AND ANOTHER THING
Shouting with a mob for all seasons
PAUL JOHNSON
One of the darkest observations on pol- itics was made by the benevolent and sup- posedly innocent-minded Mr Pickwick. Discussing the behaviour of the rabble and one's reactions to it, Pickwick observed, `It's always best on these occasions to do what the mob do.' Whereupon Mr Snod- grass asks, 'But suppose there are two mobs?' Pickwick replies quickly, 'Shout with the largest.' Whatever we may think of Pickwick's cynicism, there is no doubt that Snodgrass had a point. Psychologists, soci- ologists, crowd behaviourists and other experts — even political theorists — often seem to work on the assumption that the masses, the hoi polloi, 'the people', form one undifferentiated, single-minded mob. But history shows repeatedly that the uni- formity of the mob is nonsense. There can be many different kinds of mobs. Broadly speaking, however, there are two: radical mobs and reactionary mobs. Both favour change and wish to bring it about by force. Both, in their brutal way, are idealistic. But one looks forward to a utopian future, the other backwards to an equally tendentious golden age. In Paris, whose mobs have changed his- tory many times, the dichotomy is striking. During the Wars of Religion, the Paris mob was Catholic and reactionary: it was run by Guise agitators and made the Massacre of St Bartholomew possible. The radical mob emerged in 1789 and got the upper hand then and again in 1830, 1848 and at the end of 1870. But the reactionary mob was always there, waiting. It re-emerged in 1871 and cheered as the peasant-soldiers gunned down the Communards, again in the 1890s during the Dreyfus case, in 1934 with the Stavisky scandal and in the early 1940s under Vichy. The radical mob was in charge in 1944-45, and a murderous crew it proved; and it put its head above the para- pet briefly in 1968, when the authorities more or less evacuated the whole of the Left Bank. But on that occasion, after a vfeek of radical triumph, an enormous reac- tionary mob emerged from nowhere and occupied the whole of the Elysee district and much of the Right Bank. It was order- ly, if hypertense, composed, in part at least, of nuns waving their rosaries. But it looked as if it could mean business, and shortly afterwards proved it had the electorate on its side by giving the radicals the biggest political trouncing in French history. That mob is still around, and it has its counter-
part in many European cities.
The dualistic pattern in Britain shows sig- nificant differences. London mobs in the early modern period were Protestant, even nonconformist, and the left-wing historians who have produced the conventional pic- ture of modern times insist the mob is radi- cal, i.e., the genuine 'people'. But there is also a 'church and king' mob, which turned the radical Dr Priestley out of his Birming- ham house in the 1790s and burned it down. Was this the lumpenproletariat, to use Marx's disparaging term? Hard to say. Our mobs are sometimes ambivalent. Were the Gordon rioters radical or reactionary? And what about the Queen Caroline mobs of 1820, much feared by the Tory govern- ment but actually rioting in favour of the indissolubility of marriage? We ought to sharpen up our adjectival definition of mobs because it is quite clear two types are once more emerging in John Major's Britain.
On the one hand, there is the mob we see on television. It is inaccurate to dignify it with the name radical, though it is certainly anti-authority. It pops up all over the place, mainly in neglected housing estates of problem tenants, in London, Bristol, in the north-east and places like Burnley and Blackburn. It is spear-headed by teenage gangs, `joy-riders', sometimes by blacks or other minorities; it is pro-drugs and crime, highly destructive, above all anti-police, though it attacks ambulancemen and fire- men with as much enthusiasm, and consid- erably more bravado, than it does the con- stabulary. Its aim, in so far as it has one, is to do a Los Angeles, take over part of the city to loot and steal and, failing that, to burn down the neighbourhood.
This mob does not need a rationale because that is invariably provided for it by
`It's an all too familiar sight in Job Centres these days.' swarms of academic pundits, compassion- ate clergymen and other busybodies and troublemakers. On the morning after the mayhem you can be sure to hear some weary chief constable being given a grilling on the BBC's Today programme about whether his men (many of them by now in hospital) were 'insensitive', 'over-reacting' or 'provocative', in other words trying to enforce the law. A whole generation of young thugs, often only 10 or 12 but rang- ing right up to the mid-20s, are being taught, by the media and academia, that there is a legitimate form of rent-a-mob politics, in which it is perfectly normal to express any grievance whatsoever, or indeed any emotion including boredom, by throwing petrol bombs at the police and emergency services, and by looting shops. Naturally, these pseudo-radical mobs are backed by the far Left and infiltrated by violent anarchist groups who provide lead- ership and detonators. But in essence they are merely a new triumphalist version of that old urban phenomenon — the criminal class.
At the same time, though not favoured by television and the progressive pundits so we do not see them or have them `explained' to us — new reactionary mobs are forming. They consist of solid citizens, members of the working classes who pay their bills and like to be 'decent', who long to return to a time when the streets were safe, neighbourhoods crime-free, the police respected and malefactors promptly arrest- ed, tried and severely punished. They are an anti-liberal mob, who want a whole half- century of pampering of the criminal and the feckless by social services, youth work- ers, probation officers, local councils, pro- crime magistrates and judges decisively reversed. The method of these mobs, who have revived the pre-modern vigilante tra- dition, is simply to demonstrate outside the houses of the guilty but unpunished, and frighten them out of town. It started in a village in Anglesey but has spread to other districts in Wales and is catching on else- where. The media calls it lynch law, but it is more than that. It is the conservative rural answer to the radical crime-culture of the inner cities, it is the voice of the older gen- eration, or an earlier, better, safer, more wholesome Britain, talking through its teeth clenched by decades of liberal mis- rule. Here we have a true people's mob, a mob for all seasons, a mob to shout with.
Previous page
