by Stoker
Crowd behaviour in the car park; just one free thinker!
The late Queen of the United Kingdom – not just England, please – was a mistress of the perceptive remark. One reliably attributed to her was her response, while standing on the balcony of Buckingham Palace waving to the massive crowd below and being complimented by a courtier on the people’s adoration for their monarch, “It’s always possible that one day they’ll come to lynch us.”
I do a little job, on the days I am not in the Only Connect newsroom sweating over my rattly old typewriter and correcting fluid, which is in the tourist business. We have a car park, which opens at 9.30am each day and those of us who work there, notice with great amusement that wherever the first visitor parks their car, subsequent ones will not only park in the same line, but even facing the same way. Normally our marketing manager is first to arrive and parks nose to the boundary fence. We can guarantee that 90% of visitor vehicles will do exactly the same thing. Yesterday she was away. As an experiment one of my colleagues, arriving first, parked his car in the same place – but facing the opposite way. Yup, most of the visitors did the same thing. Nearly all nose out. Next week we are going to park our cars in a completely random pattern across the field. Such chaos will ensue that we suspect half our visitors will leave rather than attempt to deal with these wild precedents.
Some of our readers may have read that wonderful work on behavioural psychology, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay, a Scottish journalist fascinated by mobs, fads, fashions, and crowd behaviour generally. It was written in 1841 but remains as highly readable now as when it was first published, to large sales. Indeed, it is still in print and your local bookshop should be able to oblige you with a new copy.
Mackay studied many phenomena of bizarre crowd behaviour. His greatest interest was in financial booms and slumps, and he wrote about the Tulip Mania of the 17th Century, the South Sea Bubble of the 1720’s, the Darien Scheme of 1691 which crashed the Scottish economy and led directly to the union with England in 1707, and, perhaps most remarkable of all, the French Treasury Bubble, better known as the Mississippi Bubble, at the beginning of the 18th Century also, where John Law, a Scottish adventurer, brought the French state to the very edge of bankruptcy. Later, Mackay added a chapter on the UK Railway Mania of the mid 1840’s which he himself had been involved in. All these financial booms and slumps had the common features of massive cash investments, often financed by debt, into quasi financial instruments – you may not have thought of tulip bulbs as a financial instrument but gross over-excitement on the part of the public made them so - which became extraordinarily valuable for a short time. But then each time nervousness began, every investor tried to exit their entire holdings very quickly, huge fortunes were lost, great commercial and noble families ruined, political dislocation and scandal abounded, and the general economy greatly damaged. There have been many similar events since – the boom of the late 1920’s, followed by the 1929 crash, the technology stock market boom/crash of 1997 to 2000, and the recent ramping up and down of the Chinese economic miracle. We are tempted to include Bitcoin and the like, but longer is needed to allow its historians to draw any proper conclusions.
Mackay also drew attention to other strange examples of mass crowd behaviour. The Crusades were one, and the fashion for beards (correspondent rubs hairy chin) another. Belief in ghosts and witches seems never to quite leave us; pressed, a large proportion of the population will profess that ghosts move amongst us, and whilst witches may not have the followers they had, aliens, UFO’s, chemtrails, the faking of the moon landings, and the various groups behind the assassination of JFK all seem to command surprisingly widely held support.
Which brings us to politics. In the UK, the USA, and France, party loyalty among voters always seemed to be the main determinant of voter behaviour. “Once a Tory, always a Tory” – with similar stickiness attributed to Liberals and Labour, applied also in the USA to Republicans and Democrats, and, post General de Gaulle’s politely executed democratic semi-coup in 1958, to Gaullists and Socialists. Well, you wouldn’t say that now; what we have seen in the UK and its southern neighbour last week are remarkable voter movements, crowd behaviour indeed. And that may turn out to be nothing compared with the USA….
Now of course, one can exaggerate the party loyalty of post-war times. If nobody changed their minds on which way they might vote, there would be no changes of government. But it was true that the swings which brought different parties to power in all three countries were drawn from a smallish group of unaligned voters. More damage was always done to their parties by grumpy supporters who just stayed at home. In the USA and UK the major parties had vast mass memberships. The UK Conservatives had three million members in 1954, Labour over a million. In the 1960’s a slow decline set in. The Conservatives are now rumoured to have around 150,000 subscription-paying members, though Labour had a resurgence under Jeremy Corbyn and have about 370,000. The Liberal Democrats have close to 100,000 and Scottish Nationalists some 70,000.
What we now have in voter behaviour in the UK is perhaps the madness of crowds. The rise of Reform is the most remarkable instance of this, rising from mere existence two years ago to take around 14% of the popular vote in the UK General Election last week – against the Lib Dems 12% - and costing the Conservatives many seats. Are there popular delusions among Reform voters? Anecdotal evidence very much suggests so. Most are traditional right-wing Tory voters who want a stop to immigration, lower taxes, more spent on the police and defence, but less spent by the government on almost everything else, and a much more traditional approach on social matters. Backing Mr Farage has ensured they will not get any of that - delusionism indeed. Maybe it was tactical to push the Tories rightwards? But it would have made more sense to have joined the Conservative Party as members and start pushing from inside. Mr Corbyn, seven years ago, knew how to use crowds, whether mad or otherwise, by getting Labour dissidents to join the Labour Party organisation and support Corbynite candidates for various party offices. Labour is surprisingly democratic in these things which may yet be a problem for new Prime Minister Sir Keir when the excitement of electoral success starts to wilt.
In France voter behaviour in their two-stage election has been especially volatile but this column will not trespass on the French political expertise of its colleagues. It will point out though, that in the USA both parties have also lost their mass party memberships. Indeed Messrs Biden and Trump treat their traditional supporters with some disdain if not contempt, and in 2020 (and since) Mr Trump has shown that he knows only too well how to madden a crowd – and how to stoke popular delusions. We live in worrying times and all we can do is to start to think for ourselves, subject what we are told to critical review, and not be afraid to speak out. And park your car as you please.
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