A Full Tank of Paradoxes

London

In Europe this September protest went populist with a vengeance. The truckers and farmers clogging roads and blockading fuel depots across the continent to protest petrol prices were no rainbow brigade of the disaffected but solid citoyens: middle-aged men with mortgages and beer bellies, deck chairs and thermos flasks. Their avatar, if they have one, is Monsieur Poujade, the conservative French bookseller who led a tax revolt of shopkeepers in the fifties and came to represent the political muscle of capitalism's squeezed middlemen. Leaderless, decentralized, linked by Internet and mobile phone, they have borrowed their tactics from the environmental and anticorporate movements of the past few years; so far, their impact has been much more dramatic. In France, where it all began, they quickly secured the promise of a 15 percent cut in fuel duty from Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. In Britain they took government and media by surprise, threatened to paralyze the economy and the health service, and pushed the Labour Party down below the Tories in the polls for the first time since 1992.

This strange solidarity of the self-employed produced a rash of political paradoxes. Tabloids that have denounced every demonstration since Cromwell discovered the exhilaration of direct action ("Protest," said the Daily Mail, "is the lifeblood of democracy"). While Margaret Thatcher once demonized striking miners as the enemy within, her young ward William Hague hailed the truckers who stalled the country as "fine, upstanding citizens." And Prime Minister Tony Blair found that strikebusting laws passed by the Iron Lady and gratefully kept on the books were useless in this case, because the men picketing the oil refineries were not unionized. Mechanisms devised to control dissent as the old, industrial Britain was being dismantled are of limited use in the new world of virtual networks and unstable work. The oil refinery pickets numbered less than 2,500 across the country, and at some depots looked more like picnickers than protesters. They were able to bring the system to a halt in part because the tanker drivers who were meant to defy them are themselves contract workers with no fixed loyalties.

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