Oct 31, 2026, 3:33 PMI feel I am regularly told by middle class people how it is only the peaceful, quiet, well-behaved protesters who made change happen in the past. However much I'd love that to be true, it feels like a fiction. That doesn't mean I think it was only violence either. I'm increasingly arguing that improving our lot has often involved many different forms of actions, by different people/groups, acting in roughly the same direction.
Oct 31, 2026, 3:48 PM@slowe I think it is British middle-class cope.
I'd argue most progressive change has been through a combination of direct actions and violence*, and calm, well organised non-violent protest.
Post hoc the narrative is then spun to be about the great success of the "reasonable". When it was often where peaceful protesters were ignored until windows were broken and property damaged. It is then just a more comfortable lie...
* or at least the threat of
@slowe I'm sure Emily Pankhurst thought the same.
@slowe I'm pretty sure it was only violent riots that stopped the poll tax. Living in Scotland we tried lots of peaceful protest I'm the year before England got it and rioted
@ianturton @slowe I remember writing some angrily sarcastic political definitions at the time. One I had for Scotland was "1: part of the UK from which a protest march takes longest to reach London. Hence 2: testing ground for the most unpopular government policies."
(Another was "country whose football team was not been banned from World Cup", which the English one had been. Or some football cup or other.)
Yeah. One of the patterns is like: The rowdy lot won't directly get the ear of government. But when the rowdy lot get rowdy enough, that's when the reasonable lot suddenly seem like people the government would like to meet with :-)
Oct 31, 2026, 8:32 PM@slowe they really don't know how women or non property owning men got the vote do they.