Social Movements in Britain

Paul Byrne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415071239
• eBook ISBN: 9781136126765
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Social Movements have become a central focus of political study in recent years. Paul Byrne's accessible account of British Social movements introduces students to the relevant theories, and puts them into practice by examining groups such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the Women's Movement and the Green Party. Byrne goes on to look at how the British scene compares with what is happening in the rest of Europe and in America.

1 Introduction

Over the last thirty years, hundreds of thousands of people in Britain have been inspired to take part in a ‘new’ kind of politics. Not content to choose just from the programmes offered by mainstream parties, they have advanced ideas previously ignored by established politicians. They have often by-passed conventional political processes, taking part in campaigns and protests, and sometimes even putting their personal liberty at risk. They have championed radical causes like environmentalism, feminism and disarmament which not only challenge the postwar orthodoxy, with its espousal of industrialisation, economic growth and nationalism, but also often seem to benefit others as much as themselves. They have blurred the line between the ‘personal’ and the ‘political’, arguing that the causes they advocate are too important and wide-ranging to be dealt with by change only in the public sphere – people's attitudes and lifestyles also have to change.

The national political scene may remain dominated by conventional Parliamentary politics, but there has been a distinct trend of people showing less enthusiasm for the main parties and more interest in ‘single-issue’ politics. When people have felt strongly about an issue, they have not just made their views known to politicians or within parties, but gone out and organised their own campaigns, groups and self-help organisations. The mainstream political parties have responded by trying to incorporate some of these concerns into their programmes, but the ‘new’ politics continues.

It is not just the style of politics which seems to have changed, but also its subject matter. Largely as a result of such activism, ideas and causes previously missing from ‘normal’ political debate have become common currency. Some, like unilateral nuclear disarmament or the rights of women, have been around before, but have been revived with a new impetus. Others are new – like the ‘dark green’ environmentalism which questions the whole ethic of economic growth. Perhaps most significantly, new political identities have emerged. People no longer classify themselves just as Conservatives, Socialists and so on, but as ‘feminists’ and ‘greens’. While most of these people have left-wing rather than right-wing sympathies, they tend to see themselves as apart from (often, indeed, above) the conventional left/right dichotomy This has not been something unique to Britain, but has occurred throughout the world, and especially in the Western liberal democracies.

They have also redefined the scope of politics. By stressing the importance of personal change, as well as looking to the state for action, they have argued that ‘politics’ is not something that just takes place in Westminster, Whitehall or the Town Hall, but in people's everyday lives in their homes and workplaces. Who does the housework and takes care of the children; how often you use your car; what kind of food you eat – in the ‘new’ politics, such questions have as much relevance as what laws are passed and how they are put into practice by the authorities.

Recognising the different nature of this kind of politics, social scientists have differentiated it from ‘conventional’ politics by reviving the term Social Movements. This book is about such movements in Britain, and looks at what we know about who these people are, what they have done and why they have done it. We cannot promise definitive answers; in some instances the information simply is not available. As we shall see, one of the distinctive features of social movements is their nebulous nature. This has not prevented commentators from speculating in theoretical terms about why some people (and not others) have gone down this road, how they have gone about it, and what has been achieved. This in turn raises interesting questions about motivation and strategies of political action which are relevant across the whole political spectrum, not just social movements. In what follows, we shall scrutinise these theoretical ideas, looking at how theories have been derived from new kinds of political activity, and trying to assess how useful they are.

POLITICAL PARTICIPATION

Before beginning our assessment, we need to establish the general context within which these developments have occurred. After all, we are examining the motives and behaviour of a minority of the population. If we are to assess the importance of a new kind of political activism, it would be as well to have an idea of the nature of political participation in Britain generally.

Although we shall be looking at what appear to be some new features of political behaviour, many of the old, established ways of conducting politics remain intact, and the majority of people appear content to restrict their political involvement to the ‘normal’ channels. Having said that, we must remember that political activism of all kinds is a minority sport in Britain. Most British people do participate in their political system; roughly speaking, three out of four vote in General Elections and about half as many take the opportunity to vote in local elections. For the vast majority of people, however, participation is sporadic and limited to voting or perhaps contacting an MP or Councillor over a specific issue. Relatively few people are sufficiently interested to become active in the main political parties. Although many belong to interest groups of various kinds, their participation rarely extends beyond paying their subscription. Any meaningful assessment of unconventional activism, therefore, should measure it against not just the total population but also the numbers really involved in conventional politics.

If we do this, then it is clear that significant change has taken place. For example, the mainstream parties have ruled in Parliamentary terms throughout the post-war period, but the loyalty they have been able to inspire among their supporters has declined since at least the early seventies.¹ Electoral volatility has increased, as more people change their political allegiances between elections. Membership of the mainstream political parties has fallen significantly. Whereas millions were members of the main parties in the fifties, today the Conservative Party's membership is estimated to be below half a million, and Labour can only boast of some 400,000 individual members – and before the strenuous efforts made by the Blair leadership in the nineties to boost such membership, the total was around 250,000. In contrast, campaigning groups and movements have boomed over the last twenty-five years. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and the associated Peace Movement, for example, saw its support rise from around 4,000 in the seventies to a height of some 250,000 in the mid-eighties; it has fallen back considerably in the nineties, but still claims the support of some 60,000 people. Friends of the Earth saw its membership rise from around 1,000 in 1971 to almost 20,000 at the beginning of the eighties, and 140,000 by the end of that decade. Greenpeace in the early nineties had some 400,000 supporters in Britain out of a global total of 5 million.

It is dangerous to cite specific examples out of context. Internecine strife in the Labour Party in the seventies and early eighties may have done little to stimulate new membership of the party. It may be that specific issues were the main stimulus for growth in some campaigning groups – the decision to site American Cruise missiles was an important factor in the revitalisation of CND, for example. Before moving on to place these developments within their specific contexts, therefore, we should examine what we know of societal trends in political participation and activism during the last thirty years.

The authoritative account of the differences in political culture across the developed world at the beginning of the sixties² portrayed Britain as a deferential culture which produced a high level of regime support – in other words, most of the British people were, for most of the time, content to limit their participation in politics to the ‘normal’ channels of elections and mainstream political parties, and to leave the details of politics in the hands of established politicians. This appraisal was comparative rather than absolute; the point being made was that British citizens were less likely than citizens of other liberal democracies to resort to protest and even violence to resolve political arguments, not that such activities were totally absent.

Subsequent research in the seventies threw up findings which suggested that, even if the picture of a consensual society content to confine itself to conventional politics was true in the sixties, changes had taken place by the seventies. In an influential work published in 1977, Alan Marsh used survey evidence to argue that people had become significantly less deferential towards established institutions and practices, and wanted more opportunities to participate in and influence decision-making than those conventional avenues offered.³ Marsh's study was concerned more with attitudes than actual behaviour. He used his survey questions to try to ascertain what he termed ‘protest potential’; that is, rather than concentrating upon who had actually performed some kind of ‘unconventional’ political participation, he was trying to identify who might, and what those who would not contemplate such action thought of those who did. He found that over half of his respondents approved of the use of unconventional protest activities. Not only did some 55 per cent approve in general terms of such actions as (legal) demonstrations, but as many agreed with the proposition put to them that there were times when ‘it is justified to break the law to protest about something you feel may be very unjust or harmful’. Further comparative research confirmed a similar trend in other Western liberal democracies;⁴ many more people were ready at least to consider the possibility of unconventional participation and protest than had been the case a decade earlier. Some commentators were sufficiently moved to argue that Britain's political culture had been transformed, and that the stability which had been the hallmark of British politics was consequently under threat.⁵

Any survey-based evidence, no matter how carefully constructed, must always be questionable to some degree. One can never be sure that the sample chosen is completely representative, nor that survey questions have not simply prompted respondents to come up with opinions which did not exist prior to the questioning. Moreover, critics have pointed out that these surveys conducted in the seventies do not have much to tell us about actual participation in unconventional politics as distinct from feelings about such activities.⁶ The trend of such evidence was clear, however; people were continuing to participate in conventional politics, even if with rather less enthusiasm than had been the case, but they were more ready to see as justifiable the kind of unconventional activities that all but a small minority had spurned in the twenty years after the war.

What is more, the evidence we have suggests that this trend continued unabated into the eighties. A highly comprehensive account of contemporary participation provided by Parry et al. concluded ‘protest has become firmly established as part of the array of actions citizens and groups might consider using to make themselves heard. It cannot be ignored as part of any present-day study of political participation.’⁷ Whereas previous investigations had been directed towards attitudes towards protest and other unconventional participation, this study provided data on actual participation. Among its findings were that almost as many people had signed a petition (63.3 per cent) as had voted in local elections (68.8 per cent); almost twice as many had attended a protest meeting (14.6 per cent) as had attended a rally organised by a mainstream political party (8.6 per cent); and as many people had been on a protest march (5.2 per cent) as had participated in fund-raising (5.2 per cent), canvassing (3.5 per cent) or clerical work (3.5 per cent) on behalf of political parties.⁸

We have to be careful not to over-state the case; one must distinguish between the attitudes people have towards others undertaking protest activity, and their readiness to engage in it themselves. While Marsh may have found a majority willing to see illegal protest as sometimes legitimate, later surveys have found far fewer people who have actually engaged in such protest or who are willing to contemplate doing so. Parry et al. found that 72.4 per cent of their respondents ‘would never consider’ going on a protest march, and 36.4 per cent had similarly negative feelings about attending a protest meeting.⁹ On the other hand, conventional participation is not exactly wildly popular. Parry et al. group their respondents into a small number of categories, ranging from ‘just voters’ to ‘complete activists’. Over 75 per cent of their sample either voted regularly but undertook little other participation, or did not even vote with any regularity. As they put it, ‘less than a quarter of British citizens (23.2 per cent) actively sustain the citizenry's role in political life’.¹⁰ Within this active quarter of the population, direct action of various kinds attracts just as many people as does the opportunity to work on behalf of the conventional mainstream parties.

In short, there has not been a revolution in the conduct and practice of British politics. Most people, for most of the time, continue to participate only sporadically, and politics remains a relatively low priority in their everyday lives. What has changed, however, is that there are many among those who are actively interested for whom politics no longer means just participating in national parties, local politics and conventional interest groups like trade unions.

THE CULTURAL CONTEXT

People's involvement in politics is, of course, affected by the rules of their society. In the UK, for example, all adults have the right to vote, with some exceptions (prisoners, lunatics, peers of the realm). People may write to their MPs, but they cannot gather to register a protest within the immediate vicinity of Parliament. They may organise a petition among their neighbours or fellow workers, but there are now strict limits upon mounting public demonstrations. Such rules are the ‘codified’ part of the political system, so called because the opportunities for and limitations upon political activity are formally expressed and given the force of law.

Having said this, there are comparatively few formal laws governing political behaviour in the UK. There is no comprehensive written Constitution and/or Bill of Rights, laying down in law how people should participate and interact on a political level. Instead, the UK has a ‘residual’ system – that is, certain aspects of behaviour are protected or forbidden by law, but outside of those the assumption is that people may do as they wish.

It is not just the formal or legal rules which govern participation, however; there are also informal expectations about what are considered to be ‘legitimate’ forms of political participation. These expectations on the part of people (usually termed ‘norms’, meaning customary behaviour) can be hard to identify precisely, not least because they are not formally expressed or written down, and we cannot always be sure of their origins. Nevertheless, they form as important a part of the opportunities open for political participation as the legal rules. If you feel strongly about a particular issue, you may express your feelings in a way which is within the law – for example, having your body covered in tattoos saying ‘End the Bloody Whaling Now’ – but contrary to the prevailing norms of political behaviour. Ignoring or rejecting conventional means of political activism entails the very real danger of your message being treated with ridicule, or opposed simply because of how you have chosen to express your views – regardless of the merits or otherwise of those views. In other words, conventional wisdom suggests that, if you want your participation to be effective, you are best advised to pay heed to what political scientists term political culture – that is to say, those values and beliefs on the part of both politicians and public about not only what should be done but also how it should be done. In short, political culture mediates the form and effectiveness of demands for change.

Society is dynamic, however, and it is both the changes in society and the forces or actions which bring about those changes which interest us. A country's political culture is not immutable; on the contrary, it is constantly changing, not only because of changes in the law but also because attitudes and values change over time. Occasionally, changes in the law can precede attitudinal change; that is to say, the Government (or, more accurately, Parliament) can pass laws which are in advance of public opinion. The wave of ‘moral’ legislation in the late fifties and sixties, which saw legal restrictions relating to homosexuality, divorce and abortion relaxed or abolished, are commonly cited examples of Parliament enacting changes for which there was little evidence of widespread public support at the time.¹¹ Although all remain contentious issues, many more people are now much more relaxed about the changes than they were at the time. Such instances tend to be the exceptions that prove the rule, however; it is far more common for attitudinal changes to take place first, followed by changes in the law, as political parties seek to identify popular trends in the electoral marketplace.

Just what it is that causes people to change their attitudes is a highly problematic question. Personal experiences, the experiences, arguments and examples of others, domestic and international developments – and the crucial role of the media in reporting and interpreting all of these – are all important factors. Whatever the reasons, at any one time there are always some people who are questioning both the contemporary laws and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Theory and practice in British politics
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Defining social movements
• 3 The resurgence of social movements
• 4 Theoretical ideas
• 5 Who are they?
• 6 CND and the peace movement
• 7 The women's movement
• 8 The green movement
• 9 Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index