Deborah Orr
IndependentJune 19, 2001
In the wake of the violent demonstrations marking the EU summit in Sweden, a German politician has offered some fighting talk in return. The Interior Minister Otto Schily said: "Bands of criminals are systematically trying to disrupt political summit meetings." He then suggested that such troublemakers should be treated in the same way as football hooligans, with known offenders banned from travelling abroad.
The spectacle of ravening hordes of "political hooligans", feeling passionate not about whose team wins but about which political orthodoxy triumphs, is a quite striking one. Sure, pitched battles and riots - especially on this scale - are always disturbing and problematic. But there's some kind of progress here surely, when people are fighting for political causes rather than victory at team games?
Here in Britain, we have only just emerged blinking into the sunshine after an election that inspired the majority of us to seek solace in hibernation. The great threat to world democracy, scolded schoolmasterly politicians, was apathy. It didn't take long for us to be reminded that far from being apathetic about politics, people are being shot on the streets in the name of their beliefs.
Glassy-eyed boredom or blind rage? What has brought democracy to this hideous impasse? For these two are further choices that are, as much of the electorate in this country complained earlier this month, no choice at all. Choose apathy and you have no voice at all. Choose anger and any point you might be trying to make is negated by the tantrums of inarticulacy that are dominating legitimate protest more and more.
Many people during the election pointed out that they were not apathetic but angry and that they became angrier still when their silent protests were belittled as the actions of people who simply didn't care. If being angrier still involves hurling cobbles and abuse around Gothenburg, then these efforts can be belittled even more, as the outbursts of people who care for nothing except a massive great ruck.
Mr Blair has condemned the Gothenburg riots as "a complete outrage". His embarrassment has no doubt been made all the more crushing by the fact that it is reported that a British man has been arrested as one of the ringleaders.
Meanwhile the world leaders themselves stand and fall united. How unedifying that already Mr Blair and Silvio Berlusconi will be getting their heads together and working out how British people can be stopped from travelling to Genoa next month, for fear that they might spoil the party at the next G8 summit.
National politics has become craven, reliant on economic performance, performance that is delivered by international organisations and alliances that are often not democratically elected and are effortlessly dominated by the wealthiest countries. The wealthiest countries, in turn, are dominated by the wealthiest people, a very small number of whom control a huge amount of the collective wealth.
Here, in wealth inequality, not just at home but worldwide, is the very nub of the process that makes people apathetic or angry. (Whichever you want to call it, and however you want to condemn it.) And capitalism does have an answer to the problem - for even the most ardent of capitalists will admit that this is a difficulty.
The march of capital, if only its elected proponents could grasp such a negation of their own egos, makes all politicians redundant. (Except, in the short term, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, which is why our own is always so very, very busy). Democratic politics, in essence, exists primarily to tax and spend - to raise money from the population then spend it on projects which will be of benefit to all.
But as capitalist economic models insist on the minimum of taxation, there is not very much for government to spend. The idea among melioristic capitalists is that the gap here can be filled by philanthropy. They point to such proponents of big charity as Bill Gates, Ted Turner or George Soros as the sort of people who will deliver the public services of the future.
Politicians prefer to call this sort of business public-private partnership, and show their lack of faith in the idea that public services can be provided by pure philanthropy by making such schemes extremely attractive to capitalists. (In the only way possible, of course, by setting them up as generators of private profit provided by public money.)
The result is that even as they hand over responsibility, the politicians are able to convince themselves that they keep control. Instead, we're heading for future times when it would be more sensible to elect people directly to run public services than to elect MPs. Likewise it would be more sensible to have MPs heading local government with no government in Westminster at all.
Interestingly though, help is at hand for our blissfully ignorant but nevertheless massively beleaguered politicians. What they need is a big bogeyman to fight, an enemy that they can pump up to enormous dimensions, before sparing no expense in cutting them down. Obviously this would not be a very nice thing to do to those infected with voter apathy. But those brigands suffused with voter anarchy. They're just the ticket.
We've already witnessed extraordinary scenes in London on May Day, displaying the lengths the establishment will go to in maintaining order among protesters. Yesterday police released photographs of six of the protesters taken from CCTV footage on the day of the suppressed protests. Even though the damage on the day was, to say the least, limited, 53 of the 97 people arrested have been charged with public order offences.
Meanwhile, in Gothenburg, none of our great democratic leaders seems at all perturbed by the fact that one stone-throwing protester was shot with live ammunition by police and is now seriously injured in hospital. The police say the shot was in self-defence. Footage of the incident suggests that the young man had already turned to flee when he was shot.
The estimable Andrew Wilson points out that "the new Home Secretary has authorised British police to buy Heckler and Koch G36K high-velocity military assault rifles as used by the German police". He asks: "Is this what we, let alone the anarchist groups, want?"
The question is pertinent. It is disturbing to suppose that just as one arena for political control is narrowing and closing, the very people who believe they are striking a blow against this happening may be offering rich fodder for the flowering of a new one.
As the old forms of political intervention fade, there has already been a huge rise in "nanny state" interference in civil liberties. This rise in worldwide civil disturbance could be just the thing to convince politicians that here is a issue which allows them to really "get tough".
It's a grim thought - politicians joining together globally to act as little more than tub-thumpers for the private concerns of capitalism - their position as violent repellers of protest justified only by the violence of the mob on the street. How, I wonder, will the anarchists join with the apathists to knock that one on the head?
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