Translating the intellectual in Britain: The Cenotaph yob and other representations of dissent

Representing national identity: discourses of Britishness

Representations of social unrest and of dissenters are integral to the values of Britishness – a process of invention, transformation and recovery of chosen pasts and identities shaped by the tropes of inclusion and exclusion (Dodd, 1986: 1–29). ‘The development and maintenance of every culture require the existence of another different and competing alter-ego’ (Said, 1995: 35), and Britishness acts as a discourse based on a distinction between insiders and outsiders. The continuous power of these characterizations and clichés is predicated on the obliteration of a home-grown culture of dissent. According to Stefan Collini (2006), reflections on national identity imply constant comparisons with geographical and historical ‘elsewheres’ which exist as a counterpoint, contrasting visions of a pragmatic Britain empty of profound political and social upheavals with other less fortunate cultures situated on the ‘continent’:

Cultures, like individuals, can become imprisoned in images of themselves and so it is with the enduring power of certain images or stereotypes. These images have allowed the familiar claims about the absence or comparative unimportance of intellectuals in Britain to acquire over time the brassy sheen of self-evidence … Many of the assumptions and prejudices which these claims express turn out to have been present in dominant notions of national identity before the term ‘intellectual’ and the phenomenon it (unsteadily) referred to entered discussion – for example, those self-congratulatory contrasts with less fortunate nations, especially France, which were such a staple of political argument in England during the nineteenth century, pitting stability against revolution and political overexcitability; pragmatic empiricism against abstract rationalism; irony and understatement against rhetoric and exaggeration; and so on. (Collini, 2006: 69)

In 1837, the historian Thomas Carlyle published his interpretation of the French Revolution, an allegoric epic of the victory of anarchy over ‘worn out monarchy’:

The French mob … is among the liveliest phenomena of our world. So rapid, audacious; so clear-sighted, inventive, prompt to seize the moment; instinct with life to its finger-ends! That talent, were there no other, of spontaneously standing in queue, distinguishes, as we said, the French People from all Peoples, ancient and modern. (Carlyle, 1846: 245–6)

In England things might be different because we, ‘with our better methods, may be able to transact it by argument alone!’ (Carlyle, 1840: 42). During the nineteenth century, Carlyle’s preoccupation with the contrasting experience of parliamentary Britain and the insurrectional continent became a striking feature of assumptions about British national character closely associated with Englishness: revolutionary threats originated from outside the kingdom, from abroad. Indeed, it seems that the civility of everyday life in England has long been regarded as part and parcel of the national identity, in sharp contrast with other countries worldwide. In 1944 George Orwell wrote of the ‘gentle- mannered, undemonstrative, law-abiding English’, adding that ‘an imaginary foreign observer would certainly be struck by our gentleness; by the orderly behaviour of English crowds, the lack of pushing and quarrelling’ (Orwell, 1947: 8).

Such representations of the nation held up as a beacon of civility and peace frequently constitute the underlying thread of newspaper comments against the backdrop of domestic political unrest: from the onset of the 2010 demonstrations, foreign models and foreigners were regarded as vectors of disorder which conjured up representations of revolution and contagion.

Crossing the boundaries: revolutionary contagion and outlaws

Describing the first demonstrations which took place in London on 10 November 2010 and were attended by between 30,000 and 50,000 protesters, several commentators stressed the massive influx of students coming from peripheral regions of the United Kingdom: ‘Students from as far as Scotland, Wales and Cornwall spilled out of coaches’ (Anon., 2010a). Similarly, BBC News described ‘hundreds of coachloads of students and lecturers’ including 2000 from Wales and 2000 from Scotland (Anon., 2010b). The characterization of protesters as ‘Welsh’ and ‘Scots’ converging on London underlines their origins as the fringe, the edge of Britishness. Indeed, prevailing representations of the ‘Celtic fringe’ contrast with the dominant pragmatic version of Englishness, as the Celts are often associated with legends, dreams and unruly passions (Bradley, 2007: 68).

Geographical and historical elsewheres were constantly evoked during the 2010 UK demonstrations, as the social networking websites played a crucial part across institutional as well as national boundaries. In the context of these new channels of dissent, commentators and journalists, trying to comprehend the scale and intensity of protest, described student unrest through the prism of struggles taking place elsewhere, in other countries such as France and Greece (quite recently) or in mythologized pasts such as May 1968. In November 2010, the violent occupation of Millbank Tower (the headquarters of the Conservative Party) was regarded as a mere imitation of foreign models and repertoires of protest:

Recent events in Greece and France, where students played a large part in the unrest over public sector cuts appeared to have inspired today’s actions. Chants of ‘Greece, France, now here too!’ echoed through the HQ as people stormed up the stairs. (Smith, 2010: 33)

This geographical translation concealed the domestic roots of the protest: that is, the recent publication of the Browne Review, ¹ and the charges made by many protesters against Nick Clegg, who had abandoned his pledge on tuition fees. The topicality of the protest was consequently diffracted by this mirror effect of foreign, potentially threatening elsewheres. A few days later, the testimony of several journalists who had visited the UCL student sit-in reinforced this representation of the student unrest perceived as a simulacrum – as a revolution lost in translation. In late November, Bagehot (2010) confessed he had felt ‘oddly relieved’ after being ‘ushered into the tidiest sit-in in history’. Interestingly, 1968 was present at UCL, but in the form of ‘photocopied reproductions of French protest posters, saying things like: “Nous sommes le pouvoir”, with English translations helpfully added to the bottom’. According to Bagehot, the contrast was striking with student demonstrations in France and China where students were ‘fantastically articulate, but in a slightly creepy, parrot-like fashion’, having been marinated in ‘a sour soup of sub-Marxism by their teachers’ (Bagehot, 2010). Several columnists expressed a similar point of view: it appeared that British students were ‘playing out fantasies from 1968’ (McCartney, 2010), and that they were quoting ‘Harry Potter rather than Che Guevara’ (Coughlan, 2010).

The first emblematic representation of November 2010 demonstrations and unrest (an image endowed with an emotional power, standing for the whole protest movement) was the figure of the British outlaw, the ‘hoodie’, embodying a protest that had got out of control. A hooded figure balancing on one leg kicks at the last fractured pieces of an already broken and partially collapsed window. The strength of this photograph, which made the headlines, lies in its various possible interpretations: the image conjures up apocalyptic visions of fire and destruction and the window may also symbolize the broken fabric of British society. But this individual surrounded by photographers was also an antihero, not the ‘student protester of legend’ or the ‘righteous’ revolutionary of the past, ironically evoked by Harry Mount in the Daily Telegraph (Mount, 2010). This photograph of a hooded youth had not only a denotative meaning (capturing the outline of an image), but also a connotative meaning (in that it was perceived by viewers according to a shared cultural code). Indeed, in recent years photos of ordinary lads standing around wearing hooded tops have become visual shorthand for urban menace and the breakdown of society (Garner, 2009). In the context of demonstrations over higher education, the photograph of the hoodie can also be perceived as another means of translating the protest – that is, displacing its meaning – reducing it to hooliganism and thuggery and therefore devoid of any intellectual reasoning.

During the student protests the image of the hoodie (representing the threat from within) was reinforced by the visual impact and the evocation of activists spotted during violent clashes with the police. Several commentators blamed ‘black-hooded anarchists’ related to international networks and associated with transnational revolutionary contagion. The spectre of a cross-boundary militant plot had been the object of a press campaign during demonstrations against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s (Thomas, 2002: 289), and it gained renewed currency following the G20 demonstrations in London in 2009. This image of the threat embodied by restless uprooted troublemakers has well-established roots within British post-revolutionary thought. Frequently associated with the term ‘intelligentsia’, the figure of the nihilist had entered the social imaginary through the vogue for Russian literature (Turgenev, Dostoevsky), and during the twentieth century it came to define the boundaries of Englishness as well as the threat of continental ideologies. Furthermore, the fear of international undercover networks of militants from the far left rekindled the counter-revolutionary ideology which blamed the ‘overproduction of graduates’ on the expansion of universities: on 10 November, Harry Mount of the Daily Telegraph wrote that ‘the criminals who smashed up’ Millbank Tower were probably ‘anarchists – perhaps with a student card, from a third-rate institution they never visit, that cloaks their criminal violence with the figleaf of principled protest’ (Mount, 2010).

In the popular press, a highly charged narrative emerged, involving connoted features of lexical choice. It postulated the shared knowledge of a well-known story: the narrative of a nation jointly assaulted by internal foes and foreign activists, whose threat defined Britain, Britishness and their enemies. On 9 December, the day of the parliamentary vote on education reform, when several protests were organized in central London, a car carrying Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall was attacked on Regent Street. This event, which made the headlines worldwide, can be truly regarded as a defining moment in the representation of the protest movement by the media. Traditionally endowed with a spiritual and religious character involving distance and composure, the monarchy symbolizes Britishness – believed by many to be under threat in an age of devolution and globalization. The picture of a terrified Duchess surrounded by protesters chanting ‘Off with their heads’ conjured up pictures of past continental revolutions, external threats but also national fortitude: ‘The Queen Mother, who knew all about the Blitz spirit, would have been proud of them’ (Shakespeare, 2010).

Following the attack on the royal car, representations of the event, which neglected the domestic roots of the protest and were displaced by tropes of foreign contagion, were further developed: ‘Anarchists from Argentina, Germany, Italy and Latvia plotted the London tuition fees protest mayhem.’ This was the Daily Mail headline on 13 December. The Daily Mail article juxtaposed well-informed precise data with an accumulation of anecdotes linked by their exotic features. The tactics of the protesters and the individuals involved seemed well known: using social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, ‘militants from Italy, Germany, Spain and Latvia made plans to travel to Britain. Others came from Argentina to carry out planned attacks on the Treasury and Palace of Westminster’ (Camber, 2010) – seats of power and emblems of Britishness.

Strategies of denial: amnesia and the depoliticization of home-grown dissent

As previous journalistic comments show, the mediated interpretations of social unrest at home are frequently characterized by decontextualization through ‘foreignization’, undermining connections with historical precedents and contemporary domestic demands. Therefore, despite the perceived novelty of some recurring features (such as the role played by networking websites such as Twitter), the student demonstrations of 2010 need to be connected with previous domestic episodes of social unrest, unlocking the selective memory of a British radical past.

Indeed the foreignization of dissent through the exotic figures of continental anarchists overshadows the haunting presence of a forgotten history of mass protest in Britain. In an era of rapid social change, dissent and disturbances constitute a feature of nineteenth-century Britain epitomized by the Luddites and the Swing Riots of the 1830s. The long struggle for the franchise in Britain is illustrated by the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 which inspired Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy (‘Rise like Lions after slumber / in unvanquishable number’), followed by decades of direct action exemplified by Chartism and by the suffragette movement. ‘For nearly twenty years after 1837, Chartism was a name to evoke the wildest hopes and worst fears, like Bolshevism in a later age’ (Harrison, 1984: 261), due to its association with working-class radicalism. In the early days of Chartism, petition processions by torchlight accompanied by the strong bodily presence of workers unsettled manufacturing towns, as the combination of Irish and Chartist insurgencies intensified the alarming threat of ‘barbarians at the gate’ among the governing classes (Saville, 1987: 15). In nineteenth-century industrialized Britain the prevalence of ‘collective bargaining by riot’ (Hobsbawm, 1952: 59) was well tried as a negotiating tool: the Victorian period witnessed several episodes of labour disputes and strikes, especially among coal miners who gained a reputation for fierce militancy and solidarity. In 1893 the Riot Act was read at Featherstone in Yorkshire: troops opened fire on strikers following threats by the crowd to destroy colliery property, and two workers were killed. As a memory of past struggles deposited in the lexicon, ‘to read the Riot Act’ – a procedure whereby the authorities were required to read a proclamation before soldiers could use force – had become a common expression meaning ‘to severely admonish’ from the early nineteenth century (Outram, 2010: 10). ²

Following the 1981 Brixton riots, which heralded a wave of unrest in Britain’s inner cities under the Thatcher government, the British public reacted with horror and incredulity to images of urban guerrillas usually associated with Northern Ireland – the haunting counterpart to placid Englishness. In post-war Britain, revived myths of the nation as a pastoral idyll had contributed to the perception of urban unrest as a symptom of moral degeneration and ‘copycat’ behaviour – by-products of destructive modernity and transnational contagion. In the wake of the 1985 Tottenham riots, several commentators highlighted the baleful influence of the mass media, suggesting that the unrest was generated by recent television broadcasts of black protests in South Africa (Benyon and Solomos, 1988: 411). In 1984–5, an estimated 100,000 coal miners went on strike for several months in Yorkshire and South Wales, and there were violent clashes between pickets and police as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher branded the union leaders as ‘the enemy within’, underscoring long-established beliefs about domestic trouble and organized conspiracy:

A … very common theory of rioting is that it is engineered by extremists and subversives. The conspiracy theory, that agitators are fostering discontent, appears to have been advanced to explain almost all the disorders that have occurred in Britain since the Gordon Riots of 1780. (Benyon and Solomos, 1988: 411)

The media framing of dissent which gives voice to grievances is closely related to social definitions and the perception of legitimate protest: in November/December 2010, the frequent characterization of protesters as ‘yobs’ involved in ‘bloody riots’ reactivated urban narratives of British inner cities besieged by ‘sick’ and ‘feral’ delinquent youth – a leitmotiv in the British popular press. In December 2010, the attack on the car carrying the royal couple symbolized the crossing of boundaries between civility and animality, and the Prime Minister David Cameron promised that ‘the full force of the law’ would be brought to bear on the ‘feral thugs’ responsible for violence (Meikle and Dodd, 2010). Descriptions of violent demonstrations involving the destruction of public property and the desecration of national symbols (Harris, 2010) revived the post-revolutionary representation of the madding crowd whereby normal folk were turned into a threatening mob. Indeed, the evocation of irrational crowds of young dissenters lost to common sense constitutes a leitmotiv of post-revolutionary writings, epitomized by Gustave Le Bon’s theories in the aftermath of the French Commune:

It will be remarked that among the special characteristics of crowds there are several – such as impulsiveness, instability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgement and of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of the sentiments … which are almost always observed in beings belonging to inferior forms of evolution – in women, savages, and children, for instance. (Le Bon, 1995 [1895]: 55–6)

Similarly, in his comments column devoted to the ‘new revolutionaries’, the rector of Edinburgh University who had recently witnessed the London demonstrations, described protest as a synesthetic fusion of affects and the intoxicating feeling of empowerment:

Street protest is essentially an emotional experience, not dissimilar to a music festival or a football match. Being in close contact with tens of thousands of like-minded individuals unleashes a kind of euphoria, a sense of power … Last week’s violence in Parliament Square underlines an inconvenient truth about street protest: people get caught up in the excitement, the disinformation, the chaos, the ecstasy of violence. (Macwhirter, 2010)

Amid chaos, the boundaries between law-abiding crowds and criminal mobs became porous: articulate young people interviewed by journalists could be seen ‘among the rabble as the violence broke out at Millbank Tower’ (Anon., 2010a), and during mass protest ‘militants from far-Left groups whipped up a mix of middle-class students and younger college and school pupils into a frenzy’ (Gill, 2010), corrupting vulnerable youth.

On 10 December, the Daily Mirror described the ‘bloody riot taking place in London’ in graphic terms, referring to a possible insurrection: ‘blood flowed on the pavements and fires glowed in the night air’, ‘there were fears the mob would try to storm the Commons’ (McTague and Palmer, 2010). Opposing civilization and anarchy (Williams, 2005 [1980]: 5–8), ³ such dramatized narratives of social unrest obliterate the underlying political agenda of several outbreaks of disorder since the nineteenth century, namely a demand for empowerment, inclusivity within mainstream politics and equal opportunities (Tilly, 1981: 5–6). One of the roots of the British student movement which made the headlines in November/December 2010 was the perceived exclusion from educational opportunities following the publication of the Browne Review of Higher Education Funding. By conjuring up representations of mindless mobs driven by suggestibility and credulity, reports of mass protest conveyed the theme of depoliticized dissent.

The infantilization of protesters, which is an essential component of conservative rhetoric from Burke to Fukuyama (Fukuyama, 1992: 330), further contributes to the depoliticization of dissent, undermining considerations of agency and subjectivity. Against this discursive backdrop, the issue of student responsibility frequently hinders the consideration of the free will and intellectual capacity possessed by young demonstrators, who are often described as suggestible children. During the student demonstrations of November/December 2010, several columnists depicted as an impending tragedy the fate of kettled youth lost in leaderless protest and organization. In an empathic article based on participative observation, Laurie Penny described in The Guardian ‘a new children’s crusade, epic and tragic’ singing in an ‘apocalyptic choir’ before heading to Westminster at the sound of a ‘wordless cry’ (Penny, 2010). However supportive it may seem, the evocation of lost and isolated schoolchildren and young people implicitly addresses the issue of lost causes, and it may well serve as a cautionary tale against romanticized fantasies of youthful voice and empowerment. Branded as infantile behaviour, the student protest against tuition fees was frequently dismissed as a baleful mixture of youthful naivety and middle-class privilege. The argument disparaging activism as the growing pains of spoilt adolescents had already been stressed during the student rebellion of the 1960s (Thomas, 2002: 278).

During the 2010 student unrest, commentators and journalists described the very heterogeneous components of the crowd, made up of foreign professional agitators, schoolchildren in uniform led astray by bearded Trotskyites and retired teachers. But the threatening, dissenting crowd often remained faceless, hooded or anonymous. Following the attack on the Prince of Wales’ car, another narrative emerged, highly charged, arranging a cast of characters and naming a villain.

Enter the Cenotaph yob …

The Cenotaph yob: intellectual dissenters and narratives of national loyalty

On Armistice Day a photograph was published in the popular press which quickly became another representation of student unrest. An androgynous individual, at first mistaken for a girl, dressed in black, is swinging from what appears to be the Union Jack. This photograph had to be translated into selective meanings – that is to say articulated to discourses and shared representations – to gain a highly connoted meaning. The headline of The Sun identified the dark-clothed individual, nicknamed ‘Cenotaph yob’ as Charlie, aged 21, the privately educated ‘son of Pink Floyd star David Gilmour’ (in fact his adopted son) (Grant and O’Shea, 2010).

‘Cenotaph yob’ is an oxymoron as it evokes an outrageous crossing of boundaries between the profane and the sacred: namely a war memorial commemorating ‘the glorious dead’. According to The Sun, Charlie had joined the demonstration against higher tuition fees ‘even though his dad had a £78 million fortune from his Pink Floyd days’ (Grant and O’Shea, 2010). Described with a wealth of details, Charlie’s flamboyant lifestyle illustrated the alienation of privately educated radical activists who were ‘more interested in having a good time than studying’, according to one of Charlie’s anonymous acquaintances interviewed by the Daily Mail (Bracchi, 2010). This was a lifestyle reminiscent of Brideshead Revisited – an intertextual reference evoked by several newspapers – which conjured up geographical elsewheres (Oxbridge colleges, a ‘£1.4 million estate set in 130 acres in the heart of West Sussex’) and past models of bohemian life associated with the pervasive influence of the 1960s counterculture. Following the arrest of Charlie on suspicion of criminal damage and violent disorder, the Daily Mail added keys that unlocked the narrative, implicitly evoking the transgenerational legacy and haunting presence of the 1960s and their dissenting voices. Like father, like son: Charlie’s biological father was the poet Heathcote Williams, ‘one of the most controversial anti-establishment figures of the Seventies’ (Bracchi, 2010). Carefully selecting the ‘entries on Heathcote’s CV’, The Daily Mail described the setting up of an anarchist state in the middle of London by the ‘Eton-educated rebel’ who had published ‘a series of increasingly violent pieces … in the alternative Press of the time’ and had abandoned Charlie and his mother in the most ‘callous way’. Charlie’s mother also had a ‘far from conventional background’ according to the Daily Mail which evoked her cosmopolitan upbringing. Her own mother, ‘the offspring of a Chinese businessman and a cockney chambermaid’ had served ‘as a major in Chairman Mao’s Red Army’ when she was 16 (Bracchi, 2010).

Ironically described as a ‘Byronic porcelain-skinned Cambridge undergraduate’ (Sexton, 2010), Charlie had publicly displayed some strange behaviour: he arrived at the protests ‘carrying a red and black flag in one hand and a book of verse in the other. He clambered onto the reinforced barrier protecting Parliament and began reciting Byron and Keats to riot police’ (Swinford, 2010). Such strange behaviour concealed worrying signs of ‘sinister intent’: also known as Rafael Lefebvre – a hybrid surrogate identity reminiscent of revolutionary, exotic elsewheres – Charlie was photographed ‘attempting to start a fire outside the Supreme Court’, repeatedly tossing a rock into the air and even stealing ‘a woman’s lace-up boot … attached to some sort of pole, possibly a limb from a shop-window mannequin’ (Johnson, 2010).

Even more strikingly than the photograph of the protester smashing windows at Millbank Tower – which was regarded as the embodiment of antisocial behaviour in Britain’s broken society – the picture of Charlie Gilmour swinging on the Union Jack defies swift characterization: the androgynous dark-clothed individual seems to cross the boundaries of gender and theatrical genre, between buffoonery and villainy. The polysemy of this picture characterized by strangeness as well as theatricality left room for explanatory narratives which updated a recurring theme – the populist denunciation of antipatriotic intellectual elites.

Representations of the intellectual in English reveal a multilayered semantic field shaped by transnational transfers, where figures of otherness, such as the militant and the revolutionary intelligentsia, prevail. Indeed, since the late nineteenth century, the semantic field of the term intellectual (a linguistic unit already present in the vernacular) has been affected by its association with revolutionary Russian intelligentsia and the French dreyfusard intellectuel, in contrast to the alleged absence of dissidence among most British leading minds (Collini, 2006: 20). The Russian intelligentsia which emerged in imperial Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century was a distinct group committed to being critical of political and religious authority. From the early twentieth century, the word intelligentsia (often italicized) was linked to international networks of exiled outlaws – potential vectors of transnational and ideological contagion. The French representation of the intellectual, an offspring of the Enlightenment, acquired general currency in English in the late nineteenth century while the Dreyfus Affair divided republican France. Throughout the twentieth century, dreyfusard intellectuals subsequently intervened in politics in the name of truth and justice and were often associated with radical and revolutionary militancy. In Stefan Collini’s words, the use of the concept of intellectual in present-day Britain has to be explored in relation to performative narratives of national identity, and as integral to a ‘tradition of denial’ which renders the phrase ‘British intellectuals’ an oxymoron (Collini, 2006: 2). During the student unrest of November/December 2010, ‘patriotic denialism’ (Mayer, 2010) of a British culture of dissent was associated with representations of the intellectual as an outsider, or more specifically an alienated cosmopolitan figure.

Because of his family background, his academic status as a Cambridge student and his evident partiality for the poetry of Keats and Byron, Charlie Gilmour possessed the sociological and cultural attributes associated with the emblematic figure of the intellectual. More precisely, the visual, iconic representations of the young man ‘flying the red flag’ in Parliament Square and attempting to set institutional buildings on fire vividly conjured up the figure of the revolutionary and anarchist intelligentsia, ‘propagandist by the deed’. As seen previously, while the term ‘intellectual’ possesses many resonances laid down by the history of linguistic transfers, the semantic field of the word ‘intelligentsia’ (never fully domesticated in the vernacular) refers more specifically to the propensity of rootless emigrants to cross boundaries, preach the gospel of international socialism and alienate disciples from their own homeland and families :

Stability is not a quality usually associated with an intelligentsia, a term which, Russian in origin, suggests the shifting shiftless members of revolutionary or literary cliques who have cut themselves adrift from the moorings of family. (Annan, 1955: 244)

Polemical essays underlying the (alleged) loathing of the elitist intelligentsia for the masses, as well as their criminal duplicity in word and deed (Carey, 1992: 71), involve the definition of outsiders and enemies, namely the educated classes who are detached from the daily concerns of the general population. And indeed, following the publication of the Cenotaph pictures, several newspapers published lengthy descriptions of the hedonistic pursuit of entertainment by ‘upper-class warriors’, rebels without a cause (Sexton, 2010), at a time when ‘the clever working-class youth of this country has been socially and spiritually “kettled” … by the privilege and entitlement of Charlie Gilmour and his ilk’ (Burchill, 2010). Some columnists drew a dichotomy between ‘hard-working, intelligent, curious and cash-starved students’ (Mount, 2010) and elated fanatics emerging ‘from the privileged communities of Chelsea and Kensington’ (Shakespeare, 2010), providing a vivid illustration of well-established populist anti-intellectual discourse. This populist divide between the arrogant elite (here the adopted son of a millionaire pop star) and the hard- working masses (far more deferential) constitutes one of the well-established features of anti- intellectualism.

In British culture, against the backdrop of constantly revived discourses on British exceptionalism, the ‘civilized and educated classes’ (Heffer, 1999: 133) have often been described as being alienated from common sense and patriotism, generating scepticism and outright hostility (Jennings, 1997: 109–25). In ‘England your England’ written during the Battle of Britain, George Orwell described the alienation of the left-wing ‘intelligentsia’ who had lived in a state of chronic discontent with the existing order and alienated from the ‘common culture of the country’:

The English intelligentsia are Europeanised, They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. (Orwell, 1953: 219)

Since the late 1990s, in the context of debates on multiculturalism and devolution, the perception of a challenged national identity has sparked renewed controversies regarding the problematic allegiance of the British intelligentsia to the nation. In 1996, the junior minister David Willetts launched an attack on ‘Blair’s Gurus’ as an echo and counterpart to Edward Said’s recent lectures on metaphorical exile whereby the ‘intellectual as outsider’ experienced ‘the state of never being fully adjusted, always feeling outside the chatty, familiar world inhabited by natives’ (Said, 1994: 53). Willetts starkly dismissed ‘rootless’ intellectuals eager to purge the quintessential Britishness of the nation and he argued that Labour intellectuals (a pleonasm?) were ‘seeking to make Britain something else. What they do not like about us is precisely what makes us British’ (Willetts, 1996: 60).

In the light of several commentaries and analyses following Armistice Day and the desecration of the Cenotaph, Charlie’s cosmopolitan background and lack of patriotism had turned him into the latest embodiment of the anti-patriotic middle-class intellectual. The media focus on Charlie Gilmour contributed to narratives of national cohesion and loyalty, a discursive interpretation given renewed urgency in the context of rekindled concerns over the geographical and moral breakdown of Britain: perceived through the magnifying glass of media attention, the Cambridge history student from an artistic family and a broken home embodied the moral breakdown of British family structures often correlated with the pervasive influence of liberal intelligentsia (Dennis, 1993: 25–31). ⁴

Despite his academic credentials and literary postures, Charlie was ultimately described as a parody of the intellectual – an intellectual by proxy turned into an object of mockery. He was portrayed as an ignorant youngster – he did not know what the Cenotaph was – and he was ridiculed by ironic descriptions of his lifestyle studded with intertextual references to Bright Young Things and Evelyn Waugh’s novels popularized on the small screen:

And here is this vile body, more Beau Brummel than Che Guevara, talking about the reward Mummy and Uncle-Daddy gave him for being a good little soldier and getting into Big School: ‘I’ve always loved good-quality clothing. My parents said that if I got into Cambridge they would buy me a Savile Row suit.’ (Burchill, 2010)

The complex representations of Charlie combining multiple figures of unrest (criminal arsonist, alienated youth, spoilt child) in a carnival atmosphere of inverted authority reveal the semantic richness and flamboyant imagery of dissidence and otherness as the very core of Britishness.

Several other young men who did not make the headlines were arrested and charged over the same protest in Trafalgar Square in December 2010, while the media described (in far less colourful detail) the impending trial of a sixth-former who had thrown a fire extinguisher from the roof of Millbank Tower. The exemplary history of Charlie, also known as the ‘Cenotaph yob’, illustrated the well-known theme of an ambitious and careless individual meeting his nemesis after trespassing over boundaries of morality and legality. Young, angry and posh, Charlie Gilmour had become a figure of the home-grown dissenter who blended multilayered narratives on the nation and outsiderhood, translated into representations of the alienated intellectual.

In October 2010, in the aftermath of French demonstrations against pension reform, historian Tariq Ali, who had previously characterized the memory of 1968 in Britain as a ‘sideshow’ (in contrast with the ‘glorious decade’ of continental unrest) wrote an article entitled ‘Why can’t we protest against cuts like the French?’ In The Guardian, Ali evoked the French (‘citizens all’) on the streets again, linking this protest to the recent Greek riots: ‘Were there a Michelin Great Protest guide, France would still be top with 3 stars, with Greece a close second with 2 stars’ (Ali, 2010: 2). Protests and dissent are indeed objects of desire: they are fascinating as they epitomize unleashed, repressed fantasies while serving as a reminder of the overarching presence of the boundaries of civility and composure. ‘In British cultural history, the Dionysian appetite for a rumble seems to be deeply engraved, as the shadow, the mirror, of our usual placid self-image’ wrote columnist Jonathan Jones (2010) after the Millbank occupation.

Indeed, the various strategies displacing (that is translating) social unrest, characterized as ‘foreign’ or alienated, airbrush the memory of home-grown protest, obliterated by exemplary narratives such as the memory of the ‘Jarrow Crusade’ (1936), a peaceful march of 200 men from the north-east of England to London carrying a petition to parliament in an oak box with gold lettering on it. Against the backdrop of the recent debates on multiculturalism, the issue of the absence of a culture of dissent that involves tropes of difference and identity constantly remaps and reinvents geographies of belonging through a translational process, ultimately strengthening narratives of Britishness. According to George Steiner:

To experience difference, to feel the characteristic resistance and ‘materiality’ of that which differs, is to re-experience identity. One’s own space is mapped by what lies outside; it derives coherence, tactile configuration, from the pressure of the external. ‘Otherness’, particularly when it has the wealth and penetration of language, compels ‘presentness’ to stand clear. (Steiner, 1975: 362)