T HE GREAT achievement of parliamentary democracy is to take politics off the streets. In the 18th and early 19th centuries Britain was a land of people on the march. Mobs rioted against papists and gin taxes. Protesters marched in favour of repealing the Corn Laws and extending the voting franchise. The arrival of full democracy in 1928 changed the tone of politics. Big demonstrations were few and far between. Industrial conflicts alienated the public. Professional protesters, carrying their bedraggled banners from one tiny meeting to another, became figures of fun.

Today the crowd is re-emerging as a force in politics. Parliament Square is permanently occupied by rival armies of pro- and anti-Brexit protesters. The Labour Party’s leaders have spent most of their lives on “demos”. A gaggle of Brexit supporters has begun a “March to Leave”, from Sunderland to London. The People’s Vote campaign expects that on March 23rd hundreds of thousands of people will march in favour of “putting it to the people”, its second giant demonstration in five months.

Things began to change in Tony Blair’s second term. In 2002 over 400,000 people, many of them country squires, protested against a ban on fox hunting. A year later 750,000 marched against the Iraq war. These demonstrations were driven in part by strong feelings about polarising issues, but also by a sense that politics had been taken over by a professional political class. The return of marching came at a time when formal participation in the political process had reached its nadir. In 2001 voter turnout reached its lowest level since the beginning of universal suffrage, at 59.4%. Party membership was a fraction of what it had been in the 1950s and 1960s.

More recently the return of protests has been supercharged by three things. Brexit is the gift that keeps on giving when it comes to getting people riled up and on the streets. The decision to hold a referendum unleashed a volatile force: the “will of the people” (based on a single vote), which supposedly trumps the considered judgment of elected MP s. The vote was sufficiently close for Remainers to dream of reversing it if they shouted loud enough, and sufficiently decisive for Leavers to feel affronted at the thought of a re-vote. Theresa May’s serial bungling has heightened every possible contradiction between representative and direct democracy.

The second is the rise of Jeremy Corbyn. The far left has always been contemptuous of “bourgeois democracy”. For them the great debate is whether simply to ignore Parliament (“If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal”), or whether to treat it as just one front in the broader struggle. The Corbynites have taken the second route. They want to shift the locus of power from Parliament to broader society. In 2013 John McDonnell, now the shadow chancellor, proclaimed that “Parliamentary democracy doesn’t work for us, elections aren’t working for us” and advocated co-ordinated action with trade unions and community organisations to bring the government down. Corbynites also want to reduce MP s from representatives to mere delegates, who have to implement the will of the people (ie, the will of activists). If he ever wins power, Mr Corbyn will lead something new in British politics: a government committed to advancing its agenda not primarily in Parliament but in society at large, through co-ordinated strikes, agitation and general botheration.

The third is the rise of social media. In “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind” (1895), Gustave Le Bon accused crowds of “impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgment of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of sentiments” and, above all, debasing the normally civilised citizen: “isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian.” This might sound a little overwrought when applied, say, to the People’s Vote, where the biggest post-march agitation is about whether to decamp to Itsu or Wagamama. But it applies perfectly to the virtual crowds online. The internet not only allows the likes of Tommy Robinson to reach millions of people, it also persuades otherwise civilised folk to adopt mob behaviour, bombarding their enemies with vituperative messages and embracing ever more extreme views. It would be unwise to bet that such vituperation, once normalised, will remain confined to the virtual world.

Danger in numbers

That is why the return of crowds is bringing with it something that had long been banished from British politics: the fear of crowds. When Brexiteers like Iain Duncan Smith warn that “there will be repercussions if we don’t deliver on the Brexit vote,” it is unclear whether they are offering analysis or making threats. Mr McDonnell has repeatedly used the 18th-century device of threatening to raise a mob. In 2011 he told a rally that no Tory MP should be able to “travel anywhere in the country or show their face in public without being challenged by direct action.” After the election in 2017 he urged 1m people to “get out on the streets” to force another vote. Far-right activists wear yellow jackets not just as a gesture of solidarity, but as a threat that they will start acting like the French—smashing things up and disrupting traffic—if they don’t get what they want. This week supporters of James Goddard, a yellow-jacket wearer who stands accused of harassing Anna Soubry, an anti-Brexit MP, forced a judge to halt court proceedings and then joined other activists in storming the attorney-general’s office.