Written 18 July 1994

A quite different drum

Eisenstein was there in spirit. Who else could direct a raggle-taggle throng climbing narrow paths through dark and ancient woods, bursting out to confront a mile-long scar of blinding white chalk? The late, great Soviet film director, master of the crowd-as-hero, was dreaming in Technicolour on July 2 on Twyford Down.

The crowd slid and tumbled into the great pit, grave of the downland they struggled to save -- and my heart raced in expectation of an outpouring of anger. Their hearts beat instead to their tribal drums as they paused, more to party than to protest; then ambled over the crest of the motorway, all neon hair and rainbow garb framed and contained on stark black tar by sheer shining rock; strolled down toward a line of police, ant- high in the heat-haze.

"Do not send a demo into a dead-end" should be there in the canon of self-evident rules for life, after "do not put your hand in the fire". This crowd does not believe in rules. Hundreds walked right through that line, which up close turned out to be just a dozen police, with few cross words; and through a second line; and onward to the fence of the construction site.

"Time to go back the way we came," a fluting woman's voice cried through the drumming. "Don't be silly, crowds don't do that," muttered this retired agitator. After a sleeve-tugging to-and-fro between the Home Counties One and a Glaswegian rumbling "on to the machines!" (you know the scene in Lang's Metropolis?), the crowd did just that.

The half-dozen confrontation-seekers weren't finished. They scrambled down the bank onto the Winchester by-pass, crawling at its usual needs-a-motorway pace, its good burghers in fair numbers 'til now honking their support for the (mostly) hippy anti-road rabble as they, er, drove past. The six went to block the road. The crowd poured after them. Uh-oh. Confrontation time?

Astonishingly, the crowd managed to meander peacefully off along the carriageway, mixing with the halted cars, apologising and looking for cheerful debate. Even twenty minutes into the hold- up, a good half of the drivers were smiling. (I'm still not sure I believe this. But I can only report what I saw.) Young children trapped in sweltering cars did cry; someone must have missed their 'plane. But the pre-teens in their family cans gazed in apparent anticipation of anarchic freedom to come. The barely- clad beauty of much of the crowd can have done no harm; the fact that more stopped to talk with drivers than to harangue must have helped; and the drums defined it all.

This crowd genuinely marches to a different beat: not the bowel- loosening thud of the Ulster lambeg, not the "slogan, slogan, slogan, chant! chant! chant!" of the Hyde-Park-to-Trafalgar- Square cortège, but the complex cross-beats they call with good reason their Tribal Rhythm. It's hard to growl when your feet insist on dancing.

It were magic. It's a long time since I've joined a protest anything like this. And also since I've seen protest based so much on magical thinking.

There was, inevitably, the mentally-dishevelled teenager announcing around the camp-fire "There's a dragon sleeping under Twyford Down. And when they dig out the other carriageway they're going to run into its nostrils, and they're going to get a surprise, I mean literally, physically." But the real magical thinking is in the conviction that people will, by behaving as if the world were the way they'd like it to be, change it.

My notes of the speeches beforehand -- far too many speeches, all listened to eagerly despite the burning sun -- say "These people don't yet know how hard political change is." But then the speaker from the Ramblers' Association, a veteran of the 1930s Kinder Scout mass trespass, still doesn't know how hard it is sixty years on. Setting out to make change requires a willing suspension of disbelief, doesn't it?

It also helps, at some level, to know that others have succeeded in the past. Lots of the crowd talk about past nonviolent campaigns: about the US Civil Rights movement; about Gandhi; and about the Women's Suffrage movement in the UK. Dog-eared copies of Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down, a political history of the English Revolution of the 1640s, are borrowed avidly.

Mention Greenham Common, though, and you're as likely as not to get a blank look. This may seem odd, because the physical details of the anti-road protests -- the camp-fires, the "bender" shelters made of small trees and tarpaulins -- have more in common with the women's protests at the Greenham cruise missile base than anything. And so does the attitude (as far as I can tell, having necessarily been an outside observer of Greenham): the mood of insouciant defiance, and of "we are who we are -- get used to it."

Start discussion of the roles of women and men in the campaign, though, and you get either dismissal -- or the "aha!" of a powerful new idea. Some women here are about, I'll wager, to re-invent feminism, from scratch and from experience; just as women in the anti-Vietnam war movement ("the what?") did, and then discovered their fore-mothers.

Re-invention is what it's all about.

Twyford on June 2 was not really an anti-road protest, nor even totally a celebration of the right to be different, in the time and place of one's choosing, Criminal Justice or not. It was a community, an improvised collectivity, re-inventing itself in a land where "society" was abolished by Prime Ministerial diktat fifteen years ago.

Yes, much of the pleasantness of the demonstration has something to do with middle-class backgrounds -- and faith in the power of reason.

Yes, protests against roads and even the Criminal Justice Bill are displacement activity. If we constructed a league table of issues demanding our political attention, it might start with: Bosnia; Rwanda; Global warming; poverty, anger and racism on our doorsteps. But what can the citizen do when governments tell us that they are powerless, that only the holy Market can make change -- and then believe their own propaganda?

Fear runs deep. Consider the possibility that a wrong step in Western policy on Bosnia could bring down Russian missiles on Washington and Warrington. I was afraid that thinking about this meant I was getting paranoid in my old age. Then a self-avowedly apolitical friend in her twenties, much more interested in where the next good rave is than who the next Prime Minister is, brought up her own fears out of the blue -- even before wossname did so well in the Russian elections. It's the ones who know how hard political change is who are censoring their own thoughts.

Try discussing the Slav nuclear threat with your nearest member of the chattering classes and see if you don't get a dismissive wave of the hand. Try thinking of something you can do about it now. Re-inventing a trusting, sharing community may seem an option.

The nonviolence espoused by the Twyford crowd isn't a political theory. It's an expression of spirited humanity, re-emerging like (excuse the trite phrase, but it fits so well) flowers growing through concrete. It's a counter-culture, folks! As much as anything, it's the second, actvated, generation of rave culture. The first generation emerged, after all, bang on schedule after the disarmament movement of the 80s (the what?) as another counter-culture did after the disarmament movement of the 60s (ditto).

It isn't based on a detailed examination of the balance of forces, of which forces are the agents of change, or of the futility of armed resistance to a militarised state despite the deep psychological lure of the bullet as a means to make something, anything, happen very suddenly or the appeal of revenge against the violent repression which all protest is likely to attract.

It is a mish-mash of the blindingly obvious: "Violence only provokes more violence"; "What frightens them is the amazing breadth of our support -- Tories and all. If they manoeuvre us into violent confrontation, we lose that." People are more likely to talk of "keeping it fluffy" than of commitment to principled nonviolence; and they're rather good at it. They're more likely to talk about the importance of having fun while you resist, and they're very good at that.

The Twyford crowd showed that just because something goes against all sensible experience doesn't necessarily mean that it won't work. When a bunch of disorganised protesters first chained themselves to the gates of Greenham Common Air base, declaring that they'd stay until they got a television debate (wasn't it to be with the Minister of Defence?), the old hands put their heads in their hands and groaned. You just don't do it like that. They did, and something very interesting indeed happened. Now people are flying kites on Greenham Common. [And -- 1996 addition -- holding legal raves in one of the bunkers.]

On the other hand, when the drab cadre of the Socialist Workers' Party arrive to try to catch the wave of protest, promising to Get the Trade Unions Involved, the voice of experience from too many real trade union committee rooms -- that it just doesn't work like that outside the Trotskyite imagination -- cuts no ice. Oh well. The SWP won't get very far, though, because they just don't understand. They'll lose more members to hedonism than they gain through entrism. Suggest that the Party would get more respect if it called a party, and their faces say, as inexpressively as my telephone, "The number you have dialled, has not been recognised".

You have to keep a sense of humour, or stay away. Freedom of assembly and protest, and the right to silence, and the environment, remain serious matters. "We've got to get it sorted," announced Tom Fox for the Freedom Network to the assembly gently frying on the Twyford hillside -- "and look at us! Can you believe it?!"

This version is © copyright 1996 Mike Holderness; moral rights are asserted.