Riots And Rebels - Nick Rennison

RIOTS AND REBELS - FROM THE PEASANTS' REVOLT TO EXTINCTION REBELLION - NICK RENNISON

We can protest to death they won't listen, as Colin Jerwood of Anarcho-punk rock masters Conflict once said. And it's true. Change only typically comes when we force the hand that bleeds us. Protest can bring about concessions, for sure, but always leaving the fundamental structures of power in place. And this, comrades, is a problem.

The act of riot (or 'the art of riot', perhaps?) has always been with us and it's this that Nick Rennison in his book Riots And Rebels - From The Peasants' Revolt To Extinction Rebellion sets out to show. France, it could be argued, has always been deemed to be a nation of rioters all set for insurrection at the drop of a hat, whilst England has always supposedly done things differently. The English are meant to be be more restrained and less temperamental though where this idea comes from is anyone's guess because rioting is in actual fact as English as a Sunday roast. It's in our lifeblood. It's engrained. It's in our history and without a shadow of doubt so too in our future.

Rioting is a form of power that once unleashed is uncontrollable and there are no peoples of any particular country that has a monopoly on it. It is there for the taking but not for the making, as in it's nigh-on impossible to plan or instigate a riot. There are white riots, race riots, food riots, Rebecca riots, Swing riots, Bawdy House riots, Poll Tax riots, Old Price riots, full-scale riots, Gordon riots, Brixton riots and of course, Bristol riots. Even police riots. If war is politics by other means then riot is politics inverted. A riot is a ticket to ride but to where is contestable. From riot to insurrection? To revolution? Who knows? Who can say? But wherever it is, it's a place that those in authority wish to prevent people from reaching.

Nick Rennison's book is essentially a romp through British history using riots and rebellions as markers, and unusually for a book such as this, it's not an academic study. There's a bibliography at the back but you'll find no footnotes, which is fine but I'm not sure if it's all the better for it? What if you're new to the subject of the Merthyr Rising of 1831 and you're curious to know which historian called it 'the first true rising of the industrial working class'? There's no footnote pointing to the source so you continue reading straight onto the next historical riot, that being the Bristol Riots of 1831, described by someone as being 'the worst outbreak of urban rioting since the Gordon Riots'. But it doesn't say who that 'someone' is.

'Riots And Rebels is intended very much as popular rather than academic history,' Nick Rennison writes. It's 'an attempt to provide a brief survey of such actions'. In this light it should be said that Rennison very much succeeds and along the way highlights a lot of interesting stuff.

In regard to the Gordon Riots, Rennison writes 'Why so many Londoners rioted in June 1780 remains a matter of scholarly debate. Was it largely because of strong antipathy to Catholicism? For many of the desperate, suffering from the effects of poverty and deprivation, the chance to express their rage and frustration with a society that condemned them to occupy its lowest rung was welcome. As the historian Christopher Hibbert wrote, 'Popery was as good an excuse as any other.'

This rings very true, and I would argue the same applies to a vast number of riots throughout history, right up to those that took place over the summer of 1981, during August of 2011, and even some of the post-Southport riots of 2024.

On the other hand, the Luddite riots of the early 1800s were very specific as Rennison notes: 'Workers were already suffering the consequences of new machinery replacing work once done by hand and of the building of new and even larger factories to house that machinery. Often they had no other means of defending themselves against unemployment or impoverishment than violence and riot.'

Likewise for the Swing Riots of 1830 where the rioters' main targets were the new threshing machines that threatened their livelihoods, with the destruction of these often being accompanied by arson attacks on property. Rennison highlights a very good quote from a 'follower' of Captain Swing by the name of William Oakley who informs a magistrate: 'We will have £5 before we go out of the place or be damned if we don't smash it. You and the gentlemen have been living upon all the good things for the last ten years. We have suffered enough, and now's our time, and we will now have it.'

Is that not a good quote? Right there. Class hatred and resentment served on a plate.

The largest number of pages are devoted to the Suffragettes whose calls for votes for women though not involving any riots as such, involved plenty of direct action. 'So long as we have not votes we must be disorderly', as one of the Pankhurst daughters declared and so followed acts of vandalism, window smashing, attempted invasions of the House of Commons, physical attacks upon MPs, arson attacks, and letter bombs. 'Suffragette Terrorism' as the newspaper headlines at that time put it.

With the declaration of war against Germany in 1914, the suffragette's activities came to a standstill as women took over jobs that would previously have been done by men. After the armistice in 1918 it was difficult to argue that women should remain disenfranchised and so an Act was passed to give women over the age of 30 the vote. 'It's reasonable to argue' as another unnamed historian is quoted as saying 'that militancy played little part in securing women the votes' but arguably that's not strictly true.

Militancy (or 'terrorism' as the newspapers called it) alone didn't get women the vote but it certainly helped, if only by forcing the subject firmly onto the agenda. Likewise, the Trafalgar Square Poll Tax riot of 1990 alone didn't get rid of the tax but it certainly helped.

The comparisons here to the proscribing of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization are glaring.

In comparison again, the absolutely massive Stop The War march in London in 2003 didn't stop or didn't even help to stop anything. As Tariq Ali later said: 'It was a huge show of anger, but that's about it'. Maybe if a riot had ensued it would have been different?

Riots And Rebels by Nick Rennison is a book of lessons to be learned. It's the story of how riot and rebellion is our birthright. Riot for the hell of it and riot as a means to an end. It's our heritage. Our past. Our present. And it's our future.

John Serpico