Objectiveless Protests

I have been thinking some more of the weird ideological mash ups that make some demonstrations these days.  They are obviously not designed to get any real action, so I wonder whether the participants want them to?

O f course there are demonstrations, which at least by showing strength of feeling, can help to raise the profile of a subject.  The two biggest demonstrations of the last hundred years, against the Iraq war and in favour of a referendum on the final terms of Brexit both did this.  Where the issue is clearly defined, it is possible to get a concession from some one to achieve an end as the fuel tax protests did in 2000.  However as President Macron has discovered with the more recent French yellow vest protests, a really disparate set of demands can't be bought off since the protester aren't demanding anything definable that you can actually give them.  His efforts to placate the yellow vest by reversing the fuel tax rises simply led to more demands which I think were just conveying a sense of general unhappiness.

In that case, I suspect the general unhappiness is the message.  However, there are other protests where some people just enjoy going on these demonstrations and causing a lot of noise.  In other words attending protests about almost anything is just a sort of hobby.  You get to (sometimes literally) bang a drum and feel good about yourself.  Where you simply cause disruption for the sake of it you may be actively harming the cause that you are ostensibly supporting.

The exception to this I suppose would be if you had a clear objective and you were just inflicting damage in order to bully concessions.  This is what some of the library litigants told me that they were trying to do during the libraries transformation project in Brent.  At some level that makes sense as a tactic although it is not a very nice one.

It didn't work in the case of Brent libraries, partly because that litigants were demanding things such as increased budgets or the possession of buildings that Brent Council was unable to give them.  In fact rather than ending the transformation project and going back to the libraries status quo of 2010, it has actually preserved Brent libraries as they were at the culmination of the Project.  If it were not down to fear of awakening such demons, I suspect that the present Council would not have abandoned its mooted cuts.

So ironically, the protesters that wanted to kill the transformation of Brent libraries have ended up preserving it.