154. DISRUPTION - Its Importance and its Impotence
I’ve been thinking a lot about protest and rebellion the last week.
On the Saturday of the coronation we saw London’s Metropolitan Police, already accused of long-term institutional racism, sexism and homophobia, take advantage of new powers granted under the Public Order Act to “respond more effectively to disruptive and dangerous protest” and arrest members of anti-monarchy group, Republic, simply for unloading a van-full of placards. Their planned protest, agreed with the police long in advance of the coronation, was deemed too “disruptive” to go ahead and members were taken into custody simply for their intention to protest the crowning of a new king. The act exposed just how open to interpretation the crime of so-called “disruption” is, especially once we include merely intention to disrupt (rather than actual disruption); a troublingly loose concept in the hands of a police force already known for prejudicial assaults on certain ethnic groups, genders and sexualities (not to mention undercover targeting and sabotaging of political groups). But even out of such institutionally prejudiced hands - the idea of criminalising disruption at all is deeply problematic.
First of all it is an entirely political concept, aimed only at politically motivated disruption. The gas engineer who makes you wait in all day for an indeterminate appointment “between 7am and 7pm” will not be arrested for the disruption to your life that is caused, nor will those responsible for the roadworks that have made your commute to work such a daily ordeal for the last eighteen months. When the roads are closed for a marathon, bike race, or, dare I say, a royal procession - this is not disruption to be criminalised. Disruption is only to be criminalised when it comes attached to a motive to draw attention to certain political causes. (The disruption which comes when a primary school is closed so it can be used in the political cause of being a polling station is frequently permitted).
Secondly, disruption is often the only thing that alerts us to emergency and can be seen, therefore, as an entirely legitimate methodology for attempting to bring public attention to certain issues. It is the fire alarm disturbing the silence which saves us from the fire, the sirens of the ambulance which alerts us to the need to pull over and let them through to save someone’s life, the unusual activity in the scan which tells the doctor that something is wrong. When my sleep is disturbed it is a sign that something is happening: maybe a noise from outside, maybe some inner anxiety? The disturbance carries with it important information.
To be informed in our democracy it is vital that we are frequently disturbed from the unconsidered acceptance of the status quo, if only to be alerted to possible problems or perspectives we may not have noticed before. Sometimes our fire alarm might malfunction - the disturbance can be ignored. Not every protest is necessarily valid in terms of its cause, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t valid as a method of alerting us to that cause so we can be informed enough to either act on it, or ignore it.
Crucially - a protest that doesn’t disturb at all is a protest far too easy to ignore. Perhaps not even a protest at all. Protests have a function - to articulate a message, to inform, to alert. If they blend into the background or form part of the furniture they fail in their function. To criminalise disruptive protest is to criminalise protest, and to criminalise protest is to erode a necessary aspect of an informed democracy: the right to refuse and object. A democratic country’s laws should be a negotiated conversation between the government and the governed and not merely a one-way monologue.
On a smaller scale, as this was happening in the national conversation, seemingly similar battles were waged this week in schools across the country as those in the examination year groups arrived at their final days before study leave. The end of a final year, especially for those eldest students about to leave the school for good, tend to be marked with a range of festivities including, frequently, pranks. And, predictably, schools tend to react in much the same way we saw the police respond to potential disruption on Saturday. Telling their plotting sixth formers not to disrupt the learning in the rest of the school, or disrupt the school rules, or disrupt the norms of the school day. Disruption is to be avoided at all costs! Sometimes bags are searched, pockets are turned out, and students are sent home before their prank has even taken place.
Other times, however, the contraband is smuggled onto the school site successfully and the disruption takes place. The response, whenever this occurs, is always performative noises about immaturity and shouted warnings to everyone else about responsibility and public safety in the future (they did this terrible thing but don’t you lot even think about doing the same thing next year!) but the cracks start to show in the response. The school must now battle its own possible self-disruption: usually a leaver’s do is planned and if they send everybody home early then the planned celebrations will be ruined. Parents have been invited, catering organised - what to do?
At some point, every year, the students realise this - the school doesn’t want to send them all home, so there is a recognition of strength in numbers. Solidarity. If we all break the rules then they can’t do anything. The disruption occurs, and disrupts the attempted response to the disruption, but, and this is instructive, with a critical mass all doing the same disrupting thing the planned disruption loses the force of being that disruptive: it simply becomes the new norm for the day. Everybody in fancy dress. Nobody attending their lessons. A million stink bombs and water balloons set loose. Strange objects appearing so ubiquitously that they lose their strangeness and just blend in. The backwards school uniform starting to feel like it is being worn the right way round.
The leaver’s pranks are a rite of passage - a symbolic recognition that the school’s po-faced rules of the last however many years no longer hold authority. Far from real disruption though, they are a ritual, and part of that ritual is the apparent last gasp of institutional control as schools demand compliance to rules they are no longer in any position to enforce. Without the bans, the admonitions, the threats, the power of the prank would lose its force. A prank permitted is no prank at all.
And here we see the difference between the two disruptions - the disruption of protest and the disruption of the leaver’s pranks - and the difference is fairly crucial. Because the purposeful disruption of protest is one aimed at waking us from some dogmatic slumber. The prank, meanwhile, is merely a self-serving pantomime of rule-breaking. If the school leaver rebels were really the rule-breaking rebels they pretend to be in their final days, they would have broken the rules when it counted, long ago. Back when they were actually meant to be under their thumb. Back when breaking them had real stakes and when exposing a bad rule, maybe even getting it changed, could have helped their fellow students. These same rule-breakers poking fun at the school’s authority on Friday will, by Monday, return in their proper uniform to sit their exams in silence. They will go on to universities and follow the rules there too. Have jobs where they will do what their bosses tell them to. This childish satire of protest really is a symptom of an immaturity, but not in the way their elder’s usually mean it when they shake their heads and tut. It is not the immaturity that they did it in the first place, but that they didn’t do it a lot sooner, and once they did it, that they didn’t keep on rebelling. Make an actual point by breaking a rule. Transform the world.
Every year the leaving students break the rules, and yet every year the rules remain safely in place, unthreatened by their fun, but ultimately empty, rebellion.
By happenstance, this same week I was listening to an excellent podcast on exactly this phenomenon. Put out by the Anarchism Research Group out of Loughborough University: Chris Rossdale’s Anarchist Essays episode on rebellion as a political concept speaks about the tactics of groups like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, and the role of disruption both as a force for radical change, but also as a way of masking an unchanged status quo or marketing conservatism and right wing values. In Rossdale’s thesis I could see more clearly why disruption by itself has no intrinsic good - only the instrumental potential to do good. Rossdale notes that it is possible to rebel and disrupt to get a message out about something like climate change, while actually affirming in all your proposed solutions the same existing ideological, economic and political structures that are responsible for the damage in the first place. That stopping traffic does not equate to any necessarily true radicalism. That someone like Liz Truss is just as able to paint themselves as a rebel and a disrupter for rejecting the socialism of her radical parents and committing herself to conservative values, as the rebel is who attempted to disrupt and transform those same conservative values into something more progressive.
Rossdale’s discussion clarified for me the importance of the right to protest in a democracy precisely because of this fluidity that comes from the concept of disruption. Disruption as a tactic - rebellion against a particular set of norms - is no guarantee of either success in ending those disrupted norms, or of promoting something better, but what it always does is get our attention. Expose us to a possibility we might not have thought existed before. And that is a vital element of an informed democracy. To have those surprising conversations. To listen to those we disagree with. To be alerted to points of view we might not have ever considered. To recognise that we share a society with people who see the world completely differently than we do.
We not agree with those new voices. WE may continue to choose to ignore their message. But if dissent is shut down, if different voices - disruptive and rebellious voices - are silenced, then we do not have all the information that we need to make a rational choice. We lose the right to object to what is currently happening in our name and present an alternative. We lose the right to remind both the powers that be, and our fellow citizens, that the authority of those in charge is an authority based only on our willing consent to be governed - a social contract which cuts both ways - and that if those authorities forget that important detail, and mistake the gift we have given them of temporary power as something they can hold without dialogue and without giving us our parallel right to take our consent to be governed away, then their authority becomes illegitimate.
The authority of the school, perhaps, is never legitimate and never could be within such specifically coercive institutional structures, and that’s why disruption there hits differently. It is always been a tenuous fantasy played out by teacher and student alike in order to mutually benefit in a society that equates qualification to education. Such an education is provided in return for the administrative compliance which makes that particular conception of mass education possible. But, backed up by legal threat for non-attendance and the fear of future joblessness for failure, compliance is never truly given freely. It is always coerced. Illegitimate. The authority of the bully designed to mould you into a participant in an equally illegitimate socio-economic system whether you want to participate or not. The leavers’ pranks are an ancient rite of acknowledgement of that fact, and a chance to bully back, but no serious act of protest. The individual lampooning of particular teachers or mockery of certain school rules leaves the overall structures of schooling entirely unfazed. They are intended to blow off steam after seven or so years, not a serious critique to catalyse change. For a day, a blind eye is turned, so that tomorrow normal order can resume.
If we don’t want our more serious political protest to become an equally empty symbolic gesture in the future, then we need to protect our right to meaningfully disrupt. Not disrupt agreeably, and in liaison with the very bodies we intend to disrupt, but to actually disrupt. Cause a stir. Cause a scene. Make people ask questions and make people think. The current government, whether it has been targeting industrial action or political dissent, have been waging a war against disruption which needs to be, itself, disrupted. Legislation like the 2023 Public Order Act is legislation arguably has no place in an authentic democracy. If we are serious about our political freedoms it ought to be disrupted and rejected until it is formally repealed.
Protesters disrupt the status quo.
The police disrupt the protest.
The formality of schools disrupt the informality of learning.
The students leaving the schools disrupt the school’s formality.
Disruption is not the thing - but what you intend to achieve with your disruption is everything. Long-term change or light-hearted short-term relief before conceding to the inevitable and inescapable reality you believe is too big to ever be defeated?
Perhaps it is the latter thought - that such a limited and limiting reality is inescapable and inevitable - which needs to be disrupted the most?
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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