ABSTRACT
The following historical review of political disorder on the streets of London over the last one hundred years will show how violence has tended to occur whenever protesters have been castigated as ‘subversive’, ‘unpatriotic’ or ‘communistic’; when their activities were likely to prove embarrassing to the government, monarchy or ‘national reputation’; or when the demonstration was technically illegal, occurring in defiance of a legal prohibition (cf. Bowes, 1966; Critchley, 1970). The first section of the chapter illustrates these general assertions by looking at five categories of protest: the suffragette marches around the First World War, the unemployed and fascist marches of the 1930s, the peace campaigns of the 1950s and early 1960s, and the anti-Vietnam War protests of the late 1960s.
