Parliament Square has changed a lot since Ken Livingstone was in charge (a leftie mayor) because he was happy for it to descend into a messy cub camp of bleeding hearts who’d sit there raging against whoever they had an angst against today. Israel? Yeah… Woo hoo! Let’s have a shout about them. George Bush? Yeah, we hate George Bush and Tony Blair and Maggie Thatcher the milk snatcher! Arrest them all for war crimes! And they’d shout down their loudhailers and smash their pots and pans about and it was just… awful.
A site for public protest
I might be talking a load nonsense here, and this is probably going to make me sound very middle-aged and unsympathetic, but it sometimes seemed to me that protesting in Parliament Square was just a fig leaf for begging. It became a job for drop-outs. They’d set up their posters and placards and beg for donations from passers-by, and the police would be powerless to act because they’d start harping on about free speech.
It wouldn’t look very good if the police started silencing the public just fifty feet from Parliament, would it? So they became more and more confident and moved in with their tents and camping stoves and you could see all of their dirty plates and cutlery and rubbish all over the place – lord knows what the tourists must have thought of it all. But then Boris came along (a Tory mayor) and sanity was restored. He must have passed a law that prevented people from sleeping overnight because all the tents came down in a flash.
It’s nice and peaceful today but this is where all our political marches end up, the ones where protesters carry placards and banners saying ‘I hate this’ and ‘I hate that’. Most of the genuine marches seem to be infiltrated by angry students these days who shout at the police from a very safe distance. They might chuck a Coke can at them if they’re feeling brave, or climb on top of the Churchill statue to put a bit of turf on his head, but more often than not they’ll just pretend to be angry so they can have a day out. They’ll rage against capitalism just because they’re broke. They’ll support the nurses by creating more patients. They’ll smash windows to promote peace. Then they’ll bash a bus stop. Kick over a rubbish bin. Write some rude words on a wall. That is protesting in 21st-century Britain.
Let me give you a crash course in British politics so you can understand the placards. We have two panto villains in this country: Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. Margaret Thatcher gets blamed for absolutely everything even though she left Downing Street over three decades ago. If intergalactic spaceships invade Earth in 3000 AD then I bet you five hundred quid there will be a load of students in Parliament Square blaming her for that as well.
Tony Blair gets called a war criminal a lot and is blamed for screwing up the Middle East (which to be fair, he did). That’s pretty much all you need to know about UK politics to fit in at a protest. If you can pretend to hate those two people then you’ll be made welcome.
Statues of British Prime Ministers
Britain does have a few political heroes, but you’d never know it from looking at the statues. This is supposed to be our Mount Rushmore, our Les Invalides, but the only Prime Minister we seem comfortable celebrating is Churchill (and even he has become controversial in recent years). Where’s the statue of Walpole? Or Pitt? Or even Atlee? I’m surprised they haven’t honoured Atlee yet because even Tory voters like him. The only other British Prime Ministers on show are the ones you’ve probably forgotten about, or the ones you never remembered in the first place: Palmerston, Derby, Canning and Peel. Lloyd George and Disraeli are more well known. Personally I would like to see Margaret Thatcher up there as well but I know that’s totally impossible… someone will just come along and knock her head off within a week.
Statues of famous world leaders
If you’re looking for Oliver Cromwell then you’ll find him shunted off to the other side of the road, sunk into a walled-off pit that no one can approach. And that’s the problem with living in PC Britain – we’re too scared of upsetting people. We can’t honour Thatcher in case it upsets the students or the miners or the Scots. And we can’t honour Cromwell in case it upsets the Irish. So we’re stuck with leaders that either everyone loves or nobody knows. That’s why Nelson Mandela and Gandhi went up in Parliament Square: because they’re totally safe. No one ever has a bad word to say about those fellas.
Abraham Lincoln is the one that really gets my goat because his statue is huge and what did he ever do for Britain? They should put him in Madame Tussauds if they want, but Parliament Square should be reserved for British heroes.
One of the most recent statues is for a champion of women’s suffrage, but probably not the one that most people remember – Dame Millicent Fawcett. If you want to see a statue of the more well-known Emmeline Pankhurst then you need to go round the corner to Victoria Tower Gardens.
If you enjoy this then try Downing Street (you can walk it in 4 mins); Houses of Parliament (you can walk it in less than 3 mins) and Westminster Abbey (you can walk it in less than 3 mins)
