David Babbs, Dan Hind, Shiv Malik and Laurie Penny
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The New Protest Movements |
Laurie Penny is not now able to attend this event due to illness.
Since the coalition was formed in May 2011, and as it responds to the crash and implements the largest programme of public expenditure cuts ever, new forms of protest have emerged. Whether it’s traditional demonstrations or new online campaigns, the results have been significant and in some cases, such as the proposal to sell off forests, have already resulted in change: large numbers of students have been radicalised, MPs have been inundated with email letters of protest, banks have been raided and there’s much more to come. But will it change things significantly? Is online activism just ‘slacktivism’? Will student protest fizzle out? And what’s next? David Babbs, Executive Director, 38 Degrees, discusses the new protest with Dan Hind (author of The Return of the Public), Shiv Malik, activist and co-author of the book on intergenerational conflict, The Jilted Generation, and Laurie Penny, journalist and activist whose reports often come from the front line of protest.
David Babbs is the executive director of 38degrees.org.uk. Formerly head of capacity building at Friends of the Earth, where he was responsible for delivering its activist strategy including The Big Ask campaign, which has widely been credited with the introduction of the Climate Change Bill in 2006.
Dan Hind was a publisher for ten years. In 2009 he left the industry to write about the public sphere and media reform, centred around public commissioning, in The Return of the Public. He is on twitter @danhind.
Shiv Malik is an investigative journalist who regularly writes for the Guardian and is the co-author of Jilted Generation: How Britain Has Bankrupted Its Youth.
Laurie Penny is a journalist and feminist activist from London. She is a regular writer for New Statesman and the Guardian, and her political writing was shortlisted for the Orwell prize.
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April 26th, 2011 at 4:36 pm
Laurie Penny is author of a brand new feminist dialectic on women’s bodies and capitalist cannibalism, the book is Meat Market 9781846945212 £6.99 out on 29th April 2011
May 20th, 2011 at 9:40 am
I felt that there was a somewhat unfocused quality to this talk. Don’t get me wrong, each of the guests (Laurie Penny was unavailible due to illness) had interesting takes on the subjects that came up for discussion. But perhaps there were just too many people chasing too many strands of thought, as the result was a rather quick skim through a complex subject.
The evening did throw up some good moments. When discussing why Libya had not attracted UK protests, Shiv Malik postulated that most street protest is carried out by young people, and as Libya had been “too complicated” and “not about them”, protests had been strangled at birth. I couldn’t help thinking that Malik had just Jilted his Generation.
However Dan Hind said he was “wary” of this view, and I feel that although the moral complexity of the situation may have deterred many, Malik was being shockingly sterotypical about the young.
David Babbs perhaps inadvertently pointed out the perils of “slacktivism” when he explained that one of his online petitions gathered over a third of a million “friends”, but (correct me if I’m wrong) about 200 people turned up for the related real world event. If this is correct, I suspect that the government won’t be losing any sleep the next time a 38 Degrees campaign rocks up in the inbox.
More positively, a good point was raised by the panel – that if we are going to get involved in protest, we have to believe that things can be changed. As Dan Hind said in relaying a refrain from the Egyptian protests, people will risk their lives, but not for nothing.
During a discussion of the recent student protests, Dan Hind suddenly sent a ripple through the room by saying that victory for us all would be splitting the Liberal Party and bringing down the coalition as quickly as possible.
What time does the march start?