Solidarity, Not Service Provision

A Green and Black Cross legal observer monitoring a line of police in central London

Imagine finding yourself stuck in a police station cell after a bullshit arrest at a demonstration: bored, anxious, waiting to find out when custody officers will eventually release you, worried whether this will happen in the middle of the night, about whether your friends and family even know where you are.

Concerned about why officers seem so keen on offering you a caution, or whether the duty solicitor you were offered has ever dealt with a protest case before. Wondering if you will have to go to court, if it was all worth it and whether you will ever risk arrest again.

It’s at moments like these when it helps to know that the campaigning organisations who called you out onto the streets are waiting and worrying for you too.

Our movements talk a lot about the importance of solidarity. We offer it and sometimes we receive it and we seem to instinctively know it is a virtue.

However, when pushed, explaining exactly why is often more difficult. Is it simply transactional, a kind of emotional cryptocurrency, tokens of shared sentiment, proof of our concern and our support? Although often necessary in a crisis, is adding a name to an open letter to a government minister, sending a card to someone in prison, or making a donation the same as solidarity? How much do we genuinely understand the difference when saying we believe in “solidarity, not charity”?

One of the four key messages of Netpol’s ‘Defending Dissent’ campaign, when we launched in 2022, was “collective solidarity”. We felt adding that modifier was vital as a reminder that as campaigners, Netpol sees solidarity not just as something we give and receive, but in its anarchist sense: as mutual aid, as collaborative work we undertake together with others.

In place of capitalism’s “invisible hand” of self-interest, this notion of solidarity is the “visible hand” of political action, organised through a shared commitment to care, compassion and cooperation. This is the opposite of the charity sector model where there is a giver and a taker.

That is also why other key messages we chose for this campaign — resisting police surveillance, rejecting the notion that protests have suddenly become illegal and making sure participants in acts of dissent know their legal rights — do not automatically lend themselves to demands on politicians or the state.

Instead, they are themselves calls for solidarity: for working with movements to collectively share knowledge and experience on these issues, within which our tiny paid staff team are primarily organisers, not delivering a service.

“There is no vast bank of volunteers waiting in the wings to fill a gap left by movements”

It is, of course, unquestionably difficult to maintain bottom-up structures in a culture that views voluntary action as inherently charitable and apolitical and that often ignores more cooperative methods of fixing society.

Briefly, during the start of the first pandemic lockdown in 2020, it looked like the rediscovery of mutual aid in the face of state neglect of any meaningful safety net for millions might turn into something transformative because it reflected, as Rachel Shabi puts it, “a desire for purpose and action, meaning and connection”.

However, collaboration is also hard work. It is all too easy for campaigners who want sweeping, systemic political change to fall back on seeing groups who offer support to protesters — before, during and after demonstrations — as simply providing a useful but peripheral service. The protests, their size and impact, matter the most.

Yet, at the moment when a far-right government and the leadership of policing are seeking to crack down on an increasing number and scale of protests in Britain, the lack of collaboration is placing a tremendous strain on the capacity of legal support groups such as Green and Black Cross, the Independent Legal Observer Network and others like them around the country.

All of these groups are eager to share their knowledge and experience to train legal observers, deliver know-your-rights training, answer questions on a Protest Helpline and coordinate immediate post-arrest support for people attending demonstrations.

But there is no vast bank of volunteers waiting in the wings to fill a gap left by movements that have tended to treat oppressive policing and the trauma of arrests and charges as something they can contract out to a “service provider”.

Solidarity can help to overcome the new challenges of more restrictive laws, more police powers and more attacks on our rights — if we collaboratively mobilise whatever limited resources we each have.

At the most basic level, this means political movements actively encouraging their members and supporters to learn about and share information on their legal rights, as part of preparations for any demonstration or action, and organising and promoting training sessions on protest laws and police tactics.

It should also mean calling for people within their ranks to themselves step forward and train to become legal observers rather than hoping someone else is always available.

It must mean protest organisers, if they suspect that arrests are likely, putting time and energy into marshalling and coordinating enough volunteers to support arrestees held at police stations.

If we fail to organise legal support based on mutual aid and cooperation, if this is left up to overstretched groups perceived as offering a ‘service’, we risk failing to keep each other safe and, in turn, stopping our movements from growing.

And that, right there, is exactly why solidarity is important.

RESOURCES

For guidance on organising police station support, visit GBC’s Police Station Support Guide and get advice on planning this in advance. For details of future training, see https://greenandblackcross.org/events/