In both France and Britain, poisonous lies are
being spread about the rebellious French workers.
Last
week, during a raucous May Day protest, the gilets jaunes ransacked Paris’s
Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital. Thirty-two protesters were arrested. This was an
‘attack’ by ‘anti-capitalist, ultra-left militants’, according to France’s interior minister Christophe
Castaner.
Except it wasn’t. Video footage of the incident clearly
shows the protesters seeking refuge as they are chased by scores of police
officers firing tear-gas grenades and beating them with batons. The protesters were
all released without charge and the interior minister was forced to row back on
his claim.
Baseless
smears of this kind against the gilets
jaunes, whether from the media or the government, are nothing new.
From the moment the protests began in November 2018, the government immediately
denounced the yellow vests as far-right thugs. A month later, President
Macron used his New Year’s message to
brand the protesters a ‘hate-filled crowd’, who attack ‘elected
representatives, the forces of law and order, journalists, Jews, foreigners,
homosexuals’. Numerous mainstream media outlets allege that protesters have
been ‘fueled’ and ‘manipulated’ by
Vladimir Putin.
Given the
yellow vests’ intentions to rock the French establishment, this response is
unsurprising. More striking, however, has been the complete lack of interest
from the media and politicians on this side of the Channel. Such is the dearth
of coverage that there is even a rumour spreading around social
media that Theresa May’s government has issued a so-called ‘D
notice’, gagging the press from reporting on the French uprisings in order to
avoid copycat demos in Brexit Britain. But there is no official ban in Britain.
The much sadder reality is that there is no official anything.
The most significant wave of protests since 1968
has been happening for the past 26 weeks – for nearly six months – and yet it
barely elicits a reaction on these shores. This is a movement of people demanding greater democratic
and economic control. They are fighting against a neoliberal order that has
eviscerated their living standards and robbed them of their communities and of
social solidarity. It ought to be a natural cause for the left. So where are
the stump speeches expressing solidarity? Where are the parliamentary Early Day
Motions? Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has in the past signed or
initiated Early Day Motions expressing solidarity with far-flung Venezuela, Palestine and many
others. But nothing on the gilets
jaunes. And why haven’t Britain’s supposedly ‘internationalist’,
pro-EU trade-union leaders extended their support to struggling French workers?
Even more
worrying is the silence towards the French government’s growing
authoritarianism. At the time of writing, independent journalist David Dufresne
has counted over 780 separate and verifiable serious injuries caused by police
violence. Protesters have had their hands blown off and scores have lost an
eye. Macron’s government has introduced new laws banning unsanctioned protests
and censoring so-called fake news (aka anti-establishment content) on social
media. Opposition leaders have had their offices raided and
prosecutors have attempted to conduct warrantless searches of
investigative newspapers. Imagine the chorus of condemnation if this were
happening in Viktor Orban’s Hungary? Yet there is barely a murmur of
disapproval against France’s liberal strongman.
Yes, some British journalists and politicos have taken
the French government’s smears at face value, which has no doubt dampened their
interest in the yellow vests’ struggle and has allowed them to downplay the
seriousness of the government’s authoritarianism. Propaganda tidbits pepper
the few English-language reports on the protests. Britain’s paper of
record, The Times,
for instance, reports of police
being ‘overpowered’ and ‘powerless’ in the face of the ‘gilets jaunes mob’ –
despite the fact that on the weekend concerned, as is the case most weekends,
the police to protester ratio was around 1:1, according to official figures.
But the real cause of this indifference is an
awareness, at least on some level, of who the gilets jaunes are, their place in society
and what they are fighting against. Many of the yellow vests are in the same
demographic as the ‘deplorables’ in Trump’s America and the ‘gammon’ of Brexit Britain, who are widely loathed by the
political and media establishment. Not only that, the gilets jaunes are
fighting against an undemocratic, neoliberal order that is backed by all wings
of the generally pro-EU establishment. They are yet another manifestation of
the populist insurgency that is tearing up
the political rulebook across Europe. This is why the gilets jaunes terrify
observers in the UK – and it is also why they deserve our solidarity.
Fraser Myers is a
staff writer at spiked and
host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on
Twitter: @FraserMyers.
