The lesson of the Big Brother row is that we really should be burning more effigies
HUGO RIFKIND There is Guy Fawkes, of course, and those annual photogenic exuberances they have somewhere in Sussex, but in the UK political protest rarely employs the device of the flaming effigy. Our grievances tend to be written about, shouted about or, occasionally, fought about. Only very rarely are they cast in human form and incinerated. This is a terrible shame. We are missing a trick, I am sure of it.
Not so in India. Last week, in the Bihari city of Patna, an angry mob used the effigy trick in order to vent their collective spleen about the Celebrity Big Brother racism row. A strange sort of effigy, that. I can't pretend to be a connoisseur of such things, but I'd have thought that for a top-notch effigy you need some identifiable features. A mask helps. The beard of Osama bin Laden, the wig of Margaret Thatcher. In the UK, in the past, the Pope's clothes must have been a godsend.
The Patna effigy was apparently intended to be a Big Brother producer, but it had been built, plainly, by people with scant knowledge as to what a Big Brother producer actually looks like. You don't get Channel 4 in Bihar. You don't even get Newsnight Review, so protesters had no way of knowing that an accurate effigy of a Big Brother producer would, in fact, have looked like a fierce-eyed teenage girl with a Bluetooth headset and a clipboard. Theirs was more like a wobbly member of the Ku Klux Klan, draped with a yellow tarpaulin. Still, let us not quibble. This was a general purpose, off-the-shelf effigy, and intention was everything. Really, you have to admire their tenacity.
An effigy is just how it is done in Patna. You can't make a point without one. In the past year, on separate occasions, they have also burned George W. Bush, Pervez Mushan-af, the national railway minister, Australian cricketer Greg Chappell, a health minister, the whole Indian government and, with no apparent irony intended, a range of oversized Gutka tobacco products. Last week (and if I were making this up as satire I would feel rather proud) the PatnaDaily.com website described the local effigy business as 'in boom'. If you have something to say in Patna, this is just how you say it. You make it into a person, and you fetch a match.
It is tempting to seek the root of this in Hindu anthropomorphism, although with effigies also being popular across the Middle East, that seems a touch too pat. Either way, let us take inspiration from Patna. There is an honesty and an enthusiasm in an effigy. An effigy cries conviction. In 2003, a million of us may have marched through London to call Tony Blair a bloodthirsty liar, but we didn't set him on fire and stamp his ashes into the street. Even if the idea had occurred to us, we probably would have felt it rude.
Likewise, when the Countryside Alliance had their turn the year before, nobody burned anything more than the contents of their pipes. And no, I don't know how you embody a hunting ban, green-belt development, petrol tax hikes and rural post office closures in a single combustible form, but you can be damn sure they would have figured it out in Patna.
Frankly, it smacks of weakness. It smacks of woolly thinking. What are we afraid of? Possibly, it is not the flames. Possibly, it is the enthusiasm. Our views are worn lightly, like a fashionable T-shirt. We like to think of ourselves as being more than our beliefs, as being somehow above them. We don't like to think of them as being as real and tangible as we are ourselves. We don't get down and dirty with them, in their cinder and their ash. Perhaps that is why we rarely put them to good use.
So, let us have more effigies. Indeed, let us burn more effigies. And, let us take the Indian example, and not be daunted if our targets tend towards the abstract. Hike in the licence fee? Effigy. Gridlock on the M25? Effigy. Failures in our education system? Effigy, effigy, effigy. Let us burn effigies of cash for peerages, and effigies of slush funds for Saudi royals. Let us burn effigies of testicular cancer from mobile phones. Let us figure out what an effigy of BT's 'call waiting' system looks like, and burn that. Let us even burn an effigy of carbon emissions, and let the paradox be damned. Let us burn effigies of everything that is bad, and perhaps, in the building and the burning, we will learn to understand our grievances with a little more clarity.
FT hen again, there is perhaps an emerging modern equivalent to the mob burning of an effigy, and that is the mob posing of a question on a political party's website. It is, in essence, a similar sort of process. One person does his best to encapsulate an issue, and then everybody else piles on, to stamp it home.
For the past few months, and largely with my newspaper diarist hat on, I have been paying keen attention to the 'e-petitions' section of Mr Blair's 10 Downing Street website, and the 'Ask David' section of Mr Cameron's Webcameron website.
These are similar in conception, but the latter is certainly the braver of the two. As well as inviting anybody to ask a question, Cameron has also pledged to answer whatever questions get the most support from other readers each week. So, when 60-odd people ask David to discuss his views on cannabis, he has to respond. When 9,000 petition Tony to make St David's Day a national holiday in Wales, he doesn't even have to notice.
Still, in the days of mass online communication, both are probably more powerful democratic tools than they might initially appear. It is possible, these days, to assemble a virtual mob very quickly — hence the 3,000-odd people who have petitioned the PM to 'stand on his head and juggle icecream'. Over on the Tory website, meanwhile, Mr Webcameron has been conceding diary stories at the rate of about one a week. At the time of writing, we're about to hear about 'his involvement with the shadowy Bilderberg group'.
Sooner or later, the mob will grow too mischievous, and I suspect the feature will be toned down or scrapped. Even now, there are some issues with which our elected leaders bluntly refuse to engage. On the PM's site, a poor Mr M. Tahani has repeatedly attempted to set up a petition to call upon the government to 'stop torturing me by the electromagnetic microwave weapon', but webmasters simply aren't having it. It sounds like somebody needs to make some calls to Patna.
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