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At about 4pm, the riot police closed in, blocking exits from Parliament Square. After a heart-catching winter sunset, temperatures plummeted towards freezing and Dan Hancox was not alone in wanting to go home. The police had other ideas. “With their black snoods up and their thick plastic visors down,” he recalls, “the postmodern storm troopers of the Metropolitan police’s Territorial Support Group were unrelenting and unmoved.”
Hancox, a white middle-class thirtysomething journalist, was about to be taught a life lesson. It’s one the less privileged people learn earlier. When the police come, they’re not necessarily there to help – at least not to help you.
If you’re in a crowd that Hancox spends much of this book eulogising – be they football fans, ravers, student protesters, Notting Hill carnival-goers, or women roughed up by police while peacefully protesting against another officer who had raped and murdered Sarah Everard – state violence is liable to come into focus as fast and real as a heart attack.
And so it was for Hancox on 9 December 2010 in London, where he had been demonstrating against the new coalition government’s tripling of university tuition fees and swingeing public services cuts. He was surprised to find he and fellow protesters later described by the prime minister, David Cameron, as “feral thugs… hell bent on violence”. On the contrary, argues Hancox: the crowd had been largely peaceful until the police kettled them.
Kettling is a public order tactic whereby protesters are, as Hancox puts it, “surrounded by riot police with shields, truncheons and body armour… in a confined space without food, water or toilet facilities”. After five hours, the kettle opened and Hancox thought he was free. Instead, demonstrators were herded towards Westminster Bridge where more police were waiting. Colleagues chased other demonstrators from the rear. Germans have a word for it: wanderkessel, a forced march to another kettle. “The forced march to the bridge marked the transition from a kind of open-air pigpen to what was suddenly, terrifyingly, a battery cage,” writes Hancox.
For five more hours, he and others were trapped. Waist-high walls barely protected people from tumbling into the icy Thames. Hancox reports that protesters suffered respiratory problems and chest pains. One female student told the Observer she felt “like I’d been in a car accident”.
The political epiphany that Hancox experienced that night catalysed this book. In it, he champions the erotic, capitalism-subverting, ego-transcending crowd against those who – from Peterloo to illegal M25 raves, from Orgreave to the poll tax riots – have striven to batter the life out of it.
His nemesis is Gustave Le Bon, the army officer who in 1871 saw the Palais des Tuileries burn during the Paris Commune and ascribed what he saw as destructive madness to a new phenomenon, the crowd. The crowd typified the rising force of the masses which he thought must be resisted by any means necessary. His bestselling pseudo-scientific 1895 book, The Crowd, with its dubious notion of social contagion whereby law-abiding citizens get driven to violence by exposure to those with whom they’re in physical proximity, was taken seriously by Freud, while its fear of upstart proles resonated for social conservatives. It was also embraced by Mussolini and Goebbels as they choreographed fascist crowds to cement what psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich diagnosed as their sado-masochistic appeal. The latter were forerunners to Trump’s Capitol rioters, if better drilled and with smarter uniforms.
Hancox recalls a lone shout he heard inside that Westminster Bridge kettle. “This is not,” called out an earnest adolescent, “what democracy looks like.”
Perhaps by contrast, Hancox suggests, the crowd is the emblem of, and blueprint for, what a really democratic society might look like. His sense is that most of us have become exploitable assets passively bingeing Netflix, freely supplying personal data to be monetised by billionaire tech bros and so cognitively diminished that we are scarcely able to know what democracy is, still less realise it.
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For Hancox, lockdown presented an intimation of what life would be like without crowds, without serendipitously brushing up against strangers and having, thereby, our prejudices challenged. Crowds, he thinks, are a more necessary antidote to political and social reality than ever.
A confession: I don’t like crowds. I didn’t mind lockdown. Glastonbury alienates me. Reading Hancox’s hymn to the collective joy of supporting AFC Wimbledon made me remember how stadiums have put me up close and personal with some of the racist, misogynistic foul-mouthed muppets I spend the rest of my life avoiding. I feel about political demonstrations as the Australian comedian and writer Hannah Gadsby felt about Sydney’s Pride parade – sympathetic but happier in Tasmania.
For all that, I enjoyed Hancox’s description of one crowd. His poetic account of getting more than 30,000 steps each day of the Notting Hill carnival as he strolled soca-seething streets, feeling an interpersonal fondness that I might do well to cultivate, was blindsidingly touching.
The crowds that Hancox champions are, in this sense, antidotes to the modern world. They’re not consumable products but transformative experiences that you collaborate in making. Crowds show a different way of being, freer than one predicated on personal utility maximisation. The powers that be – from Gustave Le Bon to David Cameron to whoever’s running the Met – don’t get that.
