Although the great and the good of this feted land have, in recent times at least, attempted to develop a responsible and ethical relationship with their own population, with their neighbours, with foreign potentates and with the leaders of other races, factions and interest groups, nonetheless the pressures placed on any free society by the complexities of modern statehood have taken their toll on the patience of our law makers. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in London’s shimmering streets of gold, where the right of the individual to express his or her free will has not always been appreciated or encouraged, despite the avowed intent of worthy politicians from all shades of the political spectrum to protect the very basic tenets of free liberal democracy.
A few years ago the policy makers in the country’s parliament were faced with making one of any truly democratic nation’s most unpalatable decisions; namely whether to take the country to war or to reject violence in favour of an attempt at a diplomatic solution to their problem. Now, the purpose of this story is most definitely not to debate the merits of the choice made by the politicians of that day, for this has already been the subject of considerable vitriol and public argument. However, if you cast your minds back to the newspapers of the time, there is every possibility that you will remember hearing something about Jack and Jill, and their unfortunate walk along the paths of our political uplands.
That the nation’s politicians had chosen the option of war in a foreign land rather than the continuation of diplomatic and economic methods of problem resolution had irked Jack and Jill considerably, so much so, in fact, that they willingly joined a protest march that snaked and chanted its way along their local suburban high street. The march was held on a bright and crisp spring day, and the assembled crowd was a refreshing mixture of young and old, of blue and red, and of creed and colour. Rather than being a riot of the usual suspects, at least as portrayed in the media, Jack and Jill really felt that this time the commoners of the land, the everyday jobbing folk, were standing up for what they believed in. The numbers varied according to the witness, but the country as a whole saw millions of Jacks and Jills walking under a clear blue sky peppered with banners and filled with the harmony vocal slogans. In every borough and every ward, under familiar high street signs and shop displays, the streets echoed to the sound of tooting car horns and good natured but serious protest.
Jack joined in with the chorus line on every marshalled step, “Not in my name…No War…Freedom, not oppression…”.
Jill, feeling herself to be at one with the ebb and flow of the crowd all around her, found her voice breaking with emotion as she too called out, “What do we want? Peace and understanding! When do we want it? Now!”
Neither of them had ever actually participated in any form of public protest prior to this, preferring to comment quietly from the relative safety of the front room in their semi-detached home. Jack had supported the government’s taming of the wilder elements of the socialist movement some years earlier, had despaired of the more recent sleaze bound affairs of state and had even questioned the merits of voting on one or two occasions, but on this matter both he and his wife were of one opinion. It mattered desperately. It mattered that they stand up and be counted in a way that would really make the politicians think.
Ever since the debacle of “Honest John” Skuttle’s forced resignation following the blank speech scandal, Jack and Jill had grown both disillusioned and militant in their own particular, socially responsible manner, picking issues on which they could hold definite opinions amid the general torpor that they felt in relation to the general body politic. The war helped to galvanise them into belated action, giving them common cause with thousands upon thousands of similarly confused and worried men and women who lived everyday lives and dealt with everyday problems just like their own.
Things had changed in the country’s parliament and now that fresh faced and youthful Mike “Mickey” Gambol had assumed the reins of power, it was most decidedly time for Jack, Jill and the rest of the little people to remind the establishment of who it was that really stalked the corridors of power in England’s green and pleasant land.
In the Houses of Parliament, “Mickey” Gambol, having accepted the poisoned chalice of a foreign war, tried desperately to persuade his fellow parliamentarians and the wider constituency of voters that they were all fighting for the same ideals.
“Despite our differences, despite our deeply held convictions”, he asked, “are we not really brothers? This great country has seen a thousand years of history, during which we have developed as a nation to value beyond measure the freedoms and securities that only a true and open society can yield. That this government has embarked upon a policy that some of you disagree with is, understandably, a bone of contention among many of us, but this government’s actions and policies are designed to protect exactly the right that you are exercising, the right to dissent in a proportionate and measured way.
We will debate these issues. We will reach a consensus and we will remain, now and forever, arbiters of freedom, democracy and inclusion amid the chaos of a fractured and hostile world.
It is precisely because we can air our views without fear of reprisal, that millions of our citizens can conduct peaceful and considered protest and that we, as a government, will listen to your protests.
It is precisely because of these ancient traditions of fair play and accountability that we can stand tall in the world and defend the rights of the oppressed against the dark forces of persecution and oppression”.
The debate in the media raged on, as it did around dinner tables and in taverns throughout the land. Points of view differed immensely, but in general people understood that, although opinions differed and that arguments could become quite lively and heated, they lived in a reasonably balanced land where the state, despite the occasional bout of nannying, preferred to leave the individual some scope for making choices and for taking responsibility for their actions.
Away from the public eye the debate raged within government circles too, although it assumed a slightly more hushed and cautious tone. Away from the hurly burly of the parliamentary debating chamber, “Mickey” Gambol and his advisers from the governing party and from the civil service took the whole debate about the protection of democracy very seriously. Over a plate of chocolate hobnobs and plastic cups of a vaguely tanned tea-like substance, they met in secret conclave to discuss the issue and to decide upon the best way forward.
“Of course”, said the leader’s chief policy adviser, “we cannot endanger the rights and freedoms of individuals, but we should remember that such freedoms have been, and will continue to be, our Achilles heel in times of crisis like this. It’s all very well saying that we have to respect considered debate and responsible protest, but the laws, as they stand, protect any sort of protest, no matter how wild and inflammatory it may be. We have to distinguish between legitimate protest and incitement”.
And so, after a tough but productive session, the assembled ministers of state, private secretaries and political consigliore agreed that a combination of closed circuit television, internal surveillance and intelligence gathering, improved police responsiveness, and a few new clauses tacked onto the forthcoming Freedom of Speech legislation ought to be sufficient to keep a lid on the more extreme members of society.
Jack and Jill retired from the world of public protest as soon as the first wave of popular enthusiasm for the anti-war march had broken on the breakwater of political indifference to their cause. They muttered and mused on how a government that claimed to listen so intently to the voices of the common people could so completely ignore those voices when raised outside of the normal focus group channels.
Over one too many glasses of reasonably priced red plonk, Jack suggested and Jill discounted the options of shoe bombing, egg throwing, naked building scaling and petitioning. Anthrax was discussed, as was direct action of the Red Army Faction variety, but neither over the dinner table nor over the long wooden bar at their local pub, could they decide on how best to wake the buggers up and get them to smell the roses.
Every form of anarchy and every form of peaceful protest withered in their minds as the days and weeks passed into the obscurity of history, until, wrapped up in the mundane chores and stresses of normal life, Jack and Jill’s brief flirtation with political protest and activism dissipated and dwindled, becoming nothing more than the sound of a dog gnawing at a bone in a neighbouring garden. With the sound of birdsong in the branches, of lawnmowers droning on a Sunday morning and the inevitable chatter of the daily grind, they could hardly make out the sound of chewing canine teeth at all, but during the quiet hours of the night, when most of the usual suburban noise polluters had given up the ghost and finally fallen asleep, Jack and Jill were sometimes able to hear the gentle crack of a splintering bovine hock.
With time and the continued commitment of forces in overseas lands, buried bones came fresh to the surface and the dogs of war chewed enthusiastically. Jack and Jill found that the daily casualty lists weighed more and more heavily upon them. A continual diet of sanitised news reports, of ineffective debates and the inevitable slump into response fatigue by a general population whose attention wavered and drifted in the summer heat haze, tickled their own consciences lightly but persistently. With the war’s general death toll rising inexorably and with the losses experienced by Britain’s own forces of liberation approaching a significantly rounded number, Jack and Jill finally heard the dogs leave off from their chewing to bark and howl from the shadows.
“It’s really not good enough”, said Jack one evening over a light supper of smoked mackerel salad. “I mean, everyone’s saying how bad the war is but no one’s doing anything. Bloody Gambol is ignoring everyone. If only we could do something”.
“I know, love, I know”, replied Jill, “but what can we do? There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of organised opposition to the war. None of the political parties are doing anything and no one else seems bothered anymore”.
Evenings drifted by like this, interspersed with the usual distractions on the television and in the pub, without any real progress being made on the issue of how to make their voices heard. The dogs, however, continued to gnaw away and Jill’s private thoughts kept company with the hounds, whittling the bone down to the marrow of the problem as it nagged and badgered at the seams of her considered sense of justice. The words that really stuck in her mind were ‘no one’ and ‘organised’. It seemed to Jill that perhaps she and her husband were looking in the wrong place for inspiration.
“Perhaps we should think about this in a different way”, she said a few days later as she and Jack finished off a lovely late night snack of cheese slices on slimming rye bread wafers. “Perhaps we should think about doing something ourselves, you know, just making a small statement on our own. It’s a start and maybe, when a few people see us they’ll think the same and maybe it’ll grow, maybe it’ll be like a chain letter or something”.
“You’ve got a point, you know”, said her husband “I mean, even if there was a group to join or whatever, all they’d really want was our money and a signature. Even if we did buy a rubber bracelet, they probably wouldn’t actually want to listen to us, to you and me personally. Of course, they’d say they were listening to ‘Us’, but we’d never really have any say in anything. Look at that march, I mean, it was a lovely day out, but it didn’t actually achieve anything lasting, did it”.
Jill topped up her husband’s glass of Merlot. “I was thinking maybe if we did something simple, something nice, maybe if we just made a small point it might help. I’ve got an idea. I’d like to read out the names of the dead soldiers at Trafalgar Square. No one could object to that, could they? I mean, it would be peaceful and quiet and over in a jiffy”.
“And I could wear a t-shirt and hold a banner or something, you know like those protest t-shirts that were all the fashion twenty years ago. And if the banner said something like ‘quiet please’ or ‘just listen’, then who could object?”
There followed a week of planning and painting on torn up bed sheets. From a local screen-printing shop Jack ordered two bright pink t-shirts with their chosen slogan emblazoned across the chest. On the Friday afternoon, having travelled to the heart of the political district in Westminster, Jack and Jill started their ascent up the shallow rise from Whitehall, passed the Foreign Office, Downing Street and the old Admiralty buildings and eventually emerged onto Trafalgar Square carrying two sheets of A4 paper, a rolled up banner made out of an old bed sheet, an empty bucket and a bag containing one hundred small pebbles. Directly underneath Nelson’s column, they walked over to the white marble steps of one of the country’s most famous and recognisable martial memorials, and set about their quiet, peaceful and considered protest in the hope that someone, that anyone, would listen.
Jill stood on the bottom step of the memorial and prepared to read out the names that were printed on the A4 sheets of paper. Jack filled his bucket with water from a couple of bottles of Tesco stripy, stood on the second step and placed the bucket between his feet. As Jill started to read out the names in a normal, everyday tone of voice he unfurled the banner above his head, tied the posts to the pedestal of one of the lions and proceeded to drop one pebble into the bucket for each name that was read out aloud. In a simple, dignified and personally significant gesture, Jill waited for each gentle pulse of ripples to subside before reading out the next name.
Above them the sky was filled with scudding grey clouds and a light breeze made their banner flap and snap on its broom handle poles. Together, reading and dropping pebbles into a bucket, they worked through their protest, name by name, wearing bright pink t-shirts bearing the slogan, ‘Maybe if we’re all quiet’ on the front, and ‘Gambol might get the bloody message’ on the back. The banner simply asked anyone who could read it to please respect ‘The Silence of the Dead’ as they passed the strange couple dressed in pink t-shirts.
Government workers on their way to and from meetings, rubber necking tourists and the occasional meandering, unworldly vagabond strolled through the square, catching sight of the protest and registering the usual mix of momentary confusion, annoyance, interest and amusement. Jack and Jill plodded on, one name at a time, one pebble at a time, in the simple hope that one of these passers-by would see and think and take up the challenge. The possibility that television cameras would relay their activities to a much wider audience had simply not entered their heads.
Of course, the television cameras in question were those that had been installed as part of the government’s response to the perceived threat of wild and inflammatory protest. As Jill read out name number thirty-seven and as Jack dropped pebble number thirty-seven into the bucket, the high pitched snarl of a revving engine pierced the quiet dignity of their polite little memorial ceremony. Even in the afternoon hustle and bustle of the tourist throng, the whine of gears and the rumble of tyres on tarmac seemed to them to be a gross intrusion on the solemnity of their act and they watched, rubber necking just like the ambling tourists, as a white van rushed up Whitehall to where they were protesting.
They assumed, as did everyone else who had stopped to look at the van, that there must be an emergency, that there must be some dastardly act of terror or vandalism taking place somewhere in the government district, against which a fully armed response squad had been despatched to ensure that all who obeyed the law and worked hard would be protected.
The men in the van were, indeed, armed, armed with the weapons of state that allowed them to protect the great and the good, the high and the low, the strong and the frail, from rogue elements in a society threatened by extreme views and an unfettered willingness to create chaos.
They were armed with legislation that gave them wide discretionary powers, powers that allowed them to determine just what constituted wild and inflammatory protest, and so it was that the van screeched to a halt by the memorial, that seven uniformed officers bundled out of the van and these same officers managed, with a great expense of arm twisting and wrestling, to manhandle Jack and Jill into the secure environs of the vehicle’s transportation cell. The van containing the police officers and their securely bound charges careered back down the road.
Sporting bruises and cuts to their heads and hands, and with the bucket tumbled down the memorial steps, Jack and Jill nursed their aching limbs and broken crowns, and prepared, finally, to speak to the one member of the state apparatus who seemed inclined to listen to their story; namely the presiding judge in their forthcoming trial for crimes against public order and incitement to terrorism.