Indeed, next year Brian Haw will celebrate a decade living in a tent in Parliament Square, Westminster. So, ten years of shouting at ministerial cars as they zoomed into the gates of the Houses of Parliament, waving homemade placards, and wearing a floppy hat with badges on it.
Like Stanley Green who spent his life walking up and down Oxford Street with a placard offering LESS PASSION FROM LESS PROTEIN, Brian Haw has become a London institution. He has been joined, off and on, by other protestors. The Tamils arrived in vast numbers, with their own litter patrols and well-behaved children. There’s a nasty Australian women who swears at MPs and their staff through a megaphone. There’s the man claiming that Freemasons killed his friends.
Recently, though, Mr Haw and his eccentric friends have been joined by a vast number of students, unemployed people and people whose jobs allow them inordinate amounts of time off, comprising a ‘democracy village’. Their number includes people who deny that Al Qaeda organised the attacks on 9/11 (which means they think the American government murdered its own citizens). The new arrivals have erected tents, dug latrines, hung banners from the trees and statues, and made it impossible for anyone else to enjoy what was previously public space. Mr Haw is not happy. The Evening Standard reports him saying that he doesn’t want to be ‘lumped together’ with the hippies. ‘I am nothing to do with them,” he said. ‘I’m here to stop torture, genocide and looting of nations.’ By living in a tent for ten years.
I was showing a group of people from Zambia, Nigeria and Ghana around Westminster a fortnight ago. It was a shame they couldn’t see the statue of Nelson Mandela, as they’d requested, because a load of middle-class English hippies have colonised the square.
The UK, and especially London, has always had semi-permanent protest camps. The South African embassy on Trafalgar Square had the City of London Anti-Apartheid Group maintaining a vigil outside during apartheid. Hundreds of women attended, and stayed at the peace camps at Greenham Common and other air force bases during the cold war. Speakers’ Corner has given a platform to ranters and ravers of every hue.
There are many people – Lib Dem MPs and people who write for the New Statesman – for example, think that the ‘democracy village’ must be allowed to continue, perhaps even to grow into a ‘democracy town’ with its own branch of Waitrose. Some agree with the broad aims of the campers: bringing the troops home, an end to wars, and the eradication of Israel. Others defend the fundamental principles of freedom of assembly, and freedom of speech.
No-one, even the Libertarian Alliance, believes that personal freedom should be complete. The freedom to murder your enemies, to hit people who annoy you, to drive your car down the middle of the road at high speed, or to defecate in the street is curtailed by the rule of law. Once you establish the principle that personal freedom has limits, because as RH Tawney famously said ‘freedom for the pike is death for the minnow’, then the debate becomes merely a matter of degree. Freedom is rationed, and distributed, on as fair and wise a basis as possible.
So whose freedoms matter more? Anti-war protestors, or the Londoners and tourists who use Parliament Square for recreation and pleasure? There is surely an irony that liberals are defending people who have removed the liberty of people to walk across a public square by pitching marquees and sinking latrines. It’s got nothing to do with Afghanistan. It’s about whether the law should allow people to live in public parks in semi-permanent structures, or if the laws forbidding it should be enforced.
Beautiful public parks and squares are a precious thing. They are an expression of the egalitarian ideal, and the result of public campaigning. The progressive position is to defend public spaces against encroachment by people with a cause and an account at Milletts. When Boris Johnson sends in the Met to clear the square of protestors, we should be cheering them on, because we are socialists.
Ha – not sure it’s possible to put into words more effectively than this why Labour is now out of Government! You – just – don’t – get – it. And I’m a member of the Labour Party, so comparatively inside the bubble. There’s no pedestrian crossing to Parliament Square, so the argument that it’s set up to be a public space everyone can enjoy is wafer thin. It’s a traffic island. The GLA proposals floated recently to pedestrianise the whole area would be a more socialist thing to boil your blood about.
I’ve visited this d village a number of times and while I may not agree with everything they say,I think they have a right to say it I don’t think this square is particularly attractive,quite characterless, so what exactly is being spoiled?? and I don’t agree with the denouncers who label the camp “squalor” their criticism is about the embarrassment being caused to the elite and that’s why they want to get rid of it
Paul Richards’ makes excellent points that are frequently overlooked. Contrary to what one of your correspondents claims, Parliament Square is a public space. There may be no zebra crosssing but it is easily reached. It may not have the beauty of St James’s Park or Regent’s Park, but that is not the point: it is, in that over-used word, iconic, it is a setting for the most famous and oldest parliament in the world, and it contains statues of statesmen from Canning to Churchill, Lincoln to Mandela, Lloyd George to Smuts. “Democracy village” is an eyesore created by some well- meaning people and many cranks. To oppose it is not to oppose free speech or protest – I have sat down in Whitehall and picketed Molesworth; it is to restore to the centre of the world’s greatest city – I am a Londoner and an internationalist its dignity and the right of workers, tourists and citizens to enjoy it.
It’s no wonder Labour is struggling to build an Obama-style coalition amongst the young or anyone remotely idealistic if this kind of dismal cynicism is indicative of party thinking. The lazy generalisations about the middle-class background of the protesters or their employment status could be cut and pasted straight from the Daily Mail website. Obviously Parliament Square was not designed for political protest. Very few places were. Does the author not see the fundamental flaw with his implied objection to demonstrations taking place in spaces that were not specifically created for that purpose? There are plenty of nice parks in London for tourists to enjoy. It is entirely appropriate that people who feel strongly about the government’s blase attitude to war to make their feelings known outside the country’s foremost legislative building.
Paul Richards is right. It is irrelevant what they are protesting about – or even who they are. The fact is that they have appropriated a public space, denying it to all others. If they tried to do this anywhere else they would be moved on. And I would include Brian Haw who seems to have acquired some sort of ‘national treasure’ status merely through the longevity of his protest.
I sat on the bench again yesterday on the northern side of the square and saw tourists wandering past and taking photos, so the contention that the protest is preventing others from enjoying the square is another slur spread by the selfish elite running or more accurately “mis-running” this country