks of PPE, underemployed nurses, or a lot of spare capacity in ICUs, falls into the same category. Idle resources are what you need in a crisis, so some degree of inefficiency isn’t necessarily a bad idea.
Trying to manage a pandemic in a world of just-in-time production lines and precarious labour brings these issues into sharper focus. On the one hand, there weren’t enough idle resources for most countries to cope adequately with the spread of the virus. On the other, the enforced idleness of the lockdown leads to calls to get the economy moving again.
For Donald Trump, the prospect of a prolonged shutdown is particularly alarming because it threatens to undermine the competitiveness of the US economy relative to other nations (notably China) that have dealt with the crisis more efficiently. That’s an argument Machiavelli would have understood very well. One of his constant refrains was that idleness could lead to what he called corruption (the diversion of resources from the public good, which Trump equates with the Dow Jones Industrial Average) – and that corruption leads inevitably to defeat at the hands of your rivals.
For Machiavelli, the contagion of corruption was spread above all by Christianity, a “religion of idleness”. And it is true that the Judeo-Christian tradition, with its sabbaths, jubilees, feast days, and religious specialists devoted to a life of prayer and contemplation rather than martial virtue, built a lot of slack into the system. Machiavelli thought it should be squeezed out through laws that would prevent surplus becoming the pretext for idleness, rather in the way that later economists looked to the pressure mechanism of competition to do the same.
But there’s a contradiction in Machiavelli’s thinking here, because he also acknowledged that one of the things every polity needed was periodic renewal and reform, and that corruption was what preceded it. So you’re in a double bind: either you can squeeze out the slack and never experience renewal, or you can court corruption and create an opportunity to start over and make things better.
With hindsight it looks like that’s one of the problems the religions of idleness tried to address, by incorporating idleness into the calendar. In ancient Hebrew tradition, there were weekly sabbaths, and every seventh year was meant to be a year of release in which the land was left to lie fallow, debts were forgiven and slaves emancipated. The idea was picked up by the Chartist William Benbow, who in 1832 used it as the model for what he called a Grand National Holiday, in effect a month-long general strike that would allow a National Congress to reform society “to obtain for all at the least expense to all, the largest sum of happiness for all”.
Benbow’s plan came to nothing, but it provides an alternative model for how the lockdown might be viewed. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has complained that the lockdown is a state of exception with an increase in executive powers and a partial abrogation of the rule of law; but the flipside is that it is the closest thing to a Grand National Holiday that most of us have ever experienced. Despite all the suffering the pandemic has caused, for many it has also meant no work, debt relief, empty roads and a rare opportunity to live on free money from the government.
Generally speaking, exogenous threats like wars or natural disasters act as pressure mechanisms forcing us to redouble our efforts to combat them together. The benefit of contagion is that the only way to combat it is to do less rather than more. That has some demonstrable advantages. There has been a dramatic global fall in carbon emissions. The only comparable reduction in greenhouse gases during the past 30 years came as the result of the decline of industrial production in eastern Europe after the fall of communism. That was managed exceptionally badly because neoliberal economists thought that what post-communist states needed was the pressure of free market competition. Shock therapy would galvanise the economy.
The pandemic has been a shock alright, but its effect has been the opposite of galvanising. People everywhere had to stop whatever they were doing or planning to do in the future. That provides an altogether different model of political change. The philosopher Walter Benjamin once noted that while Karl Marx claimed that revolutions were the locomotives of world history, things might actually turn out to be rather different: “Perhaps revolutions are the human race … travelling in this train, reaching for the emergency brake.”
Everyone keeps saying that we are living through strange times, but what is strange about it is that because everything has come to a stop, it is as though we are living out of time. The emergency brake has been pulled and time is standing still. It feels uncanny, and there’s more slack in the world economy than there ever has been before. And that means, as both Benjamin and Machiavelli would have recognised, that there is also a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for change and renewal.
For some, this might mean a shorter working week, or less air travel. For others, it might suggest the opportunity for a more fundamental remaking of our political system. A space of possibility has unexpectedly opened up, so although the lockdown may be coming to an end, perhaps the standstill should continue.
There’s been a lot of argument about how best to handle the coronavirus pandemic, but if there are two things on which most people currently agree, it’s that governments should have been better prepared, and that everyone should get back to work as soon as it is safe to do so. After all, it seems more or less self-evident that you need to be ready for unexpected contingencies – and that it is better for the economy to function at full capacity. More PPE would have saved doctors’ and nurses’ lives; more work means less unemployment and more growth.
But there is a catch to this, and it has been at the heart of political debate since Machiavelli. It is impossible to achieve both goals at once. Contingency planning requires unused capacity, whereas exploiting every opportunity to the full means losing the flexibility needed to respond to sudden changes of fortune.
It wasn’t until the mid-20th century that economists started to realise that it might be better to leave a bit of slack in the economy to help cope with exogenous shocks. In the years after the Great Depression, governments saw the problem as “idle men, idle land, idle machines and idle money”. But there were also economists, such as the Englishman William Hutt, who went against the Keynesian consensus and pointed out that there were some things – fire extinguishers, for example – that were valuable precisely because they were never used. Having large stocks of PPE, underemployed nurses, or a lot of spare capacity in ICUs, falls into the same category. Idle resources are what you need in a crisis, so some degree of inefficiency isn’t necessarily a bad idea.
Trying to manage a pandemic in a world of just-in-time production lines and precarious labour brings these issues into sharper focus. On the one hand, there weren’t enough idle resources for most countries to cope adequately with the spread of the virus. On the other, the enforced idleness of the lockdown leads to calls to get the economy moving again.
For Donald Trump, the prospect of a prolonged shutdown is particularly alarming because it threatens to undermine the competitiveness of the US economy relative to other nations (notably China) that have dealt with the crisis more efficiently. That’s an argument Machiavelli would have understood very well. One of his constant refrains was that idleness could lead to what he called corruption (the diversion of resources from the public good, which Trump equates with the Dow Jones Industrial Average) – and that corruption leads inevitably to defeat at the hands of your rivals.
For Machiavelli, the contagion of corruption was spread above all by Christianity, a “religion of idleness”. And it is true that the Judeo-Christian tradition, with its sabbaths, jubilees, feast days, and religious specialists devoted to a life of prayer and contemplation rather than martial virtue, built a lot of slack into the system. Machiavelli thought it should be squeezed out through laws that would prevent surplus becoming the pretext for idleness, rather in the way that later economists looked to the pressure mechanism of competition to do the same.
But there’s a contradiction in Machiavelli’s thinking here, because he also acknowledged that one of the things every polity needed was periodic renewal and reform, and that corruption was what preceded it. So you’re in a double bind: either you can squeeze out the slack and never experience renewal, or you can court corruption and create an opportunity to start over and make things better.
With hindsight it looks like that’s one of the problems the religions of idleness tried to address, by incorporating idleness into the calendar. In ancient Hebrew tradition, there were weekly sabbaths, and every seventh year was meant to be a year of release in which the land was left to lie fallow, debts were forgiven and slaves emancipated. The idea was picked up by the Chartist William Benbow, who in 1832 used it as the model for what he called a Grand National Holiday, in effect a month-long general strike that would allow a National Congress to reform society “to obtain for all at the least expense to all, the largest sum of happiness for all”.
Benbow’s plan came to nothing, but it provides an alternative model for how the lockdown might be viewed. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has complained that the lockdown is a state of exception with an increase in executive powers and a partial abrogation of the rule of law; but the flipside is that it is the closest thing to a Grand National Holiday that most of us have ever experienced. Despite all the suffering the pandemic has caused, for many it has also meant no work, debt relief, empty roads and a rare opportunity to live on free money from the government.
Generally speaking, exogenous threats like wars or natural disasters act as pressure mechanisms forcing us to redouble our efforts to combat them together. The benefit of contagion is that the only way to combat it is to do less rather than more. That has some demonstrable advantages. There has been a dramatic global fall in carbon emissions. The only comparable reduction in greenhouse gases during the past 30 years came as the result of the decline of industrial production in eastern Europe after the fall of communism. That was managed exceptionally badly because neoliberal economists thought that what post-communist states needed was the pressure of free market competition. Shock therapy would galvanise the economy.
The pandemic has been a shock alright, but its effect has been the opposite of galvanising. People everywhere had to stop whatever they were doing or planning to do in the future. That provides an altogether different model of political change. The philosopher Walter Benjamin once noted that while Karl Marx claimed that revolutions were the locomotives of world history, things might actually turn out to be rather different: “Perhaps revolutions are the human race … travelling in this train, reaching for the emergency brake.”
Everyone keeps saying that we are living through strange times, but what is strange about it is that because everything has come to a stop, it is as though we are living out of time. The emergency brake has been pulled and time is standing still. It feels uncanny, and there’s more slack in the world economy than there ever has been before. And that means, as both Benjamin and Machiavelli would have recognised, that there is also a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for change and renewal.
For some, this might mean a shorter working week, or less air travel. For others, it might suggest the opportunity for a more fundamental remaking of our political system. A space of possibility has unexpectedly opened up, so although the lockdown may be coming to an end, perhaps the standstill should continue.
Donald Trump and the spectre of a race-based US election
Edward Luce in The Financial Times
The novelist William Faulkner said: “The past is not dead. It is not even past.” The past 72 hours of burning US cities triggered parallels with 1968 — a year of urban white flight that ended with the election of Richard Nixon. He won on a law-and-order platform that appealed implicitly to white anxiety. Donald Trump does not deal in implicit language. In response to protests in Minneapolis after the police suffocation last week of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, Mr Trump tweeted: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts”. The line was used by George Wallace, the segregationist third-party candidate in 1968. Republicans launched the “southern strategy” to win over resentful white Democrats after the civil rights revolution. Mr Trump’s 2016 campaign was the apotheosis of that approach.
But history offers little clue as to whether a sitting president can profit from the same manipulation. The stark brutality of Floyd’s killing — and the fact that his eight-minute suffocation was captured on video — has curbed Mr Trump’s ability to portray the police as victims. He has veered between threats of deploying the military to quell the protests and appeals for calm. Mr Trump’s record suggests he will not be able to resist the temptation to incite. It worked for him once. America’s Black Lives Matter movement took off in Barack Obama’s second term just as Mr Trump was weighing up his presidential bid. “White lives matter” and “Blue lives matter” banners festooned his rallies.
But can he pull off the same feat from the White House? That will depend on how America defines the protests. Wildly different narratives can be built from the harrowing range of video clips over the past few days. Some show white police officers brutally attacking peaceful black and white marchers. Others show cops marching in solidarity with them. Then there are the scenes of looting and burning. Mr Trump claims that most of the Minneapolis protesters are far-left radicals. Anti-Semitic memes claiming that financier George Soros is funding an army of Antifa (anti-fascist) militants have spread. Russian bots have helped disseminate the conspiracy theory. The Trump administration has picked up that thread. In a televised statement Bill Barr, the US attorney-general, said the protests were “planned, organised and driven by anarchic and far-left extremist groups using Antifa-like tactics”. Without evidence, Mr Trump said 80 per cent of the Minneapolis protesters were from out of state. On Sunday, he tweeted that he would designate Antifa as a “terrorist organisation”.
America now faces the spectre of a long summer of unrest, with a president stoking the polarisation. It comes amid a pandemic that has disproportionately claimed minority lives in the most densely populated areas of urban America. Floyd’s dying words — “I can’t breathe” — serve as a metaphor for a society choking on its increasingly toxic politics. The alternative narrative advanced by Joe Biden, Mr Trump’s opponent, is that America is crying out to be healed. Mr Biden promises to “restore America’s soul”. If recent polls are any guide, Mr Biden’s message is hitting home. A Washington Post/ABC poll gave him a 53 per cent to 43 per cent lead over Mr Trump.
But that snapshot was taken mostly before the protests had spread to other cities. Harking back to America’s better angels, as invoked by Abraham Lincoln, Mr Biden’s message has historic appeal. But nations do not possess souls. They have competing ideas of themselves. Mr Biden wants to restore the US to where it was before Mr Trump was elected — a multicultural society with its first non-white president. Mr Trump makes little disguise of conjuring a pre-civil rights America where white males held uncontested sway. He will blame Mr Obama, China, radical leftists and “thugs” for America’s unhappy condition — anybody, in other words, but himself. It is hard to imagine a more dystopian backdrop for the world’s most powerful democracy to settle on its future.
The novelist William Faulkner said: “The past is not dead. It is not even past.” The past 72 hours of burning US cities triggered parallels with 1968 — a year of urban white flight that ended with the election of Richard Nixon. He won on a law-and-order platform that appealed implicitly to white anxiety. Donald Trump does not deal in implicit language. In response to protests in Minneapolis after the police suffocation last week of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, Mr Trump tweeted: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts”. The line was used by George Wallace, the segregationist third-party candidate in 1968. Republicans launched the “southern strategy” to win over resentful white Democrats after the civil rights revolution. Mr Trump’s 2016 campaign was the apotheosis of that approach.
But history offers little clue as to whether a sitting president can profit from the same manipulation. The stark brutality of Floyd’s killing — and the fact that his eight-minute suffocation was captured on video — has curbed Mr Trump’s ability to portray the police as victims. He has veered between threats of deploying the military to quell the protests and appeals for calm. Mr Trump’s record suggests he will not be able to resist the temptation to incite. It worked for him once. America’s Black Lives Matter movement took off in Barack Obama’s second term just as Mr Trump was weighing up his presidential bid. “White lives matter” and “Blue lives matter” banners festooned his rallies.
But can he pull off the same feat from the White House? That will depend on how America defines the protests. Wildly different narratives can be built from the harrowing range of video clips over the past few days. Some show white police officers brutally attacking peaceful black and white marchers. Others show cops marching in solidarity with them. Then there are the scenes of looting and burning. Mr Trump claims that most of the Minneapolis protesters are far-left radicals. Anti-Semitic memes claiming that financier George Soros is funding an army of Antifa (anti-fascist) militants have spread. Russian bots have helped disseminate the conspiracy theory. The Trump administration has picked up that thread. In a televised statement Bill Barr, the US attorney-general, said the protests were “planned, organised and driven by anarchic and far-left extremist groups using Antifa-like tactics”. Without evidence, Mr Trump said 80 per cent of the Minneapolis protesters were from out of state. On Sunday, he tweeted that he would designate Antifa as a “terrorist organisation”.
America now faces the spectre of a long summer of unrest, with a president stoking the polarisation. It comes amid a pandemic that has disproportionately claimed minority lives in the most densely populated areas of urban America. Floyd’s dying words — “I can’t breathe” — serve as a metaphor for a society choking on its increasingly toxic politics. The alternative narrative advanced by Joe Biden, Mr Trump’s opponent, is that America is crying out to be healed. Mr Biden promises to “restore America’s soul”. If recent polls are any guide, Mr Biden’s message is hitting home. A Washington Post/ABC poll gave him a 53 per cent to 43 per cent lead over Mr Trump.
But that snapshot was taken mostly before the protests had spread to other cities. Harking back to America’s better angels, as invoked by Abraham Lincoln, Mr Biden’s message has historic appeal. But nations do not possess souls. They have competing ideas of themselves. Mr Biden wants to restore the US to where it was before Mr Trump was elected — a multicultural society with its first non-white president. Mr Trump makes little disguise of conjuring a pre-civil rights America where white males held uncontested sway. He will blame Mr Obama, China, radical leftists and “thugs” for America’s unhappy condition — anybody, in other words, but himself. It is hard to imagine a more dystopian backdrop for the world’s most powerful democracy to settle on its future.
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