Anarchy in the UK

The Sunday Telegraph recently ran a story 'exposing' one of the organisers of the Autonomous Students' Network, who were present at the student protests in London recently. Although he has done nothing illegal, the paper felt the need to investigate his private life, his electronic communications and his family. His crime was to identify as an anarchist.

The paper also describes another ASN organiser and NUS officer as a “homosexual activist”. I would have thought that even a right-wing publication such as the Telegraph was above such discrimination, but this type of scaremongering is nothing new. I suppose on some level I should be grateful that anarchism is in the news. I am also an anarchist, and I too was present at Millbank that day.

I was browsing the shelves of History, Classics and Archaeology library at the University of Edinburgh recently and came upon a rather brilliant book from the end of the 19th century, entitled The Anarchist Peril. There was a picture of an explosion on the front.

Anarchism is an old idea. William Godwin (1756-1836) was the first to formulate what might be called modern anarchism, but I would suggest that anarchism as I see it - the rejection of unjustified and undemocratic authority in favour of complete equality and freedom - has existed at least as far back as the English Civil War. Indeed, some would argue that it was an ideology put forward by Jesus of Nazareth.

The Tory headquarters at 30 Millbank did, in a sense, witness some anarchism. There was spontaneous organisation for the peaceful occupation of the lobby. When the students first got onto the roof via a back door, they hung an anti-cuts banner, waved the red-and-black flag, made a statement to the press and came down again. In my interpretation, occupation and peaceful direct action is precisely what anarchy is about. We take the opinion that if you want something done, get up and do it yourselves.

Many, myself included, also believe that violence against persons in the pursuit of anarchism is to be condemned. It is in the constitution of the Edinburgh University Anarchist Society that the means are as important as the ends when pursuing our goals. The state is a body that maintains hegemony through coercion, and violence against people is the most basic form of that coercion. Our goal as anarchists is to build a new society free from that. You cannot force people to be free from force. Breaking a few windows is one thing, a small symbolic act with arguable significance, but violence is, in my opinion, quite another.

I suppose I find it sad really, that it's the windows that people seem to care about. David Cameron's Bullingdon Club at Oxford engaged in altogether more mindless property destruction for fun. Maybe if it'd been a thrown flowerpot rather than a boot attached to a hooded youth it wouldn't have been such a problem. 30 Millbank's insurance will pay out for some new windows. The students who demonstrated there won't be so lucky with their education.

Yet when violence, actual violence against people, occurred, it was not accepted by the students. Everyone's talking about that fire extinguisher. There was universal condemnation for that act before the fire extinguisher even hit the ground, something glossed over by the reporters there who must have heard us shouting "no!" Aside from my own personal arguments against violence, Millbank showed that even a large group of very angry people, some of them the "anarchist" bogeymen the Telegraph wants to warn you about, are ready to condemn on the spot a stupid, damaging, and violent act.

Don't wait for change to come from above, because real, lasting change never does. That is why we scare the defenders of the status quo. It's not because the anarchist vanguard beat them up, blow them up, smash their big houses or shoot them. It's because if we get together, all of us, we are powerful, and the entire raison d'etre of anarchists is to make sure you know that.

If the small cabal of people that run this country wish to rip out the carefully constructed public support for the vulnerable and the poor, then people will get angry. Something big is happening in response to this government. If it really had been a small bloc of anarchists breaking stuff while students marched, then the police would have arrested them immediately. Instead, we had a massive group of people from all walks of life, all wanting to show how much we wanted education to be freely available to all.

Some windows got smashed, and some people did some stupid things as they always do, but that pales into insignificance beside what we really accomplished. We resisted. That is anarchism.