Resistance: How protest shaped Britain and photography shaped protest
Steve McQueen
Turner Contemporary, Margate
22 February to 1 June 2025
Reviewed by Jim Horton
In this excellent exhibition, Steve McQueen presents a stunning collection of over 200 photographs, documenting a history of protests over a turbulent one hundred-year period. Resistance, the culmination of a four-year research project, explores how photography recorded key moments of social and political change, acted as a catalyst for action, and actively shaped how we remember past events. Its central message is that resistance can achieve results, while, as Steve McQueen says, protest remains “especially urgent in today’s political climate”.
Starting in 1903, with the foundation of the suffragette Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), and ending with the mass anti-war demonstration in London on 15 February 2003, the exhibition takes us on a thematic journey through a century rich in examples of ordinary working-class people standing up for their rights and fighting against oppression. The images, all black and white, cover the struggle of women for the vote and against discrimination, campaigns against unemployment and welfare cuts, battles against racism, fascism and colonialism, actions to protect the environment and the right to roam, trade union strikes, the mass movement against the poll tax, and protests against war.
There is not one superfluous photo in the exhibition, from the mass demonstrations to the individual acts of resistance; each illustrates the defiance, resilience and resourcefulness of ordinary people to try to effect change. The exhibition is not, though, without notable omissions, both in terms of issues not covered and identifying the lessons for today.
Highlights include a quite remarkable photo, taken covertly, capturing Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst in the dock at Bow Street Magistrate’s Court in 1908. The Daily Mirror photographer had hidden a camera in his top-hat, with a hole for the lens. He coughed to disguise the trigger of the shutter as the suffragette leaders were sentenced. Other suffragette images include the arrest of Annie Kenney, a former cotton mill worker from Oldham, who was the only working-class woman in the WSPU leadership. Also included is an image of Sylvia Pankhurst reading suffrage pamphlets in bed while recovering from a hunger strike. She was a socialist, who linked women’s enfranchisement to broader social issues affecting working-class women, as depicted in other photos featuring her work with the East London Federation of Suffragettes.
Within, and across, the themes of the exhibition, photos connect the struggles of different generations. The fight for women’s rights did not stop with the extension of the franchise, as testified by photos of Lillian Bilocca addressing trawlermen’s wives on industry safety in February 1968, and three years later the first women’s liberation movement demonstration.
The 1936 battle of Cable Street is featured. The local Jewish community, trade unionists, socialists and communists united to successfully prevent Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists from marching in east London, despite the police assisting the fascists. Fast forward forty years, anti-racists are gathering to block the route of a National Front demonstration in New Cross, London in 1977. Four years later, following the devastating fire at a birthday party in New Cross, southeast London, in which thirteen young Black people aged between 14 and 22 lost their lives, the Black People’s Day of Action sees 20,000 protestors in London, many carrying placards declaring ‘13 Dead, Nothing Said’, a slogan that became emblematic of institutional racism in British society.
In the 1980s, with three million jobless, the impact of mass unemployment in many areas was comparable to the economic depression which blighted Britain in the 1930s. One exhibition juxtaposition in particular captures the connection. A photograph of the era-defining Jarrow Crusade of 1936, in which 200 men marched 300 miles to London, is displayed beneath Martin Jenkinson’s image of the 1981 People’s March for Jobs, when 500 unemployed marched from Huddersfield and Liverpool to London. The photographs were taken at the exact location in Lavendon, Buckinghamshire, symbols of the endemic economic failures of capitalism.
Before Jarrow, the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement had organised the more militant hunger marches. In 1932, 2,500 people converged on London from across Britain. Images show protesters carrying banners demanding ‘work or full maintenance’ and proclaiming ‘only cowards starve in silence’, in response to cuts in welfare benefits by the National Government, which included Labour politicians. This militancy was later rejected by the organisers of the Jarrow march in favour of respectability, yet failed to convert sympathy into resolution.
Many of the events depicted in the exhibition will be familiar to labour movement activists, but others not. The exhibition includes a photo of members of the National League of the Blind participating in the 1920 Blind March, perhaps the earliest national disabled protest. Carrying banners declaring ‘Justice not Charity’, these trade unionists demanded better working conditions and state support. Other images show how this militant stance was adopted by later disabled rights activists, such as the 1980s ‘Piss on Pity’ campaign against ITV’s Telethon fund-raising programme, and the 1994 ‘Parity Not Charity’ demonstration. The resonance today could not be more obvious.
Images of the 1986 candlelit vigil for victims of the AIDS virus in London’s Trafalgar Square, and the 1988 Manchester protests against Section 28, are a reminder of Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government’s hate campaign against the LGBT community. In the 1970s, Gay Liberation Front activists staged provocative ‘kiss-ins’ in public spaces across London, captured in two great photographs.
The 1980s campaigns around rights for the unemployed, disabled people and the LGBT community took place in a decade of great industrial unrest, yet these momentous trade union battles are underrepresented, restricted to some images relating to the heroic year-long miners’ strike of 1984-5, and the Grunwick dispute by mainly low-paid Asian women workers the previous decade. Other key industrial battles over the two decades are omitted.
Nor is there any reference to the fight against rate-capping in the 1980s, particularly the campaigns by councils in Lambeth and Liverpool, the latter led by Militant, the forerunner of the Socialist Party. In Liverpool, there were city-wide strikes and mass demonstrations, one of which was captured in an iconic photograph, sadly not included in this exhibition. Also given insufficient coverage is the anti-poll tax campaign, with just two photographs featured in the exhibition, both of the Trafalgar Square riots, with no mention of how the poll tax was defeated by eighteen million non-payers organised into anti-poll tax unions across Britain.
It is, of course, not possible to include every protest in one exhibition. But class battles involving organisations representing millions of workers are not merely just other protests, they go to the core of answering a key question implicitly posed by this exhibition: how can we get to a point when new generations do not have to refight old battles, or new battles on recurring issues?
Trade unions, and industrial action, have the capacity to unify the various important single-issue campaigns depicted in the exhibition, and to link them to basic class issues around pay and working conditions. Liverpool’s militant campaign initially forced extra funding from Thatcher’s government. And the mass poll tax non-payment campaign culminated in the removal of Thatcher as prime minister. Surely, all examples of defiance and resistance which need to be emulated by today?
In his introduction to the book that accompanies the exhibition, Gary Younge states that the “progressive mantra that a better world is possible is true… but a worse world is also possible, and there are people actively working towards that too”. Gary Younge doesn’t, though, define the ‘better world’ or how it can be achieved. The answer is embodied in a wonderful photo by Keith Pattison, taken during the 1984-85 miners’ strike.
This seemingly innocuous image of a striking miner’s family in their living room watching Arthur Scargill on television might just contain a subliminal revolutionary message. In addition to a reproduction of Constable’s The Hay Wain over the fireplace, above the television is a poster, easily missed without scrutiny, featuring a drawing of the late Alan Hardman – former Socialism Today cartoonist – of Karl Marx with his famous quote: ‘Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways: the point is to change it’.
Over two hundred inspiring photos show how the power of protest can win, but also how the limitations of protest result in too many battles lost. Lasting progressive change requires replacing capitalism with socialism, the potential for which exists in every act of resistance by working people, but a mass workers’ party needs to be created.