Shared anger can deliver real change

Imagine a death in the UK causing riots in the US. Or the unresolved legacies of the French Revolution leading to statues being pulled down in New York. Or social divisions in Germany generating soul searching in Washington DC. It’s hard, isn’t it? And yet, in reverse, that is what we are seeing at the moment.

The death of George Floyd in police custody Minneapolis has sent shockwaves across America, as one might expect. More surprising, perhaps, is the political effect it is having across the West. We are quite used to American cultural exports (France, Germany and Italy all have institutes dedicated to protecting their languages against barbarous Americanisms). American political exports are just as powerful and consequential.

The particular political resonance of the death of George Floyd is that racism is a familiar concept to people across the world, and a daily lived experience to many. If nothing else, we have a duty to much better understand how damaging this can be. One colleague of mine, discussing this situation, said that one develops an instinct, walking into a room as a black person, for who is uncomfortable about your presence. That is not something that white people in the West usually have to develop. There are many systemic ways in which people receive different services from the state and other institutions, and have different life chances, because of the color of their skin.

These problems manifest themselves in different countries in different ways. Logically this means the required responses vary as well. Protests are an unleashing of anger and are an important part of change. Whether they produce outcomes that bring about answers depends on the reaction of those in power. Are they short-term responses designed to look effective, or do they actually lead to a better society?

Large-scale protests are a bit like revolutions; their achievements are well out of the control of their instigators, and often one ends up where one started apart from greater social division. Not everyone who joins a demonstration is protesting against the same thing.

The death of George Floyd in police custody Minneapolis has sent shockwaves across America, as one might expect. More surprising, perhaps, is the political effect it is having across the West.

Peter Welby

To take the UK as an example, some of the striking early images of the protests responding to the situation in the US were of protesters grappling with unarmed police outside Downing Street, and crowds in the same place, with the same unarmed police, chanting “hands up, don’t shoot.” That phrase is a US import; it makes little sense in the UK, where there have only been three fatal police shootings in the past 12-months, two of them terror related.

Policing in the UK requires the consent of the policed; that is the only way the police can manage without firearms, in the main. Protests that promote the message that the police are the enemy in every conceivable political issue obviously alters that dynamic. It is hard to imagine most people in the UK wanting the police to become armed, or worse, mimic the US, where police frequently look like an occupying paramilitary force.

The wider problem, though, is the confusion over what is being protested against. With protesters chanting “I can’t breathe” (for George Floyd) or other slogans from the US, it gives protests an air of being against the US situation. This impression is aided by one of the groups backing the protests, Stand Up to Racism, distributing posters saying “Say no to Trump.” The far left, as always, tries to co-opt a protest into its wider political project, conflating “racist” with “conservative.” This raises suspicions among those on the right about the agenda of the protests as a whole, and harms their just cause.

Confusion over purpose is the enemy of successful political action. There is nothing UK politicians can do about what is happening in the US. There is plenty that can be done about the situation in the UK. But, as Bismarck said, politics is the art of the possible. Campaigns to abolish the police are politically impossible; campaigns to change the way in which policing works in ethnic minority communities are not. Campaigns for reparations for the slave trade are politically impossible; campaigns to secure greater political and economic investment in the life chances of ethnic minorities are not.

Let us assume for a moment that the majority of political figures across the West are basically well intentioned. They nevertheless have several competing demands as they react to protests: To make sure they are re-elected; to make sure they don’t make allies out of people who will later prove an embarrassment; to make sure the actions they take will not have negative consequences; and, of course, to do what is right. Protests that lead to actual change recognize those competing interests, and find ways of making them work in their favor. Protests that ignore those competing interests because they are inconvenient or non-ideal tend to fail.

Above all, political action in any country responds to situations in that country. The UK can do nothing about American policing, but it can do things to address its own problems. Meanwhile, the US is unlikely to pay attention to protests elsewhere. This is a moment in which much of the West is focused on an issue that is shared. Let’s use that opportunity to deliver real change.