Marches, protests and demonstrations change history

History shows that protest works, say Lindsey German, national convenor of Stop the War Coalition, and Independent journalist Johann Hari. With a government determined to destroy public services and the welfare state, while still justifying billions spent every year on the war in Afghanistan and on weapons of mass destruction, we need a lot more marching and direct action.

On the evening of 10 November, following that day's huge demonstration against education cuts, Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes declared MP Simon Hughes that change only came about by the power of reason and debate.

"Rational debate wins arguments, not protest," said Hughes.

It was, of course, his forebears in the Liberal party before the First World War who refused point blank to grant women the vote.

After a period of sweet reason, women decided they had had enough and began to take action. They marched, disrupted ministers' public meetings, rushed the House of Commons, broke windows using neat little hammers they kept in their handbags.

The suffragettes understood that appeals to the better nature of politicians simply would not get them very far. They stand in a long tradition.

All the major gains achieved in Britain - from the vote for workers and women, the right to join trade unions, the right to demonstrate, the welfare state itself - were only granted as a result of protest, campaigning and struggles until they were won. Many of those involved made great sacrifices, from the Tolpuddle martyrs transported to Australia for trying to form a union, to the suffragettes who went on hunger strike for their cause.

We should remember this when listening to the outrage about the broken windows of the Conservative Party headquarters on Millbank, when it was occupied by students on the anti-cuts demonstration.

We should also remember that in the past people also used tactics to draw attention to their cause which were widely criticised.

There are two points that we can draw from the November 10 protests. The first is that there is a great deal of hypocrisy about the violence on demonstrations. The proposed cuts by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government will create misery for many people.

Young people will not be able to go to university, those forced to move will suffer real stress sometimes resulting in illness or family break up, the sick and disabled will face benefit cuts. Surely this should be condemned much more strongly than the breaking of a few windows in central London?

Protest works

The second is that protest works. Not because the students have won their demands, although they have created a mass movement which certainly creates the potential for them to win. But because by going on the streets the students have asserted that there is an alternative to simply sitting back and accepting the hideous consensus which passes for political debate in most quarters. They have in one day pushed their views onto the political agenda.

Demonstrations also help to build confidence and solidarity among those who demonstrate – they establish that the protesters are not isolated but part of a bigger movement. This has been one of the most important aspects of the anti war movement. It has created a culture of protest and a network of activists who have helped to spread the movement.

The mantra 'what's the point of protesting' is a counsel of despair, a refusal to acknowledge that we can change the world for the better. The anti-war demonstrations have helped build a mass consciousness in Britain, have got rid of Tony Blair, who was forced to agree to stand down as prime minister just days after the demonstration against Israel's barbaric Lebanon demo in 2005. They have helped fight Islamophobia and attacks on civil liberties. They have made future wars harder to justify.

With a government determined to destroy the welfare state while still justifying billions spent every year on the war in Afghanistan and on weapons of mass destruction, surely the anti-war demonstrators should be making links with the students, demanding to cut the war not education.

On Saturday 20 November, we'll be marching again, to get the troops out of Afghanistan and in protest at the Nato summit which will meet the same weekend. We expect many students and school students, as well as peace activists and trade unionists, to be there.

We need a lot more marching, as well as direct action, if we are to win a world that prioritises welfare provision and public services for all, rather than wars that bring nothing but mass slaughter and destruction.

Lindsey German will be speaking at the launch meeting of Redhill Coalition against Cuts on Wednesday 24^th November at 7pm in the Harlequin Theatre, Redhill

Johann Hari: Protest works. Just look at the proof

Yes, you can choose to do nothing. But you will be choosing to let yourself and your family and your country be ripped off

Johann Hari

There is a ripple of rage spreading across Britain. It is clearer every day that the people of this country have been colossally scammed. The bankers who crashed the economy are richer and fatter than ever, on our cash. The Prime Minister who promised us before the election “we’re not talking about swingeing cuts” just imposed the worst cuts since the 1920s, condemning another million people to the dole queue. Yet the rage is matched by a flailing sense of impotence. We are furious, but we feel there is nothing we can do. There’s a mood that we have been stitched up by forces more powerful and devious than us, and all we can do is sit back and be shafted.

This mood is wrong. It doesn’t have to be this way – if enough of us act to stop it. To explain how, I want to start with a small scandal, a small response – and a big lesson from history.

In my column last week, I mentioned in passing something remarkable and almost unnoticed. For years now, Vodafone has been refusing to pay billions of pounds of taxes to the British people that are outstanding. The company – which has doubled its profits during this recession – engaged in all kinds of accounting twists and turns, but it was eventually ruled this refusal breached anti-tax avoidance rules. They looked set to pay a sum Private Eye calculates to be more than £6bn.

Then, suddenly, the exchequer – run by George Osborne – cancelled almost all of the outstanding tax bill, in a move a senior figure in Revenues and Customs says is “an unbelievable cave-in.” A few days after the decision, Osborne was promoting Vodafone on a tax-payer funded trip to India. He then appointed Andy Halford, the finance director of Vodafone, to the government’s Advisory Board on Business Tax Rates, apparently because he thinks this is a model of how the Tories think it should be done.

By contrast, the Indian government chose to pursue Vodafone through the courts for the billions in tax they have failed to pay there. Yes, the British state is less functional than the Indian state when it comes to collecting revenues from the wealthy. This is not an isolated incident. Richard Murphy, of Tax Research UK, calculates that UK corporations fail to pay a further £12bn a year in taxes they legally owe, while the rich avoid or evade up to £120bn.

Many people emailed me saying they were outraged that while they pay their fair share for running the country, Vodafone doesn’t pay theirs. One of them named Thom Costello decided he wanted to organize a protest, so he appealed on Twitter – and this Wednesday seventy enraged citizens shut down the flagship Vodafone store on Oxford Street in protest. “Vodafone won’t pay as they go,” said one banner. “Make Vodafone pay, not the poor,” said another.

The reaction from members of the public – who were handed leaflets explaining the situation – was startling. Again and again, people said “I’m so glad somebody is doing this” and “there needs to be much more of this.” Lots of them stopped to talk about how frightened they were about the cuts and for their own homes and jobs. The protest became the third most discussed topic in the country on Twitter, meaning millions of people now know about what Vodafone and the government have done. The protesters believe this is just the start of a movement to make the rich pay a much fairer share of taxation, and they urge people to join them: go to ukuncut.wordpress.com to find out what you can do this Saturday.

You might ask – so what? What has been changed? To understand how and why protest like this can work, you need some concrete and proven examples from the past. Let’s start with the most hopeless and wildly idealistic cause – and see how it won. The first ever attempt to hold a Gay Pride rally in Trafalgar Square was in 1965. Two dozen people turned up – and they were mostly beaten by the police and arrested. Gay people were imprisoned for having sex, and even the most compassionate defense of gay people offered in public life was that they should be pitied for being mentally ill.

Imagine if you had stood in Trafalgar Square that day and told those two dozen brave men and women: “Forty-five years from now, they will stop the traffic in Central London for a Gay Pride parade on this very spot, and it will be attended by hundreds of thousands of people. There will be married gay couples, and representatives of every political party, and openly gay soldiers and government ministers and huge numbers of straight supporters – and it will be the homophobes who are regarded as freaks.” It would have seemed like a preposterous statement of science fiction. But it happened. It happened in one lifetime. Why? Not because the people in power spontaneously realized that millennia of persecuting gay people had been wrong, but because determined ordinary citizens banded together and demanded justice.

If that cause can be achieved, through persistent democratic pressure, anything can. But let’s look at a group of protesters who thought they had failed. The protests within the United States against the Vietnam War couldn’t prevent it killing three million Vietnamese and 80,000 Americans. But even in the years it was “failing”, it was achieving more than the protestors could possibly have known. In 1966, the specialists at the Pentagon went to US President Lyndon Johnson – a thug prone to threatening to “crush” entire elected governments – with a plan to end the Vietnam War: nuke the country. They “proved”, using their computer modeling, that a nuclear attack would “save lives.”

It was a plan that might well have appealed to him. But Johnson pointed out the window, towards the hoardes of protesters, and said: “I have one more problem for your computer. Will you feed into it how long it will take 500,000 angry Americans to climb the White House wall out there and lynch their President?” He knew that there would be a cost – in protest and democratic revolt – that made that cruelty too great. In 1970, the same plan was presented to Richard Nixon – and we now know from the declassified documents that the biggest protests ever against the war made him decide he couldn’t do it. Those protesters went home from those protests believing they had failed – but they had succeeded in preventing a nuclear war. They thought they were impotent, just as so many of us do – but they really had power beyond their dreams to stop a nightmare.

Protest raises the political price for governments making bad decisions. It stopped LBJ and Nixon making the most catastrophic decision of all. The same principle can apply to the Conservative desire to kneecap the welfare state while handing out massive baubles to their rich friends. The next time George Osborne has to decide whether to cancel the tax bill of a super-rich corporation and make us all pick up the tab, he will know there is a price. People will find out, and they will be angry. The more protests there are, the higher the price. If enough of us demand it, we can make the rich pay their share for the running of our country, rather than the poor and the middle – to name just one urgent cause that deserves protest.

And protest can have an invisible ripple-effect that lasts for generations. A small group of women from Iowa lost their sons early in the Vietnam war, and they decided to set up an organization of mothers opposing the assault on the country. They called a protest of all mothers of serving soldiers outside the White House – and six turned up in the snow. Even though later in the war they became nationally important voices, they always remembered that protest as an embarrassment and a humiliation.

Until, that is, one day in the 1990s, one of them read the autobiography of Benjamin Spock, the much-loved and trusted celebrity doctor, who was the Oprah of his day. When he came out against the war in 1968, it was a major turning point in American public opinion. And he explained why he did it. One day, he had been called to a meeting at the White House to be told how well the war in Vietnam was going, and he saw six women standing in the snow with placards, alone, chanting. It troubled his conscience and his dreams for years. If these women were brave enough to protest, he asked himself, why aren’t I? It was because of them that he could eventually find the courage to take his stand – and that in turn changed the minds of millions, and ended the war sooner. An event that they thought was a humiliation actually turned the course of history.

You don’t know what the amazing ripple-effect of your protest will be – but wouldn’t Britain be a better place if it replaced the ripple of impotent anger so many of us are feeling? Yes, you can sit back and let yourself be ripped off by the bankers and the corporations and their political lackeys if you want. But it’s an indulgent fiction to believe that is all you can do. You can act in your own self-defence. As Margaret Mead, the great democratic campaigner, said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”

For updates on this issue and others, you can follow Johann on twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101 or you can email him at j.hari@independent.co.uk

To watch Johann on US TV discussing Britain's austerity cuts, click here.