Ramon Casas i Carbó (1866–1932), The Charge, or Barcelona 1902 (1903), is a painting that shows the early development of police tactics against protestors.
I finished a big project recently – if you’ve spoken to me in the past few months, yes I am referring to the one about crowds – so you’ll forgive me for not getting to this sooner, but it was odd and startling to see so much of what I was reading and writing about manifesting all around me.
Around the time I was finalising a draft, the UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak delivered a widely mocked speech that decried how the country was tipping into ‘mob rule’. He was referring both to the slowly building rise of climate activism and the more sudden protests against Israel’s genocidal war, yet adopted an uncharacteristically alarmist tone.
Two days later another series of complaints about extremists threatening democracy followed. The BBC reported: ‘There was tough rhetoric on extremism, warnings of "forces here at home trying to tear us apart" - but no repeat of the phrase "mob rule" that he'd used in a statement following a meeting with police on Wednesday in Downing Street.’ Many journalists highlighted the timing of the speech: it appeared rushed and reactive, as if he made a spur of the moment decision towards the end of the week.
Invocations of the mob have a dark history – depending on who it is directed towards, it is typically part of the dehumanising language that precedes and enables violence. Feminists, union organisers, refugees can be painted as a mob when contrasted against a vague but implied concept of the status quo, the law-abiding citizen, the family and so on. His language was intentional, specific; it was less a policy priority he was enacting, then mere common sense he was following. “There is a growing consensus that mob rule is replacing democratic rule,” he claimed. “And we’ve got to collectively, all of us, change that urgently.” The collective against the mob.
It is surprising how honest the government’s document is about their intentions, going as far to name the specific protests, issues and activists groups that prompt the backlash:
The UK has seen a new round of political protests since the terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas on 7 October 2023 and the subsequent conflict in Gaza. We first considered the topic of policing of protests in May 2023, following the protests surrounding the King’s Coronation. However, the successive and large-scale nature of the Israel-Gaza protests, coupled with the political tension due to a planned Israel-Gaza protest on Armistice Day, meant that we felt it was right to revisit this topic.
And:
With organisations such as Just Stop Oil using disruptive tactics as their primary method, the Government undertook significant legislative reform… The scale and nature of protests continues to evolve, with the conflict in the Middle East leading to new protests. Recent Israel-Gaza protests have presented different challenges for the police, due to their repetitive nature and large turnouts.
The original speech was chilling because it was meant to be; he delivered the speech alongside a new set of ‘guidance’ and also met with the police, with both efforts intended to further clamp down on free speech, the right to protest and other forms of civic disobedience. There were no credible links between violence and recent protests outside of politicians homes, a tradition of protest with a longstanding history – so why take action now? Because it creates a dividing line, in the same way that the vocabulary of mobs versus democracy is intended to.
“The UK has undergone a major crackdown on protest rights in recent years,” Tom Southerden, law and human rights director at Amnesty International UK said at the time, “with peaceful protest tactics being criminalised and the police being given sweeping powers to prevent protests taking place.”
Real threats to the democratic process were underway at that same time, as Lindsay Hoyle, Westminster Commons speaker, was accused of scrapping the parliamentary rulebook over a vote on a ceasefire in Gaza, because of concerns about “threats” against MPs. But the claims of the mob never go in that direction – they are directed outwards from parliament to the population at large.
Part of what my research into the crowd – and more specifically, how the crowd has been depicted by artists, writers and others – was reaching towards is the notion that metaphors around the crowd, its potential, promise and threat, underwent tremendous transformation throughout the twentieth century.
These metaphors haven’t left us; they are everywhere, embedded into our understandings of ourselves and those around us. Yet if there is one dominant idea of the crowd that persists and shapes our daily lives, it is a negative one – a fulfilling life is framed as an individual pursuit of career advancement, brand building and health as self-optimisation. Others are a burden; council flats, public transport and collective decision making are things of the past, relics, unfashionable and undesirable. Lives were lost during Covid because health was understood as something that happens within an individual's body rather than something within society (a strange reversal of the birth of public health as a concept, which can be traced back to the need by the military to improve the fitness of the poor).
What we lost, and what my writing project hoped to revive, was a sense of the crowd as a liberatory force, particularly one rooted within a socialist tradition of solidary and exchange. Especially during the Cold War, artists, filmmakers and many more sought to create links between the West and independence movements found in Cuba, Vietnam and countless others. People were blacklisted for these activities, and faced tremendous hardship through their lives for it; the narratives that evolved out of art history, criticism and wider scholarship remain with us today, taken for granted and without context.
Few artists were ever explicitly against the crowd, or denounced a protest as a mob. But the most middle class painters lived to paint picnics and parties, or lonely individuals who stood alienated against the business of a metropolis. This too is its own kind of metaphor; its own kind of understanding of ourselves and those around us. A history of racist depictions about immigration, for instance, is easier to highlight and articulate, although I think it is all the more important to highlight how one feeds the other – how individualism relies on a strategic lack of empathy, a closed horizon to others, while at the same time greedily reaffirming its own well-meaning liberalism.
It’s only when writing this now that I realise Pankaj Mishra’s powerful essay The Shoah after Gaza, a meditation on the construction of Zionism through settle colonialism, was published around the same time of Sunak’s ‘mob rule’ speech. At home and abroad, violence abounds: authoritarian politicians promise to exert tremendous violence onto your neighbours, and curtain twitchers cheer; protestors who speak out are decried as a mob that hates democracy; the legacy of one atrocity is invoked to cause another one; if the world can’t be made better, then punishing someone else is offered as a substitute.
I won’t attempt to parse Mishra’s masterful account of the history that precedes the horrors that are unfolding in Gaza now, but this section touches on the broader shifts within Zionism worth outlining in full:
In its early years the state of Israel had an ambivalent relationship with the Shoah and its victims. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, initially saw Shoah survivors as ‘human debris’, claiming that they had survived only because they had been ‘bad, harsh, egotistic’. It was Ben-Gurion’s rival Begin, a demagogue from Poland, who turned the murder of six million Jews into an intense national preoccupation, and a new basis for Israel’s identity. The Israeli establishment began to produce and disseminate a very particular version of the Shoah that could be used to legitimise a militant and expansionist Zionism.
A talk by Mishra as part of the London Review of Books Winter Series would be cancelled by the Barbican, who were then subject to a similar so-called disruptive tactic when Culture Workers Against Genocide occupied the building.
What is at stake, with this protest and others, is about the edge of violence – what actions fall into its category, who should be subjected to it and what kinds of constraints could be placed upon it. Again and again defenders of the actions by the state of Israel ask people why they haven’t condemned Hamas and 7 October, or if they affirm vague generalities about the right of the state to exist. This is because they believe that beginning the story there would make the genocide and occupation legitimate, as if such a thing was possible.
Just like with Sunak’s mob rule, democracy is also invoked here – Mishra writes: ‘Israel, the chorus goes, has the right, as the Middle East’s only democracy, to defend itself, especially from genocidal brutes. As a result, the victims of Israeli barbarity in Gaza today cannot even secure straightforward recognition of their ordeal from Western elites, let alone relief.’
Mobs describe the enemy within the state; enemies outside the state have to be demonised, either as irrational murders who can’t be reasoned with, or as some kind of savage brute – an animal at most – who doesn’t deserve dialogue. A long lineage of writers, à la Edward Said and Franz Fanon, have described not just the reality of this violence, but its interrelation. What happens abroad comes home; one makes the other possible.