Would Tony Benn be arrested today? For this is what he said in 1991 at the time of Maastricht:
‘Riot is an old-fashioned method of drawing the attention of the Government to what is wrong… Riot has historically played a much larger part in British politics than we are ever allowed to know.’
His point was that, deplorable though it might be, it could occur when ‘people lose the power to sack their Government’, as for example in the EU.
This has now happened here, despite Brexit. When both sides of Parliament agree on certain key policies, such as immigration, throwing out one party merely means getting the same from another.
Not that the people turned from the Tories to Labour in July. Either they voted for anything except those two; or they simply stayed at home, hence the low level of electoral participation - another consequence noted by Benn: ‘when the turnout drops below 50 per cent., we are in danger.’
If the 2011 referendum on the Alternative Vote had carried in favour, it might have been a different story because then each MP would have been validated by 50+% of votes cast, taking second and subsequent preferences into account. But the two main parties set their faces against that system.
Now, thanks to the unreformed First Past The Post arrangement, Labour has swept in, overwhelming as the tide in Morecambe Bay yet shallowly supported, its massive majority resting on the ballots of 20.2% of registered voters.
If, as Tony Benn held, power belongs to the people, Sir Keir Starmer now has an enduring problem of legitimation. How can he take the General Election result as a mandate to press on with his grand scheme of ‘change,’ one that yet retains the pro-EU and open-border themes that most people have clearly rejected?
One can suppress dissent with the draconian use of law, but that is like turning up the car radio when the engine is making crunchy noises. Is justice being applied impartially? Do the punishments fit the crimes? Or does the Executive risk bringing the law into disrepute by over-reacting?
And not only the law. The historian David Starkey says that Labour has permanently lost the support of the working class. He fears that a ‘semi-revolutionary Left’ could eventually stimulate the creation of ‘a revolutionary Right:’
Surely Starkey is right to observe that codified ‘human rights’ and the creation of groups on the basis of ‘protected characteristics’ have tribalised the country and threaten its cohesion. Unless the government reasserts ‘one rule for all’, we face a future of multiple inter-ethnic conflicts. This nativism is akin to the third malign consequence of powerlessness that Benn listed: nationalism - and ‘with nationalism comes repression.’
Starkey harks back to the historic success of our flexible, Burkean development of the Constitution:
What we've got to try to do… is that we revive that conservative notion, that notion that the way we always did things. the thing that enabled… Britain uniquely of any European country in the 19th century to modernize and to incorporate all these different social groups without vast unrest and Revolution. (48:29 onwards in video)
That vision is attractive, though it must be said that the UK was not always so responsive. The initial reaction of British authorities to popular unrest has often been sharp oppression: think for example of ‘Peterloo’, the Tolpuddle Martyrs and the Chartists.
But our rulers, unlike those on the Continent, have at last bent with the wind when it seemed that their alternative was to be uprooted in a Great Storm. Surely it is no coincidence that the last Englishwoman was burned at the stake in 1789, at the outbreak of the French Revolution; or that eighty years after the Chartists were crushed all British men got the vote in 1918, when the Russian Revolution was under way.
Will Starmer remain ideologically dogmatic and rigidly authoritarian, or does he have the wisdom to sway?