(aka
the fundamental human right for hipsters to eat their overpriced
cereal in peace)
Okay,
a Fuck Parade protest is held outside the trendy Cereal Killers cafe inthe East End of London. The first and most obvious question
being – why don't the two sides just fall in love and get married?
In
perhaps the most classic case of Eighties nostalgia we've had yet,
Class War are back. Only this time they're rebranded as a political
party, and stand in elections. On the same kind of reformist platform they always jeered at when anybody else did it. (Just about impossible enough not to be likely to
happen, while falling way short of being genuinely radical.) But
otherwise unchanged.
Rather
than embark on all the hard work of grassroots social struggle their
chosen method was always stuntism. Perform a shock-horror action,
then get it replayed endlessly by an obligingly denunciatory media –
a reaction out of all proportion to the tiny numbers involved. It's
yippie-style theatrics in punk clothing. Combined with a crude and
fetishistic notion of class, where everyone is either a diamond
geezer knoworrimeanguv or else they're Boris Johnson. Despite what
we've heard on rotation the last couple of days, the problem with
Class War isn't that they threaten violence. Its that they peddle
only the theatre of violence in order to become the panto villain in
the media soap opera.
And
what better target for a media symbol of working class resistance
than a media symbol of gentrification? Those contemptible hipsters
who run Cereal Killers were happy to get their smug mugs in the media
as a symbol of the 'transformation' of the East End when they thought
it would add to the queues of credulous yuppies willing to pay
post-ironic prices for some soggy Cheerios in flavoured milk. There's
been times where you could scarcely open the paper without being
confronted by identical twins Twattledum and Twattledee. When it was
pointed out to them they were operating in one of the poorest areas
of London, so were effectively the bricks-and-mortar equivalent of
burning a twenty in front of a tramp, they refused to even answer any questions on the subject. Since
the protests they've been belatedly acknowledging maybe there is a problem after all, while stammering about it being a big broad issue and so nothing to
do with them, at all, honest, no siree.
...which,
inevitably enough, is the point the chattering class commentators
have taken up and run with. Protests to them are like strikes to the
Tories. They are not against them, they are always keen to insist.
They're just against every single example of them which has ever
happened in modern history. They sagely concede there are problems
and suggest at more positive alternatives without ever... actually
suggesting anything. The overall tone is a knowing
shrug of the shoulders. “But, darling, it's so difficult even
I don't know what to do? And I've got a
column.” Bridget Christie is one example, but by now there must be hundreds
more.
And
it's important to note that Class War themselves are complicit in
this. While the cafe got a bit of paint on its windows, the nearby
estate agents Marsh and Parsons had its windows smashed. And really,
who likes estate agents? This is overlooked by one side so they can
continually harp on about the sacred nature of small businesses, as
if they're run by benevolent and community-minded saints rather than
money-grubbing profiteers. And also by the other, precisely because
they see that media chatter as their oxygen of publicity. Class War founder Ian Bone has said bluntly “a
broken window at Foxtons isn’t going to get any publicity at all,
whereas we’ve seen what happens with independent shops. We’d be
stupid not to.”
So
if I don't side with either side you may well be asking at this point
what I am in favour of? As ever, the best leadership is example. The resistance to social cleansing going on in London's Sweets Way estate has seen much less press attention. After all, its
not based around meeting media expectations but the immediate needs
of a local community. (Inevitably, most of the publicity it
has seen has been via celebrity supporters, such
as Russell Brand.) But also, its grassroots opposition to the powers
that be will in the long run be more of a threat to them.
Watch
how the Fuck Parade and the security guards behave in these two
videos below. There's no point, of course, in directly comparing how
'aggressive' the two groups are. That's the sort of pat moralism that
decontextualises and depoliticises events until nothing meaningful is
left. Yet, just for a minute or two, let's take the media agenda and
assume there is. Because there's really no competition. Despite all
the hoo-hah, despite Twattledum and Dee in a classic case of
entitlement culture calling the protests a “hate crime” (while inexplicably being
able to open for business the next day) really very little happens.
I've seen worse go on in the East End, or for that matter here in
Brighton, on a regular Saturday night.
The behaviour of the security
guards at Sweets Way is far more threatening, far more violent. Yet
did it receive a fraction of the coverage the Fuck Parade did? I use
my words advisedly. Did it fuck. The class war continues, just away
from wherever Class War are. Real protest against gentrification goes
on, local people working together just as they should. Just don't
expect to read about it in the mainstream media.
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