It’s your world too, you can do what you want”: the role of subcultural activism in Stop The City protests (1983-1984) and its implications for political protest in Britain’

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the role of subcultural activism in the Stop the City Protests (STC), 1983-1984. It shows how protestors broke with the consensual approach of overarching political organisations, chiefly the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), using direct action tactics to shut down the City of London, which was emerging as a strategic centre for globalised capitalism. STC is shown to be on a continuum with the radicalism of the preceding decades, with bands, including Crass and Poison Girls bridging the gap to anarcho-punk. This article innovates by combining official evidence, in the form of police briefing notes, with ‘ground-up’ activist materials and fanzines, to evaluate the approach and ideology of the protestors and the police, thereby tracing the increasingly intolerant policing methods that were adopted during key political battles of the 1980s, including The Miners’ Strike and The Battle of the Beanfield. Questioning the extent to which Thatcherism was the hegemonic project of the 1980s, it demonstrates how STC was at odds with the contemporaneous corporatisation of political activism, and thereby provided a model for the road protests and Reclaim the Streets movement of the 1990s, and fed into the anti-globalisation and environmental movements of the 21st century.