Out With A Bang

I know I bang on and on about Christopher Hill and ‘The World Turned Upside Down’.

But as I sit and watch the student protests unfold outside Millbank this afternoon, there are lessons from the last great revolution in English history that our lords and masters need to learn.

Like very quickly. Probably before the next round of bankers’ bonuses are announced.

The period leading up to events of 1649 when the Diggers set up camp at St George’s Hill was some of the toughest economically of the late Medieval Age.

My good friend Gerrard Winstanley was a well-to-do cloth merchant in London before his business went t*ts up and he was forced to fend for himself back in his wife’s home parish of Weybridge, Surrey. To start digging up the common land for communal food and shelter.

Perhaps, as a small businessman, he asked the local retail bank for a loan. And was refused. Whether they had made billions in Q1 and Q2 profits is unlikely; not in 1635.

But you get the gist; the common people were revolting… a sentiment you always half sense that George Osborne brings to the party.

So, the economic background – the deep-seated sense of anxiety and fear; of where, exactly, their world was going – was the same.

Equally, it was the young that felt the dislocation from the traditional order more than most; the ranks of the New Model Army and the radical sets that it spawned proved to be a young man’s game.

Generals would take charge of the so-called ‘dark corners of the land’ aged as young as 32. One month they would be a Ranter, the next a True Leveller.

They would swap communities just as our generation of young firebrands will smoothly organise themselves around first Bebo, then MySpace and on again to FaceBook and Twitter.

In that sense, they were rootless – and restless. A potent combination for those in authority to counter and command.

In the end, they didn’t. And it cost Charles I his head.

How did they communicate? Create a ‘common treasury’ of communal grievances and calls to arms? Via the pamphlets that were widely – and cheaply – distributed across the nation.

How else can we explain Winstanley’s remarks to General Fairfax in 1649?

‘We understand, that our digging upon that Common, is the talk of the whole land; some approving, some disowning. Some are friends, filled with love… Others are enemies filled with fury, and falsely report of us…

The underlines on the slide (right) are mine; it was a slide that I used as part of my final keynote at #1000flowers last week; the point being that at this particular moment in time, the English ‘common man’ – the ‘lower fifty per cent of the population on which I try to focus attention…’ (Hill) – enjoyed a ‘liberty of print’ that was unrivalled for the next 350 years.

Right up until the Web turned up. When once again, the great unwashed were handed the ability to build new communities of cause and grievance.

Freed from the need to bow to the masters and pay rent to the lords, that same ‘lower 50 per cent of the population’ that were today storming Millbank and – dare we say it, have gathered in places like Bradford, Luton and Leicester in the all the more sinister guise of the EDL – have the ability to organise and communicate in a way that Winstanley and his friends could only ever dream of…

Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers didn’t have access to a #-tag.

And yet the popular fury and frustration of which they were a part in those tumultuous times cost the monarch his head; the ‘teeming freedom’ that Hill saw as part and parcel of enjoying a ‘liberty of printing’  turned the Establishment on its head. It took 17 years for the natural order to be restored – key to which was a censorship of the Press and a restriction in social mobility.

The poor were tied to the parish; the more radical regiments of the New Model Army were disbanded and dispersed. Radicals were driven underground; or else they took their new communities to New Worlds… the Pilgrim Fathers were out of there…

If we think that a ‘liberty of printing’ is now a given; that the SmartPhone in the hand of nigh-on every student outside the gates of Millbank is here to stay… the question is how does the Establishment reckon on ever restoring ‘order’ in the way of their forebears in 1660?

To deny the common man that ‘liberty of printing’ is to confiscate every SmartPhone; is to shut down Twitter and FaceBook; to monitor the use of a #-tag; to keep trains in stations; coaches in their car parks.

And I’m not sure HM Government wholly ‘get’ this. That give people enough cause, they can organise like never before – spot and communicate a line of weakness in a police line in an instant. Something the Diggers weren’t able to do as the orders came to tear their communities down.

To turn St George’s Hill into the golf course that it is today.

Likewise, a ‘Flash Mob’ is an interesting concept if you’re T-Mobile and have Terminal Five to play with; it is an altogether different beast when you have Millbank or The Guildhall in the City of London in your sights. And a #-tag up your sleeve.

People are playing with fire here. You dump 470,000 public sector employees onto the streets of Britain next spring and add bank profits and bank bonuses to a #-tag and watch as that ‘lower fifty per cent of the population…’ organise themselves via the ‘liberty of printing’ the march of technology has now delivered.

History is not on the side of the Establishment. It cost Charles I his head and took 17 years for the genie of popular usurption to be put back into the bottle. With an iron fist, to boot.

Where Messrs Cameron, Clegg and Osborne find a cork this time round is, frankly, anyone’s guess.