Trial by fury
We live in an age when everyone is encouraged to have their say on Twitter or
blogs. But, in our anger over MPs’ expenses or Nick Griffin, we are nearer to the
baying, blood-hungry mob of ancient Rome or 18th-century Tyburn than we would
like to admit
New Statesman
In the summer of the year 190, rioting broke out at a horse race at the Circus Maximus in Rome. It
had been a difficult year, with the city afflicted by persistent food shortages, and popular discontent
had been building for months. The man that most people blamed, Emperor Commodus’s
chamberlain Cleander, was not responsible for the grain supply. But, as the mob spilled out of the
arena and began to rampage through the streets, it was Cleander’s name that was on everybody’s
lips.
In desperation, the chamberlain sent the Praetorian cavalry to disperse the crowds, but this only
made matters worse. ‘The multitude fled with precipitation towards the city,’ runs Edward Gibbon’s
account. ‘Several were slain, and many more were trampled to death; but when the cavalry
entered the streets their pursuit was checked by a shower of stones and darts from the roofs and
windows of the houses…
The Praetorians at length gave way, oppressed with numbers; and the tide of popular fury returned
with redoubled violence against the gates of the palace.’ There Commodus, Cleander’s patron,
was watching nervously, unsure which way to jump. The story goes that it was the emperor’s
mistress Marcia who made up his mind for him. A few moments later, Cleander’s head was thrown
out to the seething mob and, as Gibbon puts it, ‘the desired spectacle instantly appeased the
tumult’.
Even today, 18 centuries later, there is something profoundly unsettling about the death of
Cleander. To a modern reader, steeped in the democratic values of civility and compromise, the
Roman mob can seem a disturbingly primal, elemental force, a seething mass of blind hatred, the
sum of all that is worst in human nature. But while Alistair Darling and Bob Ainsworth can probably
sleep easy, in the knowledge that they are very unlikely to lose their heads, we are closer to the
politics of the mob than we think.
Only in the past few weeks, two major news stories - the reaction to Jan Moir’s article about
Stephen Gately in the Daily Mail and the outrage that greeted the appearance of the BNP leader,
Nick Griffin, on Question Time - have reminded us that in an age when deference has virtually
disappeared and politicians fall over themselves to appease public opinion, the spectacle of the
enraged crowd, whipping itself to ever more extravagant extremes of indignation and fury, is
perhaps not so alien after all.
The fourth estate
Fear of the crowd has been a significant political force throughout human history. In ancient
Greece, the rule of the mob - technically okhlokratia: ochlocracy - was considered one of the three
bad forms of government, together with oligarchy and tyranny. In a balanced, civilised polity, the
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thinking ran, government would tame the passions of the mob and direct it towards beneficial ends
rather than allow it to run riot. But this was easier said than done, even in England, the supposed
home of parliamentary democracy.
In London, for instance, anti-Catholic mobs played a critical role in the terror and revolutions of the
17th century: even during the supposedly peaceful Glorious Revolution of 1688, the capital
succumbed to an orgy of violence and looting before William of Orange restored order. A century
later, in an age of coffee houses, the first newspapers and stock investments, fear of the mob had
become an indelible element of modern politics.
‘The mob was so large and powerful a body’, lamented the novelist and magistrate Henry Fielding,
that it had become the ‘fourth estate’ of the realm, encroaching on the territory of king, lords and
commons, and taking upon itself the power of veto over new legislation. This was the London mob
at its height: the great seething, chaotic mass depicted by Hogarth in the 11th plate of Industry and
Idleness, which captures the terrifying passions of the crowd at a Tyburn hanging. The mob had
become so powerful, Fielding wrote, that it threatened ‘to shake the balance of our constitution’.
‘A vision of coarse faces, with here and there a blot of flaring, smoky light; a dream of demon
heads and savage eyes, and sticks and iron bars uplifted in the air, and whirled about,’ was how
Charles Dickens described the Georgian mob in his novel Barnaby Rudge (1841), a searing recreation of the Gordon riots, when thousands of anti-Catholic marchers ran riot in the streets,
looting and pillaging with impunity. By the time Dickens wrote these words the mob seemed to be
fading into history, overtaken by the rise of politeness and the Victorians’ determination to impose
order on chaos. And yet, even in an age of mass politics, when the old passions were supposedly
sublimated into peaceful electoral campaigning, the mob never entirely disappeared.
Consider what happened when David Lloyd George went to speak against the Boer war in
Birmingham in December 1901, supposedly a high point of Edwardian gentility. When friends
asked Birmingham’s old political boss Joseph Chamberlain - the dominant political personality in
the country and a prime mover behind the war - to ensure that Lloyd George got a fair hearing, the
response was cold. ‘If Ll G wants his life, he had better keep away from Birmingham,’ Chamberlain
said ominously. ‘If he doesn’t go, I will see that it is known he is afraid. If he does go, he will
deserve all he gets.’
In the event, Ll G did go, but he never got to speak a single sentence. Before he had taken the
stage, a furious mob almost 100,000-strong had overwhelmed the police and broken into the Town
Hall in an attempt to find and punish the ‘treacherous’ Welshman. It was only by dressing Lloyd
George in a constable’s uniform that the police smuggled him to safety; in the meantime, 40 people
were injured and two killed.
Such scenes may have been rare during the past century - an age in which, despite appearances,
deference often carried more weight than democracy - but they were never entirely unknown.
When the Metropolitan Police, the British Union of Fascists and a coalition of anti-fascist protesters
fought on Cable Street in 1936 for control of the East End of London, it was a reminder that politics
and violence are often tightly intertwined. Even during the supposedly stuffy and undemonstrative
mid-century consensus years, teenage mobs ran riot in Nottingham and Notting Hill in the racist
pogroms of 1958.
A decade later, hundreds of dockers and meat porters marched on Westminster to show their
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support for Enoch Powell. In the past few decades - years when English football hooligans ran
amok in European cities, poll-tax rioters pillaged central London and northern mill towns fell victim
to race riots - barely a year has passed without a reminder somewhere of the mob instincts that did
for poor Cleander.
Blog rule
In many ways, mob violence is not what it was. In a previous age, the recent revelations about
MPs’ expenses might have provoked tens of thousands to march on Westminster with flags and
clubs, just as the Gordon rioters did two centuries ago. By and large, modern protesters are rather
more decorous, such as the 5,000 Bromsgrove residents who signed a petition calling for their MP
Julie Kirkbride to stand down, or the multitude of outraged bloggers who posted details of the
scandals online.
Now, as then, however, indignation can easily tip over into violence: witness the scenes outside
BBC Television Centre as anti-fascists protested at the recording of BBC1’s Question Time. And
now, as then, it is often hard to tell spontaneity from co-ordination. No doubt many of the people
who disparaged Jan Moir in what she called ‘an orchestrated internet campaign’ were genuinely
offended by what she had written about the dead Boyzone singer Stephen Gately. But how many
read her column only after they had heard about it on Twitter, and how many complained only after
they had read the Guardian’s Charlie Brooker, the unlikely heir to Lord George Gordon?
No doubt many readers think these were both excellent causes and that it is disgraceful to
compare the Moir and Griffin incidents, however flippantly, to the Gordon riots. The problem is that
one man’s justified outrage is another’s hysterical bullying. In a society in which the old divisions of
class and ideology seem more confused than at any time in living memory, and in which every
individual feels he has the right not to be offended, where do you draw the line?
Was the Mail wrong to whip up public anger at the antics of Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross? If
so, wasn’t Brooker wrong to do the same thing, in effect, over the Moir column? Do we want to live
in a society in which journalists have the right to express any opinion, however offensive, even if it
means inflaming tensions and exploiting old prejudices? Or would we prefer to live in one in which
speech is governed, if not by the will of the majority, then by the will of Twitter’s loudest minority?
For Polybius or for Fielding, there would have been no dilemma. They lived in societies in which
rule by the ‘best men’ was seen as automatically superior to any other form of government; the
idea of following public opinion would have struck them as simply absurd. Modern liberals,
however, do not have the luxury of their prejudices. We tell ourselves that, in a democratic society,
the will of the people is what matters - except when the people have the wrong idea. So the 1960s
generation, who like to congratulate themselves for having torn down the old barriers of class and
privilege, fall suspiciously quiet when they are reminded that the landmark reforms of the era - the
end of hanging, the legalisation of homosexuality - went ahead in clear defiance of public opinion.
It is a sobering thought that if Britain had genuinely been governed by the will of the majority for the
past few decades, we would still live in a country where criminals were hanged and black and
brown faces were virtually unknown.
What made the liberal reforms of the 1960s possible was a climate of deference that has now
disappeared. When this magazine was founded, in 1913, Sidney and Beatrice Webb had no doubt
that they knew more and had better opinions than their readers did. Although they encouraged
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letters, the idea that they might post their articles in some public place for the masses to scribble
disparaging comments beneath would have struck them as ludicrous. But today, when audiences
bristle at the assertion of expertise, and when the gap between opinion-formers and opinionreceivers has virtually disappeared, every newspaper or TV news programme urges its readers or
viewers to ‘have your say’ on their websites.
Flames of resentment
In a sense, therefore, we are back where we started. In an age when everyone must have his say,
we often feel closer to the noisy demagoguery of the Roman world than to the stuffy but dignified
atmosphere of the mid-20th century, when public figures were seen as genuinely honourable men
and women to be treated with seriousness and respect.
Whether the issues are politicians’ expenses, the housing of convicted paedophiles or the rise of
the BNP, the prevailing tone is always the same: a kind of injured outrage, with politicians
competing to stoke the flames of populist resentment. And in this context, Jack Straw’s shameless
playing to the Question Time gallery - the well-prepared spiel about the ‘East Lancashire lads’
buried beside colonial troops in northern France - is even worse than Nick Griffin’s inflammatory
rabble-rousing. Griffin does not know any better. Straw should.
The politics of populism has its merits. Whether they are left- or right-wing, politicians are far more
attuned to the values and ambitions of their voters than their predecessors were; and, in this age of
the digital revolution, anybody with a mobile phone or an internet connection can contribute to
public debate. But at a time of permanent populist resentment, the spectre of the mob, the hysteria
of the Roman crowd, is never far away.
No matter how liberal and progressive we may think ourselves, we are not so different from the
shipwrecked schoolboys in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies: frightened, disputatious,
aggressive, demagogic. At first they rally to the sound of the conch, gathering in solemn assembly
to decide their plans. But step by step they shed the veneer of civilisation and succumb to their
bloodlust, preying first on a pig, then on one another. ‘Kill the beast!’ they chant. ‘Cut his throat!
Spill his blood!’ The conch is forgotten. So are the assemblies. All that is left is the fierce
exhilaration of the hunt.
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