Why I won’t be part of a ‘Day of Rage’
You’ll forgive me if I’m not out on the streets for the planned Day of Rage today, organised by the Movement for Justice by Any Means Necessary. I don’t like either title: in my experience, change for good is rarely brought about by the deliberate orchestration of mass fury, nor accurate justice delivered by those who unilaterally declare themselves the arbiters of “any means necessary”.
Even the title of the Day of Rage bears an uncomfortable closeness to the Two Minutes Hate so acutely described in George Orwell’s Nineteen
Eighty-four, in which the face of a declared Enemy of the People is projected before the baying crowd. In the midst of the Two Minutes Hate, Orwell wrote, “the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another, like the flame of a blowlamp”.
For today’s protesters, the chief target of the metaphorical blowlamp will be Theresa May, whose fragile plans for the Government they wish to bring down. “We’ve felt our power. We’ve tasted victory,” the group announced on its Facebook page. “Now we must escalate our actions to take down this rotten Government, which has lost all authority to govern.”
That the authority was bestowed, albeit narrowly, by a democratic general election does not seem to hold sway with them – nor, indeed, with John Mcdonnell, the shadow chancellor, who was quoted in the
Morning Star recently as having urged trade unionists to march for a new election: “What we need now is the TUC mobilised, every union mobilised, get out on the streets. Just think if the TUC put out that call, that we need a million on the streets of London in two weeks’ time.”
Rather like the Movement for Justice by Any Means Necessary, Mr Mcdonnell seems to regard anger as an exhilarating force to be expertly fanned and encouraged, and London’s streets in a muggy summer as the perfect theatre in which to do so. That’s a dangerous game.
Yet who owns the anger for the victims of Grenfell Tower, for its dead, displaced and bereaved? We all should. That charred, high-rise tomb, that blackened memorial, deserves more than a shoulder-shrug of resignation. We should be angry that the repeated warnings of residents on fire safety were blithely ignored; that they reportedly could not access legal aid to respond when threatened with solicitors’ letters; that their homes were wrapped in flammable cladding that seemingly acted as an incinerator. Those residents repeatedly struggled to go through the proper channels with their concerns, and the proper channels repeatedly failed them.
And our anger should lead us not only to examine the detail of the flawed decisions that led up to that grim blaze, but also the creeping rot of assumptions lying beneath it: that the residents of that tower were somehow less deserving of close attention to their basic safety than people with more money and clout.
The question is not whether or not such a tragedy should incite anger, but what one should then do with the emotion. Controlled anger, an indignation that is tightly contained and precisely directed, can be a force for good: it flows into practical care for survivors, into changes to the law and a communal determination that such an appalling event will never be allowed to happen again.
Uncontrolled anger, the selfindulgence of rage, leads to incidents of the kind witnessed last Friday when protesters stormed Kensington Town Hall. A group of them glimpsed a man called Robert Outram, 56, who had been volunteering at various shelters for the displaced, and the mistaken cry went up that he was Robert Black, the CEO of Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Association – whereupon Mr Outram was beaten up.
The fury fanned by the hard Left around the ruins of Grenfell Tower sits in stark contrast to the communal self-restraint, which is publicly urged in the face of terrorism. In the aftermath of the Islamist killings in Westminster, Manchester, London Bridge and the terror attack on worshippers outside Finsbury Park mosque, the public is repeatedly and speedily urged to unite around shared values, and to demonstrate them with songs, candles, flowers and vigils. Even the word “anger” is anathema; only resignation and forgiveness can prevail.
I understand the need to cool it, of course, but I wonder if we are shutting down any discussion of anger too easily, hastily shoving the bereaved and wounded into a place where the rest of us can feel comfortable getting on with things. The oft-repeated story of our national resilience – “We’re British, we have a cup of tea and carry on” – skates over the fact that while those of us who have not been directly affected may indeed do just that, recovery is much more agonising and complicated for those who have.
Grief is a process and along the way, such victims may well feel wracked by a fierce anger: for the loss of someone they dearly loved, for the blinkered cruelty of those who made it their business to wreck other people’s lives. The victims of terrorism will want answers, too.
We should be able to acknowledge anger, and also to feel it on behalf of others. But we should not become blinded by it, or knowingly seek to spread and escalate it. There is a rule of law and without it we are lost. The young imam at Finsbury Park understood that instinctively last week, when he prevented a crowd of fellow Muslims from beating up the man who had just brutally mowed people down in his van. Can we say the same of all our politicians? It remains to be seen.