Born in 1947 into a liberal middle-class family, I was aware of the 1956 Hungarian and Suez crises, but politics only really entered my life in the early 1960s. At 14, I wore a CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) badge, and at 15 I joined the Labour Party – but in a quiet semi-rural branch where I had no contact with the Young Socialists, in which various Marxist groups were active. I campaigned in the 1964 general election which returned Labour to power, and I was active in the local Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM). However, it was not until I went to the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1965 that I encountered more radical politics.
In particular, although I was of course aware of the movement against nuclear weapons, I had not actually taken part in protest, still less direct action. But as I was repelled by the Wilson government and my politics radicalised, I encountered the range of political action beyond electioneering and lobbying.
Inside LSE, the Socialist Society (SocSoc, which I joined in early 1966), was a main instigator of protests against the Unilateral Declaration of Independence by the white-supremacist regime in the British colony of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). It led the subsequent campaign for free speech against the LSE authorities who disciplined two student union officers for writing to The Times to oppose the appointment of a new director with links to Rhodesia.
This campaign led, in March 1967, to the first sit-in in a British university, which drew on the examples of student sit-ins in the USA over the previous three years, as well as the sit-down protests of the Committee of 100 (C100), the radical wing of the antinuclear movement, before that.
The LSE sit-in was a radical, improvised experience of mass action, based on the ideology of participatory democracy. This had inspired the more libertarian Marxist groups of the time, International Socialism (IS) and Solidarity – both of which influenced SocSoc – as well as Students for a Democratic Society in the USA, and indeed the wider ‘counterculture’ that was emerging.
For IS, which I also joined later in 1966, the sit-in also linked the emerging student revolt to workers’ activism. The mid- to late 1960s saw a rising tide of strikes – largely unofficial, since the union leaderships were tied to the Labour government, and led by a more grassroots shop stewards’ movement. IS was active in and campaigned to expand this, with student members supporting this activity.
The first LSE sit-in was quickly followed by direct action of a different kind. After right-wing colonels overthrew Greek democracy in April 1967, a group of activists from the Committee of 100 (which had played a key role in London protests against the Greek monarchy in 1963), linked with Greek students at LSE and with SocSoc in a secretive plan to invade the Greek embassy and make it a symbol of democratic resistance. Since I was lodging with Michael Randle, a key C100 activist, I was doubly involved.
After a briefing in the basement of Housmans peace bookshop – it was claimed that since the embassy was Greek territory, the British police could not get involved – over fifty of us piled into a large removal van which drove to the West End. A female Greek student offered flowers to the embassy doorman while male activists piled in. I was in the rear, carrying a record-player with which we aimed to play the music of Mikos Theodorakis from the embassy balcony. A friend carried the records.
It turned out that the police did respond, on the request of the ambassador; we were surrounded before any records were played. Transported to West End Central police station (notorious for the police planting dope on a protestor in 1963), we were charged with riot and affray – offences that were wildly disproportionate to our nonviolent protest. The majority of us who followed another item of misleading ‘legal’ advice – that we were not obliged to have our fingerprints taken – were then remanded in custody. (The advice overlooked the magistrates’ discretion to punish those who didn’t comply.)
For me, this led to three nights in a grim remand centre at Ashford, Middlesex (I was 19, so not eligible for prison), where I saw how the state treated young men who had mainly sold or used cannabis and other drugs. A final pseudo-legal idea was that if we all declared ourselves Quakers, we could claim a Quaker meeting; this also failed.
The protest drew headlines, but Labour recognised the Greek dictatorship while we were inside. A legal case followed over the next 6 months, in which we were found guilty of the lesser charge of unlawful assembly. Our lawyers had plea-bargained, but this did not save Randle and two others (who had convictions for previous C100 actions) from prison sentences.
With a 2-year suspended sentence, I stayed on the sidelines of the March 1968 demonstration organised by the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC), in which some protesters provoked the police, who responded with serious violence. I supported VSC’s decision to try to avoid similar fights during the biggest Vietnam protest, on 27 October 1968. But hyped by the press as a potential revolutionary moment – in the meanwhile, the May Events had taken place in France – the resulting peaceful protest seemed anticlimactic.
In LSE, however, it was the catalyst for a major new showdown. We had taken over the college – with the support of a majority in the students union – to house protesters from all over the country during the Vietnam weekend. This enraged the authorities, who installed steel security gates to prevent further protests. In response, a section of SocSoc decided to dismantle them with crowbars. Although they gained the support of a small union meeting, it was necessarily a small-group action.
This was my first encounter with physical-force activism. Although it is important to distinguish this from violence against people, it still crossed a significant line. Not only did it produce an instant police response, but I feared that it would prejudice majority student support. The authorities closed LSE and launched legal and disciplinary action against those they saw as ringleaders. They saw an opportunity for right-wing students to mobilise the student body against the left.
Our task now became to compel the reopening of LSE without victimisation, and this we achieved. As one of those not sanctioned, I successfully moved a motion at a huge union meeting in early 1969, unprecedentedly attended by a majority of the entire student population. While the attack on the gates had certainly alienated some students, the authorities’ disciplinary policy generated widespread sympathy. In this case, mass politics was able to compensate for the risks of forceful direct action.
I left LSE in 1970, taking up my first lecturing post, and left IS in 1976, before it became the Socialist Workers Party. In the 1980s, I was heavily involved in the new antinuclear movement. Although I did not personally take part in its direct action side, this was now completely mainstream and recognised as such by most activists. In the early 1960s, the movement had divided between its direct action wing – the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War (DAC), as well as the C100 – and CND with its legal, parliamentary orientation.
Now, direct action and traditional protest were largely regarded as complementary, even if tensions between CND and direct actionists were acute at times. This was evident, for example, when CND leaders wished to mount a mixed national protest as cruise missiles arrived at Greenham Common in 1983, but the peace camp successfully insisted on women-only action.
I was not really involved in the antinuclear movement after the early 1990s, but three decades later I agreed to write its history. I was struck by how important the type of direct action that used physical force against military infrastructure had become, from the sabotaging of Hawker jets destined for Indonesia to the campaigns of Trident Ploughshares. The name evokes the biblical idea of ‘beating swords into ploughshares’, and the campaigns targeted the UK’s strategic nuclear system over two decades.
The rise of this type of direct action occurred in the period after the mass antinuclear movement faded. Yet despite the clear gap between its tactics and the lawful campaigning of CND, the mutual recognition of complementarity remained.
The Palestine movement of the 2020s, in which I am involved (primarily as a genocide scholar) as I near the age of 80, has posed these questions again. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) has built a large campaign around mass protests, while Palestine Action (PA) has mounted direct action. Although most of PA’s actions have been of the disruptive type, resembling those of the DAC and C100, a few high-profile actions have involved physical attacks on equipment in arms factories and military bases.
Protest and direct action have always aroused repressive responses, but the 2020s has seen a sharp intensification of law and policing under both Conservative and Labour governments. PA’s ‘ploughshares’ actions have led Labour to unprecedentedly criminalise the organisation itself as ‘terrorist’, which has already led to hugely excessive prison sentences for some activists.
PA’s supporters argue that its destruction of equipment materially impacts Israeli genocide; in my view, its importance is primarily symbolic. Defend Our Juries (DoJ), the group coordinating protests against the attacks on PA, has cleverly maximised this symbolism by orchestrating the arrests of supporters to face terrorist charges for merely holding placards which read ‘I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action’. More than 3500 protestors have been arrested for holding these signs.
At the symbolic level, DoJ and PSC are on the same page in protesting repression and genocide. Practically, however, they seem further apart than the different wings of the antinuclear movement were in the 1980s, when CND sections were often directly involved in direct action and set up workshops about it. By insisting that protest against the ban on PA must be lawbreaking, DoJ has restricted it to the relatively small numbers prepared to risk a terrorism conviction, while PSC – already facing anti-protest laws and hostile policing – has not involved itself directly.
The brutal repression of PA activists for their ‘ploughshares’ activities could discourage further action of this kind, which has never been entirely mainstream in British mass protest movements. The bigger question is whether the general repression promoted by both Conservative and Labour governments will have lasting narrowing effects on protest in Britain, at a time when global and national politics demands more, not less.
My own feeling is that we are in an unprecedented situation. The far right is now powerful and dangerous, and could even take over the state. More than ever, we need coalitions both between different types of activists and between social movements and progressive electoral forces. Everyone involved needs to be prepared to rethink the aims and methods of activism in the face of new challenges.