Britain needs a Yellow Vest movement

Mass street protests would force the elites to listen to alienated voters

Paul Embery is one of the most interesting, insightful and original voices to have emerged in British journalism for some time — Douglas Murray

Photo: Guillaume70, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

For millions of citizens across our land, the state has stopped working. The economy is broken. Living standards have declined. Bills have shot up. Public services are crumbling. The industrial base has been largely hollowed out. Secure, well-paid jobs are increasingly difficult to come by. Home ownership is a pipe dream. And a growing lawlessness pervades the streets.

In many communities, social cohesion and solidarity are being severely tested, the consequence of profound demographic and cultural transformation.

Simultaneously, faith in our local and national institutions – political, cultural, academic and corporate – has nosedived, as more and more these entities peddle the dogma of militant progressivism.

Meanwhile, an expanding web of restrictive laws has served to chip away at the ancient right to freedom of expression, with police and the courts now often treating the posting of ‘offensive’ comments on social media, or made publicly (and sometimes privately) elsewhere, as serious crimes – in some cases, more serious than genuinely appalling criminal acts.

A previously dominant social majority, comprised in no small part of an amalgam of the traditional working-class from the grittier provinces and the conservative middle-class – the ‘Gavin and Stacey’ alliance which drove the Brexit vote – feels as though it is losing its place in society. It looks on as its own culture is increasingly marginalised while others are indulged and celebrated. ‘Asymmetrical multiculturalism’, as some have coined it. At the same time, it sees the political and cultural elites seemingly take every opportunity to trash the nation’s history and traditions.

Time and again, these voters have expressed their frustration – and desire for change – at the ballot box. And time and again, the political class has failed them.

The democratic process is ultimately a pressure relief valve. Where there exists a strong public mood for doing things a certain way, a head of steam will build, and votes will be cast accordingly. It is the job of the political class to respond to that. When politicians show contempt for the democratic wishes of the majority – in other words, when they shut off that relief valve – the pressure doesn’t dissipate; it just breaks out elsewhere.

Something has to give in Britain. Something very likely will give.

Back in 2018, in France, a new and powerful grassroots protest movement was formed. They were the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests), so called because of the association of that type of garb with drivers (who had been threatened with a punitive new fuel tax) and working-class industries. The movement’s foot soldiers were drawn heavily from sections of French society similar to those which delivered the Brexit vote in Britain, and were motivated by the same type of concerns – revolving principally around economic inequality; the cost of living; the erosion of national sovereignty and democracy; poor levels of integration; and the indifference of an establishment that had long ignored their plight.

Every Saturday, the Yellow Vests would form up, many waving the tricolour proudly, and march through cities and towns across France. Polling showed that they enjoyed significant popular support, and from right across the political spectrum. It was only when covid arrived that the marchers were thwarted.

But, by then, the movement had made its mark. Though it didn’t achieve all of its objectives, it did force some major concessions from government, including freezes on fuel taxes and energy tariffs, a minimum wage increase and the exempting of low-income pensioners from a planned tax rise.

President Macron recognised that the anger of the Yellow Vests was ‘deep and in many ways legitimate’. They could not be ignored. Frédéric Gonthier, a political scientist at the Pacte research centre and the School of Political Studies in Grenoble, described the movement as a ‘watershed in French politics’ and one which could lay claim to having ‘put France's invisible and inaudible working classes back at the heart of public debate’.

The time has surely come for something similar in Britain. We need a Yellow Vests movement – or something closely resembling it – on this side of the Channel. If the long-neglected concerns of millions of alienated and disgruntled working-class and ‘squeezed middle’ voters are to be addressed, at least before the next general election, then building pressure beyond the walls of parliament is crucial.

From the peasants’ revolt and the Chartists to the Levellers and Tolpuddle Martyrs, and from the Suffragettes to the poll tax protesters, there is a tradition of our political class being forced to grant concessions in the face of powerful extra-parliamentary activity. As the great Tony Benn used to remind us, all progress comes from underneath, and parliament is often the last place to get the message.

Trying to maintain social unity against the backdrop of massive population shifts is hard enough at the best of times; it is more difficult still when living standards are declining and the organs of the state have stopped functioning properly. Successive governments took huge gambles when embracing the new global market and all its works on the assumption that it would prove forever enriching. They never considered how our communities would be left to pick up the pieces if the economy went south.

That is the scenario that has played out in many parts of our country since around the turn of the century, and certainly in the years after the global financial crisis hit. And it is one that has given rise to the many grievances that are expressed by folk daily in our streets, pubs and workplaces. These are the people who have been left behind by globalisation. And they are largely the reason why Britain has experienced such political volatility and dealignment in recent times.

Unless something changes, the slow Lebanonisation of our country will, I fear, continue, with the population increasingly dividing itself along ethnic, religious and cultural lines and the risk of some kind of internal conflict heightening. Some MPs were elected to parliament last year explicitly on account of their position on certain foreign wars in which Britain was not a direct belligerent. That is a new departure, and one that should trouble us greatly.

In a recent piece for the Daily Telegraph, historian Tim Stanley wrote: ‘I struggle to think of a society in history that has faced the scale of change happening to us without descending into violence or authoritarianism.’ This isn’t scaremongering or rabble rousing; it’s an observation that is informed by the past and what Stanley and many others see today with their own eyes.

Even now, many among our political and cultural elites continue to turn a blind eye to the social disintegration taking hold in our society and a tin ear to the well-founded and deepening discontent.

That is why we need peaceful mass protests. It’s why we should look to the Yellow Vests for inspiration.

And take to the streets.

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