The demos and the demos

"Dissent is never counted; it is weighed"
Jim Crace, Harvest

Yes, yes, I know: they look the same, but there is nothing more to link the demos of democracy and the demos on the street.

In practice, however, they have a lot to say: to each other, and to all the ways in which demonstrations can feel as democratic as the exercise of democracy can be. They have certainly grown up together: it was O'Donnell's monster meetings across Ireland in the 1830s that won the vote for Catholics, and the Chartist demonstrations in Britain that extended voting rights beyond the three per cent of the population who held them at the time, and the suffragette's call for "deeds not words" that won the vote for women too. Only by their physical presence on the street have those excluded from political participation won the right to have a say.

In the actually existing democracies within which many of us live today, the demos still operate this way. Free and fair elections are considered to define and guarantee a democratic society, but not everybody has a vote, and even those who do are often left with the feeling that it counts for little in the face of all the vested interests, the many other demonstrations of wealth and privilege which in practice continue to hold sway. When they feel this strongly, they demonstrate. They too want to give their views such weight.

In the older scientific meaning of the term, a demonstration is a way of proving a hypothesis, giving substance to something that would otherwise be nothing but a theory or a fiction, even a fantasy. On the street, in politics, a demonstration offers no such evidence. Its size is only ever approximate and always open to dispute; what it says about wider opinion, whether or how it has an influence, what, if anything, it can achieve, what counts as success: none of this can be measured or assessed with any certainty. What it shows is not nothing, but it is inexact. A demo is an unknown quantity.

It is easy to underestimate how powerful this unknown element can be. There is always something disruptive, perhaps carnivalesque, about the simple act of using a street for something other than its normal business - putting the wrong bodies in the wrong places, as Jacques Rancière would say . The tamest demonstration can remind people that they can have an impact, if only on a small part of a city on a Saturday. And even when it's calm, even perfunctory, there's always the possibility that something will happen, something unforeseeable and unpredictable. This not quite knowing what will happen, how big or effective it will be, is one of its defining qualities. More than expected is always a possibility.

There were certainly more people than expected on the poll tax demonstration which was held in London thirty-five years ago, exactly, as it happens, to the day on which I am writing this. The police had planned for twenty thousand people, but ten times more turned out. The poll tax was Thatcher's flagship policy, and we were determined to sink it, which we did.

Not of course because of this one day alone. The demonstration was just a small part of a long campaign against the tax, as well as the culmination of a long decade of mounting discontent with the government.

Officially known as the community charge, the poll tax was designed to replace the existing system of local taxation, based on the value of property, with a new charge on people, specifically those who were registered. In the government's view, this was only fair. "Why", asked one of its ministers, "should a duke pay more than a dustman?" Doesn't each have a vote, and with it an equal share in society?

The demonstration was an open call to anyone and everyone who thought about this differently. All those who did indeed want to be counted, but not like this, as supposedly equal individuals in a society otherwise bereft of equality. They wanted to give substance to their views, lend weight to their opinions, show their anger, put their feelings on display. They formed a mass that was more than a large number of people, but people determined to matter, to make their presence, as bodies, felt.

There were plenty of factions vying for control and figures keen to lead, but the demonstrators had no unified identity, no leading party or coherent ideology. All they said was no to a policy that seemed to epitomise Thatcher's insistence there were only individuals, and no such thing as society.

We made placards from some hefty bits of wood and hardboard found in my dad's garage. Be careful, he said as he waved us off: you could do some damage with them.

Even on the journey, the atmosphere was cheerful, optimistic. We passed other coachloads of protesters and the park in which we had arranged to meet was full to overflowing by the time we arrived. Music, dancing, picnics, sunshine, banners, flags, noise, all sorts of people, in ones and twos, friends and families, kids and dogs, campaign groups and ad hoc unions pouring in from everywhere. We smiled at each other as it dawned on us that something was happening, and we were it.

We set off, a sea, a stream, a flow, crossing the river, past the Parliament, heading to Trafalgar Square on a route that took us past Downing Street, home of the prime minister. Here we slowed, then stopped and hung around, and after a while, we sat down. Quite how it happened is impossible to say: thousands of people had passed this point without stopping to protest. Some said it was the work of provocateurs. The press blamed a handful of anarchists. In his account of the events, Danny Burns writes: "at 3.00 pm, twenty people staged a peaceful sit down opposite Downing Street". They were followed by several hundred more, "and then the police brought in the horses. Mounted riot police baton-charged the crowd. The crowd, angered by this violent provocation retaliated throwing sticks, banner poles, bottles – anything they could find. Young people, armed only with placards fought hand to hand with police." I heard my dad's words as I watched my own effort fly towards their ranks.

Later, when we all met up again - how we did so without mobile phones is also a mystery to me - some friends said the trouble had been planned; others were convinced we had been goaded by agents provocateurs. One couple confided that the movement to sit down had started when they'd smoked a joint and simply couldn't stand up any longer. I still don't know what to make of that. But why not? This is the kind of thing that happens when a free space opens up.

We had been part of a movement, that was sure. No more or less than all the others who were there.

"People sat down", a BBC reporter later said, "I think because we couldn't go forward, we couldn't go back... there were some thousands and thousands and thousands of people, and the route just couldn't cope with it." In the records they later released, the police referred to this moment as a "SITREP", a situation to report. "Nice bit of greenery to sit down and see if anything happens", one of the demonstrators said. "At this point it starts getting interesting... we’re on this bit of grass opposite Downing Street... and then, god, all hell breaks loose!! Mayhem everywhere. A push, a shove the odd boot in here and there and then a running battle on the grass, everyone running this way and that, chaos, and in no time at all, horses appear." In the words of another eye-witness, "l don‘t know whether the cops deliberately provoked trouble on the march for reasons of their own, or whether they were just too heavy handed to deal effectively with the small sit-down outside Downing Street (they baton charged it, sparking a day of rioting), but either way, once it had begun, they rapidly lost control and had no clear plan of what to do."

There were hundreds of thousands of people on the street that day. Some took more than good stories home: many left with injuries, a few with looted goods, and hundreds were detained. But everybody felt they'd had a role to play, and all of them were right, even though it is impossible to say who exactly did what, and with what effect: something, we were sure, had been achieved, but quite what it was and how it had occurred was impossible to judge. Had the demonstration been effective because of the violence of the police? What would have happened if so many people with such strong feelings had been left to demonstrate peacefully?

Either way, it did amount to something that was too much for the authorities: too many voices, too visible, too loud, too noisy and lively, too much to be contained. "These people are totally against democracy" was Thatcher's statement the next day. For these same people, however, it had felt like the most democratic exercise, a unique chance to participate, the best of demos and the demos at its best. "Extra-parliamentary action proved itself and in the process exposed the hollowness of our claims to democracy" wrote the Observer a year later, when the poll tax was finally abandoned. Their elected representatives had let them down, and "a rag-tag army of ordinary people" had done the work of democracy instead.

Perhaps this demonstration was a special case: an issue at the heart of democracy, a long campaign, its atmosphere of defiance and festivity, its sense of solidarity. Even the weather on its our side. Things don't always come together so perfectly. But people can be so annoying when they keep interrupting things like this, making such a scene and so much noise, producing so many situations to report: so irritating, such an inconvenience. Power can't stand the sight or sound of this. How smooth would be its exercise without this human error, these spanners in the works, these rough and ready bodies getting in the way, blocking the traffic, sitting in the streets. How disruptive the demos and the demos can be.

Sadie Plant

Biel/Bienne, March 2025