Last Monday's events in central London followed the familiar rhythms of mass protest, which are not unlike those of a classical symphony, give or take a movement or two. The prelude of harmless festivity, with maypoles, music and marigolds (police laugh and smile); the ominous slow movement of mild vandalism, with the decoration and daubing of statues (police frown); the agitato of smashing shop-windows (police charge on horseback); the long climax of shouting and chanting (police stand grimly behind riot shields); the coda of sporadic violence as the demonstrators disperse (police give random chase). The level of violence was not, in truth, much worse than that surrounding most Saturday afternoon football matches. Nor can this protest be compared, either in scale or clarity of focus, to the demonstrations against the Vietnam war or the poll tax. If anti-capitalism can draw fewer than 6,000 to central London on a rain-free bank holiday, and find no better targets than a statue of a dead Tory prime minister and a branch of McDonald's, capitalism ought to feel rather pleased with itself.
That surely is the important, if rather depressing, message to emerge from the May Day protests. Despite Seattle, there is no sense here, or anywhere in Europe or America, of a popular surge of opinion that politicians are compelled to heed, as they were in the case of the Vietnam war or the poll tax. Given the size of the issues that face humanity at the beginning of the 21st century, the remarkable thing is not that there is protest, but that there is so little of it. Almost daily, the evidence grows that carbon emissions threaten the global climate and, therefore, humanity's survival. Yet politicians are under no pressure (rather the contrary) to do more than make token gestures. The greens have a toehold in several European governments, but they do not remotely threaten the hegemony of the main political parties.
Public opinion sometimes stirs itself. Monsanto's plans to transform modern agriculture were all but ruined, and the British government forced into an embarrassing U-turn, by public pressure. The road-building programme went on hold when new bypasses became the focus for mass protest. Floods in Mozambique, atrocities in Kosovo and Kurdish Iraq, ruination in British mining communities - these, and many other such issues, have moved opinion in recent years. Multinational companies, too, such as Nike and Shell, have been forced by consumer pressure to change their policies on sweatshop labour or environmental damage; indeed, some commentators argue that, as the big corporations are more powerful and often more wealthy than many governments, shopping has become a more effective way of achieving change than voting. But these are brief, single-issue victories, subject to the vagaries of fashion and soundbite. They do not challenge the enormous gulf between rich and poor countries, the growth of unaccountable corporate power or the threats to the future of the planet.
What those random little victories - the results of what may reasonably be termed designer protest - have in common is that they do not threaten the loss of anything that people already have or the denial of anything they aspire to. They do not invite politicians to question the imperatives of economic growth.
The parties instruct opinion pollsters to ask "Do you expect you and your family to become better or worse off in the next year?", not "Do you expect the planet/the African poor/the Indonesian child labourers to become better or worse off?" New Labour lacks even the faith that voters would pay higher taxes to improve the schools, hospitals, railways, parks and police services that they and their own families use. How much less likely are they to accept restrictions on economic growth that would be the certain result of addressing the big contemporary issues, whether they be arms sales, child labour in the third world, global warming or the barely imaginable possibilities of robotic and genetic technologies?
Are there, for those who can see beyond their next pair of designer shoes, cures for this bleak diagnosis? Only the old ones: thought, argument, organisation, engagement with politics. None of these was in evidence in London on Monday - a protest without speeches, banners, leaflets or even a marching route. Those who daubed the Cenotaph may expect a worse press from posterity than Nero got; and so may those politicians who made such a song and dance about it. If there is anyone left to give them a press.
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