Protesting in public is one of the staples of Left-wing culture. Whereas the phrase “Right-wing demonstrators” seems unnatural and hence sinister, “Left-wing protesters” are a familiar part of the political landscape. The Czech novelist Milan Kundera hit the nail on the head. “What makes a leftist a leftist is not this or that theory but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March… the splendid march on the road to brotherhood, equality, justice, happiness; it goes on and on, obstacles notwithstanding, for obstacles there must be if the march is to be the Grand March.” The aim is to be part of an emotionally fulfilling event, comparable with a pop festival or a football final, but with the addition of a heady claim to wisdom, virtue and the blessing of history.

Palestine has become the latest stage in the Grand March (hence “Queers for Palestine”). It cannot seriously be thought that demonstrating and chanting in London will produce any detectable effect in Gaza. But that is not the purpose. For a minority, Palestine is a pretext to disrupt and weaken a system they regard with contempt – that is, Western-style liberal democracy. For many, protesting is a satisfaction in itself. I walked through a demonstration in Parliament Square a fortnight ago, and much of it was made up of families with children, having an exciting day out and expressing their community identity. Does the participation of proud little boys waving placards provided by the Socialist Workers Party make it less or more worrying for the future? It depends on whether you think such demonstrations are just letting off steam, or that they are normalising hate speech and giving rabble rousers the glamour derived from flouting the law with impunity.

Yet we nearly all accept that nevertheless “the right to protest” must be respected. I suppose that the main reason is negative: we would not like to live in a society in which protest is forbidden, and we might even be uncomfortable in a more muscular democracy like France, where the interior minister can simply ban a march, deport foreign demonstrators, and order the police to do what he says. So we put up with distasteful protests because the alternatives seem unattractive. 

Is “the right to protest” a pillar of our democracy, and are protesters some of the principal guardians of public liberties? History does not suggest so. Certainly, protests, rallies, marches and riots have long been a regular part of our history, even though less dramatically than in many neighbouring countries. Most people have heard of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, when 11 people were killed. I did my historical apprenticeship studying Paris, where protests in 1848 led to 10,000 casualties and in 1871 to over 12,000 deaths.

Popular participation in politics was a constant even in the pre-democratic age. This was not only to protest. A crowd acclamation (even if increasingly symbolic) has always been part of the coronation of our monarchs, and when Edward II was deposed in 1327, it was thought necessary to get citizens of London into Westminster Hall to shout their approval.

Riots at times of high prices and shortages, with women in the front line, were common, tacitly tolerated and often resulted in handouts and price cuts. Parliamentary elections – when voting was in public – sparked minor disturbances as people without the vote made their opinions forcefully clear. Bigger popular movements could never be ruled out at times of economic, political or international crises. Even when most people were illiterate and we might imagine that they had little idea what was happening at Westminster or Windsor, protesters often had clear ideas of what they wanted and who their enemies were – sometimes they drew up death lists of ministers, and occasionally carried them out. The 1381 Peasants’ Revolt had quite a long list, including the chancellor, Archbishop Simon of Sudbury, whom the rebels caught in the Tower of London. His clumsily detached head is preserved in a cupboard in St Gregory’s Church in his home town.

The response of those in power was and is crucial. English and British governments have rarely commanded powerful forces, and even now our police are relatively weak, relying optimistically on public “consent” to maintain law and order. Rulers often had no choice but to delay, parley and offer concessions, even if later withdrawn. Sometimes, there was connivance between politicians and rioters. In London in 1780, the Gordon Riots were allowed to develop by the refusal of the City authorities to allow troops to suppress them. As Whigs, they sympathised with the rioters’ hostility to George III, support for the American rebels and opposition to relaxation of measures against Catholics, seen as supporters of royal power. The rioters knew exactly what they were doing: they targeted symbols of the state and individual politicians, whose houses were ransacked or burned. Samuel Johnson watched the rioters calmly wrecking the Old Bailey “at leisure, in full security… as men lawfully employed in full day”. Only after five days of anarchy – when London experienced more damage than Paris would do during the Revolution nine years later, though without a single person being killed – did George III personally order the army to act (“At least one magistrate will do his duty”), and the riots were suppressed at the cost of 450 casualties.

On the other side of the political fence were the Birmingham protests of 1791, in which some magistrates were similarly suspected of conniving. A loyalist working-class crowd wrecked the houses of prominent businessmen and the chapels of religious dissenters who had been celebrating the French Revolution. 

Yet even these spectacular protests – the Gordon Riots being the most destructive London has ever experienced – had little or no long-term effect. Indeed, one has to struggle to think of any major political change that has been brought about purely by popular protest. This is because English and British governments have generally been able to rely on widespread support or acquiescence, and because parliament, as the principle basis of government since the 17th century, has been a force for stability as long as it provides governments with a majority. So the Ban the Bomb marchers failed to shift bi-partisan support for a nuclear deterrent. Margaret Thatcher defeated the National Union of Mineworkers despite the roughest confrontations since the 19th century. Tony Blair was not put off the Iraq invasion by some of the biggest protests on record. The mass marches of the Countryside Alliance could not even reverse the ban on fox hunting.

Only when mass protests have serious political support (as with the Gordon Riots, and perhaps today’s protests too) can they have an impact, and even then this is usually ephemeral. The one example I can think of in which historic legislation was forced through parliament by violent protest paradoxically proves the point. The Great Reform Act of 1832 followed serious urban and rural disorders costing 400 lives – the bloodiest (though largely forgotten) episode in our modern history. It came after a series of unusually severe economic, social and political crises, in which the ruling Tory party was in meltdown. King William IV went to dissolve parliament to force an election. It brought a reforming Whig government to power, whose great and lasting achievement was the abolition of slavery, at the cost of a huge bribe to slave owners. 

But did the thousands of enraged protesters get what they wanted? The ensuing Reform Act was what the Whig elite decided: it modernised the constitution but abolished working-class votes, disfranchised women and people on benefits, and kept power firmly in the hands of property owners. The Whigs went on to pass perhaps the most regressive and unpopular legislation in our history: the Poor Law Reform Act, which slashed welfare spending and instituted the workhouse system, which the young Tory MP Benjamin Disraeli said “disgraced the country”. The moral here is that, in favourable circumstances, popular protest can bring change, but cannot determine what that change will be. In a working system of representative government – even a pre-democratic one – only organisation, sustained effort and persuasion can do that.

One popular campaign that did display those qualities was the most effective in our history: the anti-slavery campaign. This combined moral, religious and economic pressures (boycotting slave-grown products) with cross-party organisation in parliament and shrewd political tactics, such as using the war against Napoleon as a means to stop the slave trade. Women were crucially involved in this, their first great collective intervention in politics. It included spectacular publicity-generating acts such as a mile-long petition sewn together by women. When the peace treaty ending the Napoleonic Wars was being negotiated, the British representative came under intense pressure to insert an anti-slave-trade clause – “You really must press the Spanish… there is hardly a village that has not met and petitioned.” The reluctant Great Powers agreed to the first human rights clause in an international treaty condemning the slave trade, which provided a legal basis for the long struggle to end it. A socially diverse protest movement, representing a growing national consensus, eventually prevailed over huge international vested interests. But just marching through the streets would not have done the trick. 

In a functioning democracy, such as Britain gradually became over the 19th century, public protests, especially if violent or disruptive, are rarely if ever the way of achieving concrete objectives. At most they create a sense of crisis (which, of course, may be the intention of the organisers), and frequently a backlash within the main body of citizens which harms the cause being promoted. Extinction Rebellion is a perfect example. So are the Suffragettes, almost invariably the trump card in any argument about violent protest: were they not right, and did they not achieve their aim? Yet parliament had previously agreed on giving women the parliamentary vote (they already voted in local elections and served in local government), and the Liberal suffragist Millicent Fawcett considered that violent Suffragette protests slowed down the process. When British women did receive the vote, in 1918, the same happened simultaneously across most of Europe, and logically can have owed nothing significant to the Suffragette campaign.

So if they are not generally effective, what are the justifications for public protests? Sometimes they are an admission that democracy is failing, for example if politicians are ignoring popular wishes or if free discussion is being stifled. As an emergency measure in such circumstances, public protests have a purpose. At best, they are a crude form of argument. But, too often, protests come because the protesters cannot persuade the majority to support them, so instead they try non-democratic means to get their way. Protests that use intimidation or disruption cannot be seen as an inherent part of a democratic system and hence sacrosanct. Tolerating them may just be the price we pay for a free society.

Do the present pro-Palestine protests have even that degree of justification? They might conceivably push Sir Keir Starmer or even Rishi Sunak into giving purely verbal support for some sort of ceasefire. Does anyone think that would make any difference? The protests have no relevance to Britain and its freedoms. What they actually do is to cause anger, inflame division, and do untold and perhaps long-term harm to community relations within Britain. I fear a backlash against Muslim friends and fellow-citizens. 

Nor are the protesters expressing overriding moral concern with the welfare of the Middle East or even of Muslims. Most have never demonstrated support for the heroic persecuted young women of Iran, or deplored the horrific fate of the Syrians, the totalitarian treatment of Muslims in China and Burma, the state harassment of Muslims in India, or the grim fate of the people of Yemen. Their indignation is wholly reserved for Israel and Jews. Those demanding a ceasefire never stipulate the end of Hamas fighting and the release of all hostages. I have always been sceptical that anti-Zionism was a disguised form of anti-Semitism, but these protesters are convincing me I was wrong.

Many have flagrantly broken the law, which forbids causing “harassment, alarm or distress” by “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour” or “any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting”. The law also forbids any statement that “glorifies the commission or preparation (whether in the past, in the future or generally)” of terrorist acts. The Metropolitan Police may take refuge in semantics, but the law is plain.

That widespread and blatant law-breaking should be tolerated for whatever reason (including police incapacity) is an extra cause of alarm and resentment. It may be that the situation has now gone beyond the powers of the Metropolitan Police to control. Demonstrators must surely believe that they are invincible, as they have vocal political support among Labour mayors and MPs, academics and parts of the media. History suggests that this is a recipe for civil disorder. We have to trust that most Muslims in Britain, however they may feel about the suffering of Gazans, will refuse to encourage an extremist minority. We as a country have left it to the gradual processes of integration to create a harmonious society, without insisting, as many neighbouring countries do, on imposing religious, educational and cultural restrictions, for example over the appointment of imams and regulation of dress in public spaces. This approach has been broadly successful, as many studies have shown. But there is a deliberately disruptive minority, some of whom appear to be acting on behalf of Iran and some of whom have a tenuous right to be in Britain.

Common decency should have prevented demonstrations seeming to excuse and even celebrate the barbarous acts of terrorism committed in October. Common decency should prevent demonstrations in London this coming weekend. But we can no longer rely on common decency, and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police tells us that it is not his job to enforce it. Instead, we see in our streets public support for terrorism and calls for future violence, cheered on by a reckless fringe of middle-class “decolonisers” and anti-West nihilists some of whom have, astonishingly, been appointed to official positions. The Home Secretary and her colleagues must act firmly to limit their future capacity to do harm. The law must be enforced, and quickly. We cannot allow quarrels overseas to be imported into Britain to foment civil disorder and ethnic discord. Claiming that “free speech” or “the right to protest” offer a licence for intimidation, incitement to violence, or glorification of terrorism has no basis in history, law or ethics.

Robert Tombs is the author of The English and Their History