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  1. Politics
31 October 2013

Why the protesters of today are not your usual suspects

The mainstream coverage of protest relies on stereotypes of violence and reckless behaviour. But the real face of dissent in 2013 can just as easily be the "Knitting Nana" on the fracking front line.

By jamie Kelsey-Fry

Outside the main gates of the Cuadrilla site near the West Sussex village of Balcombe – the fracking front line – sits a woman who poses a threat to the government. She is an ex-nurse and grandmother called Bernadette, nicknamed “Knitting Nana”, and she has been there since the first days of the community campaign to stop the exploratory drilling in the woods across the road from her. She stays outside her tent all day, knitting black and yellow bandanas and wristbands to give to the community “protectors”.

Bernadette voted Tory, read the Daily Mail and had always thought that the government had her best interests at heart. That was until the fracking controversy kicked off outside her idyllic village. She tells me that everything has changed: those in government “don’t care for us; there is no democracy. All they care about is power and greed.” I ask her what she thinks of the protesters who have come down to support the campaign. “At first,” she says, “I thought they were going to be a bunch of troublemakers but they are lovely – some of them are a little weird, maybe, but they are brave. They understand all the arguments and I love them.”

I met another unlikely protester in Friern Barnet, north London. Fiona, a psychotherapist, had been infuriated by the prospect of Barnet Council selling off her local library. She helped start a local campaign to save it but it was struggling until one of the people involved invited Occupy and squatters to help. Fiona was horrified at the prospect of “violent and unruly protesters” coming to her library but she found: “They were all incredibly well informed, tremendously organised and passionate about the cause.” The groups worked together well and the newly bolstered campaign succeeded in saving the library and handing it back to the community.

This does not mean that Fiona and Bernadette are now going to Molotov-cocktail-making classes, smashing windows and voting Labour, but they have become far less ready to believe what they are told by the media about protesters.

The difference between the stereotype of protesters and the reality is stark, to say the least. When I sit in meetings with activists, people from every walk of life surround me. The characters I have befriended in the past two years include an ex-headmaster who fights for economic justice; a bathroom fitter who live-streams actions; a single-parent stallholder from Essex who has been thrown out of three English Defence League meetings for telling its members that they should give up race hatred and support Occupy instead; a single mum-of-four who wants her children to learn the “dignity of dissent”; a grandmother from Blackpool who doesn’t want to see her grandchildren “grow up in a world wrecked by inequality”; several ex-servicemen; care workers; a fireman; a health and safety trainer who has become a legal observer; teenagers and students. What brings us together was described by Douglas Wragg, another Balcombe resident, in this way: “We have here a travesty of democracy and we’ve tried every democratic path. The only choice we have left is direct action . . . You either lie down and let Cuadrilla ride roughshod over you, or take direct action.”

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The mainstream coverage of protest relies on stereotypes of violence and reckless behaviour. Until people see through this and realise that the vast majority of these protesters are the same as them, the numbers that come out will remain shamefully low. Whether the media’s representation of activism is skewed by design or not is conspiracy territory but I can leave you with something that I witnessed that is more than a little provocative.

During the anti-G20 actions in London in 2009, many of the windows in the area had been boarded up as a result of incessant scaremongering about anarchists. Except, that is, for a small Royal Bank of Scotland branch in the middle of the four marches.

At one point – in perfect time for the early-evening news schedule – the police who had been guarding the bank suddenly marched off. Moments later, platoons of media replaced them and, as if on cue, two “protesters” started to smash the bank up.

Along with the prolonged kettling of hundreds of people without water or sanitation and the news of Ian Tomlinson’s death, this scene is what has remained in people’s consciousness, driven in there so deeply that many people will have forgotten what the protest was about but still remember the association with violence.

As Howard Zinn wrote: “Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience.”

Jamie Kelsey-Fry is a contributing editor of New Internationalist. He tweets at: @jamiekelseyfry

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