Lenny gets to the heart of things with what conclusion should be drawn from the march:
It was something that I haven’t really seen en masse before. It was something that some people had written off. They said was a bit old hat, doomed to a slow, dwindling death, if it even really existed. It was the working class. Not the working class in the shitty, nostalgic, culturally regressive sense that people invoke, not the deus ex machina mobilised to berate black people and gays for being too assertive of their legitimate rights. It was the working class as an agent of its own interests; it was a class for itself. It was the labour movement, every bit the multicultural entity that Cameron reviles. And that movement, comprising several millions of people, having lain dormant for years, is now looking decidedly up for a fight. If you’re a socialist in one of those workplaces on Monday morning, you should have an easier job arguing for militant strike action now, because people now know what they could not be sure of before: that we are many, and they are few.
Jamie puts the violence and necklace clutching about it in perspective:
I suppose there’ll be a lot of angst about the violence from fringe elements. There already seems to be an attempt to conflate it with UK Uncut’s various political comedy stunts off the line of march. I don’t think it will make much difference to public opinion on the issue itself. The Poll tax demo back in 1990 was the Gordon Riots in comparison to anything that happened today, but that didn’t change anyone’s mind; if anything it helped convince the government that Thatcher’s time was up, so one up there for the Great British street fighting man. And opposition to the government’s education polcies actually increased after that young fool threw a fire extinguisher off the roof of Tory Party hq and the Duchess of Cornwall endured a light goosing.
