Where should politics happen? For most MPs, accustomed to the Palace of Westminster’s inward-looking spaces and rituals, the answer is obvious. In parliament and its associated offices, corridors, committee rooms, bars and tea rooms; in Downing Street and its surrounding maze of ministries; and in the parts of the media that mould political opinion.
This country is supposed to be a representative democracy. Except for very occasional referendums, periodic elections, voxpops and opinion polls, or perhaps the odd exchange with their MP, voters are not meant to be directly involved. A sign of a healthy political system, we are often told, is one where most people get on with their lives and leave politics to the professionals.
But Britain doesn’t feel like that kind of place now. Political professionals – whether MPs, ministers or party functionaries – are regarded by many voters with contempt: as incompetent, corrupt, uninspiring, or a combination of all three. Meanwhile the public spaces of Westminster and the centres of other cities are busier with protests than they have been for years. Gaza, the climate crisis, cuts to public services, the crisis in farming and other huge and urgent causes compete for attention, week after week. On many weekends, last Saturday being the latest example, much of central London in particular has changed from a place dominated by consumerism, tourism and statues of dead politicians to a place of banners, placards, chants, speeches, blocked roads and activists climbing lamp-posts, with coloured smoke gushing from protesters’ flares and police helicopters endlessly throbbing overhead.
For some politicians, many but not all of them Conservative, this is almost a vision of hell. The language they use to criticise the pro-Palestinian and climate protesters in particular is strikingly strong, describing them as extremists, thugs, hate marchers, a mob – despite the protests’ overwhelmingly peaceful nature. Even slightly less intolerant members of the government have had enough. The Gaza demonstrators “have made a point and … made it very, very loudly,” said the home secretary, James Cleverly, last month. “I’m not sure that these marches every couple of weeks add value to the argument.”
Some of this Tory exasperation and outrage is selective and transparently party-political. Rishi Sunak supports farmers’ protests against the Labour-run Welsh government, despite a disruptiveness to their campaign that he condemns in other activists. Desperate opportunism and inconsistency have always been his prime ministerial hallmarks.
The more revealing thing about the reaction of many MPs to the wave of protests is what it tells us about mainstream politics in general. Both the big parties are moving rightwards, having concluded that conservative voters will be decisive at the coming election. This shift means that our revered but often narrow representative democracy is representing the country as a whole even less well than usual – for example, the 45% of voters who believe Israel’s attack on Gaza is not justified. And so, when a parliament fails to speak for enough voters, politics takes other forms. In one sense, the Gaza protests, like the climate protests, are a highly public rebuke to the House of Commons, and a reminder of its limitations – of the things that most MPs cannot or will not say. No wonder many MPs wish the demonstrators would just go away.
In London, the protests have arguably been energised further by the built environment and atmosphere of Westminster itself. Britain has long been a democracy that centralises an unusually large proportion of political power in a tiny part of its capital, yet since the 1980s this enclave has become much more fortified. The official rationale is that it’s to deter terrorists, and in this the strategy has largely succeeded, but another consequence has been to separate MPs further and further from voters, behind layers of security barriers, bag scanners, surveillance cameras and armed police – while at the same time making Westminster feel ever more unwelcoming to non-insiders.
Invading this space for a few hours as a demonstrator can feel excitingly transgressive and politically worthwhile in itself, and even more so when ministers and the rightwing media are blustering about your actions being outrageous, and trying to find ways to ban them. In the 1990s the American anarchist philosopher Peter Lamborn Wilson (writing under the pen name Hakim Bey) devised the concept of the “temporary autonomous zone” to describe fleeting but politically vibrant territorial occupations, in which “a guerrilla operation … liberates an area of land … and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere”. One common current protest chant is “Whose streets? Our streets!” In an age when many feel politically disempowered, the potential of such small victories to be formative experiences shouldn’t be underestimated.
When and if the Tories go into opposition, it’s possible that they will suddenly develop their own appetite for street politics. During the most dominant phase of the Blair government in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the pro-hunting Countryside Alliance organised large marches in London, which became important rallying points for the Tories and conservative Britons in general.
Awkwardly for today’s Tory critics of disruptive protest, the pro-hunting movement had a militant fringe, which compared itself to the IRA, and threatened acts of sabotage such as draining water reservoirs and even planting fake bombs. These militants received coded support from parts of the rightwing press, such as a Telegraph editorial in May 2002 suggesting that opponents of Labour’s rural policies should “take the gloves off”.
Two truths of our politics are that memories are short and the Conservatives are shameless. It’s not that hard to imagine Tory MPs and voters marching down Whitehall in protest at the policies of prime minister Keir Starmer, while the former prosecutor tries to silence them by taking the current Conservative anti-protest legislation even further. Some controversial Tories, such as the MP Miriam Cates, are already concerned about government plans to create a new, broader definition of extremism, and the restrictions it could place on the right as well as its enemies.
One day, more MPs will hopefully see protest as an essential companion to parliamentary politics, rather than its barely legitimate rival. But as the clampdowns keep coming, that day feels far off.
Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist
