Features / Investigations
Bristol’s year of protest
It’s been a year of protest marches, solidarity walks and vigils in Bristol, with thousands of people taking to the streets in a succession of protests against Brexit, Trident, FGM, council house sales and the Chilcot Inquiry.
On the same day in May there were anti-immigration and pro-immigration marches.
And in the wake of the killing of black men by police in the US, more than a thousand people marched from St Paul’s to College Green in the beginning of July for Black Lives Matter.
is needed now More than ever
In a series of walkouts, junior doctors in the city also joined colleagues from across the country to protest against a new government contract.
At times, it has felt like there has been protest after protest, week after week.
So why do people feel the need to take to the streets and can it ever make a difference?
“I’m here to stand in solidarity with the people against police brutality,” one man told Bristol24/7 during the Black Lives Matter march.
He may be thousands of miles away from the shooting in the US but Jacquelien van Stekelenburg, writing for the London School of Economics, says that “at the heart of every protest are grievances” which are much closer to home.
“The experience of illegitimate inequality, feelings of relative deprivation, feelings of injustice, moral indignation about some state of affairs, or a suddenly imposed grievance” can all come together to fuel a protest, she adds.
And that solidarity, which comes from being part of a wider action, can inspire people to take action.
Junior doctor Alex Carpenter, who helped organise the Bristol walkouts, said he had “never before been politically active” but felt “so outraged” by the junior doctor contract drawn up by the government that he and three other colleagues were compelled to “do something big, public and which would unite all the doctors of the region together in solidarity”.
Making an impact is paramount and Alex says the the “whole process was a steep learning curve”.
“On the day, the key thing was the turnout and this took care of itself via social media.”
Social media has been the driving force behind many of Bristol’s protests. Black Lives Matter got more that 1,000 people on the streets in just 24 hours. Organiser Edson Burton wrote that the march was quickly arranged online following the shootings and the campaign gathered “furious momentum”.
Using Facebook, Edson and his fellow organisers were confident of a large turn-out and they were right.
People wanted to try and make a difference, not just in the USA, but here in Bristol as well. “We’ve seen things recently on the news that have inspired us to want a better future,” said one woman.
While some marches rise up organically in response to a specific event or action, others, like the Bristol Pride march, are organised year-on-year but are no less important.
Daryn Carter, who runs Bristol Pride, says the march is an “integral and important part of the Bristol Pride Festival”.
“Pride and our parade is a call for equal rights for our community, for people to be treated with dignity and respect but also to build community awareness, visibility and to ultimately overcome stigma and shame,” he says.
“We need to ensure that no one lives in fear or persecution and prejudice and we need to stamp out the hatred. No one should live their lives in fear, this is why Pride and the parade march are as important today as ever.”
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Measuring the success of protests is notoriously difficult. After all, if a million people could not get Tony Blair to change his mind about war, what can smaller protests achieve?
Quite a lot in Bristol it seems.
Protesters against the sale of council houses won a victory when the new administration, under Marvin Rees, said future sales of council properties at auction would be put on hold and those properties would be considered for temporary accommodation for the homeless.
Alex Carpenter says in the long-term the protests have been “successful in galvanising the doctors and moving forwards as a united group”.
And one organisation in Bristol says protesting, marching and keeping issues in the public domain are crucial to changing attitudes.
In July young Bristolians took to the streets protesting against Female Genital Mutilation. Organised by Empowering, the young arm of campaigning group FORWARD, ‘the young people followed in the footsteps of their mothers, who marched the same route in 2010’.
Organiser Jackie Mathers says it is “important for young people to march through the communities that they live in, demonstrating about an issue that affects the places that they come from”.
She added that on the march this year there were lots of women and “this was an improvement on previous events where male family members were against women demonstrating about FGM”.
The success of some protests may never be able to be measured but sometimes it’s the taking part that counts.
Quotes from article by Jacquelien van Stekelenburg reproduced with full permission.