The Commons and the Square: A Politics of Resonance

By focusing on the “square with rounded corners” at the centre of London – Parliament Square – Ella Finer highlights the acoustic relation between noisy protest and public record.

On January 18, 1982, the women of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, an occupied military site in Berkshire, England, brought their protest against nuclear weapons and cruise missiles to Parliament Square. The protesting women walked the perimeter pathways of the square in central London while wailing together. The “Keening Action” as the women would name it, invoked “an ancient tradition of women’s expression”: a grieving and prolonged call for the dead; a vocal lament, a response of deep loss. ¹ The women would say they were mourning for the future children lost to nuclear war. ²

Writing back into this text now, in lockdown London, June 2020, the idea of mourning for future children lost takes on the weight of so much recent history‑in‑making: if not lost to nuclear war, then lost to the gross inequalities that have gathered bodies again in protest. Overwhelmingly it is the young on the streets for the Black Lives Matter protests, actively voicing critical anger and hope in defiant proximity not only to each other, but to the city and to the building in which representatives speak, lobby and debate on our behalf. The stakes of what it means to stand in proximity to the Houses of Parliament have truly never been higher. In this time when we are, as I have written elsewhere, “uncommonly at home” ³ , that there are bodies who have breached the city, defying lockdown, to stand in Westminster is testament to the need to be close by, to be closing in – far from remote.

When I first introduced this research, I was speaking at the Political Voice colloquium in Paris during another kind of lockdown (strikes had brought the city’s transport networks to near standstill in December 2019), it was the morning after the UK general election revealing an outcome that had foreclosed some fragile sense of hope. This was the UK election staged in the short days of our Winter and called in the wake of mass protests about the world future generations will inherit, both ecologically and politically. ⁴ Now, in June 2020, as in December 2019 – albeit now with a heightened sense of what is at risk – I ask seriously:  how does the majority government forged in the winter election of December represent the voices that raise alarms outside on Parliament Square? Who inside the House of Commons is hearing-advocating for those outside? And might the voices of those outside – as an external sonic force – shake the structure from within?

I want to offer the action of the Greenham women’s protest in Parliament Square in 1982, directed towards Parliament within the House of Commons, as a challenge to consider the resonant relationship between two very distinct socially-configured spaces: the Commons and the Square, two sites acoustically bound to each other across years of call and response. Call (on the part of protestors, occupiers, strikers) and response, or lack thereof (on the part of those inside Parliament). I attend to these as spaces in antagonistic dialogue, where the noise of a protesting vocal mass reverberates in the regulated speech of the Commons in session. There is as much a “sonorous bond” between these two spaces as there is across the histories of those who have occupied them. ⁵ For the extent to which sound travels through the buildings’ walls as an interruptive, heard and felt force in proceedings is exposed in the historical verbatim reports of Parliament. And in these records, it is telling who is attuned to the outside, those who voice and repeat, for the record, “we can hear”, “we can hear outside”.

Who inside the House of Commons is hearing-advocating for those outside?

The square with rounded corners, Parliament Square, is enclosed on all sides by monuments to institutional power: the state and the Church and the offices of government, including the House of Commons, so named as the representative house of communities (communes).

A community of women, the Greenham Common protestors, in effect brought their occupation of the common to the square, their commoned land, their common cause – their voices in common. And in doing so they channelled a concern of the rural landscape into a concern for urban land to bear, and bear earwitness to.

In July 1983, a year and a half after their keening action, the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp was debated in a Commons sitting, instigated by an irate Conservative member of parliament (MP) for Newbury, Michael McNair‑Wilson, who was especially angered by the women’s “flagrant disregard for the byelaws” of the common and the sense that these “so-called peace women with their ultra‑feminist views…should now be afforded the sanctuary of department of transport land”. ⁶ And when he was reminded that this was still public land, his concern shifted to the women’s form of protest, the industry of their occupation – that the women were building a community:

Is not the difference between the Greenham Common demonstration and almost any other protest that one could think of the fact that protestors have decided to build an establishment on common land. ⁷

In a response that resonates with the ethos of the keening protest that had taken place 18 months previously, Mr Robert Hughes, Labour MP for Aberdeen North defended the women’s rights to the land and to a voice:

A society that ruthlessly tries to crush and imprison protestors and seeks to silence the voice of reason and dissent is the poorer for that[…] ⁸

The state’s method for silencing the “voice of reason and dissent” in the case of the Greenham Common women was to continually break their connection with the land; to move, relocate and imprison them. The dissenting voices of the Greenham women were comprehended and heard as such through their occupation of the common. The subsequent transposition of their protest to Parliament Square brought the common land with them – channelled through their explicit collective voice.

Loudspeakers are prohibited from use in the immediate area around the Houses of Parliament, including the Square. This means sound at volume has to be made from vocal commoning, from collective choral action. The Greenham Common women knew this, with one saying:

Had we just gone there and stood outside with a banner we could easily have been ignored, but by using sound we could actually penetrate the building. ⁹

And not just “by using sound”, but poly‑vocal sound; a means of amplifying voice without amplification technology and, crucially, a means of amplifying more than one voice. ¹⁰

In Ivan Illich’s talk “Silence is a Commons”, delivered coincidentally just two months after the Greenham keening action, he describes a loudspeaker overwhelming the egalitarian acoustics of his grandfather’s village on the Dalmatian coast, a place where voices had attuned to a common volume, a shared resonance. ¹¹ The loudspeaker amplified one voice over others, breaking the learned acoustics of generations. It created a new sonic order through the tyranny of unnatural volume.

On the same boat on which I arrived in 1926, the first loudspeaker was landed on the island. Few people there had ever heard of such a thing. Up to that day all men and women had spoken with more or less equally powerful voices. Henceforth this would change. Henceforth the access to the microphone would determine whose voice shall be magnified. Silence now ceased to be in the commons, it became a resource for which loudspeakers compete. ¹²

We could extend this by considering how loudspeakers, as public address systems, are used in the city to coercively control public movements, actions, responsibilities and behaviours. ¹³ But the Greenham women’s collective keening action created an acoustic commons resisting the instruction or guide of the single voice, resisting too the rallying speech of protest. Paradoxically, the women appeared to create a space for silence by making noise, and noise of a very particular type: a heterophonic composition of voices; making one distinct sound collectively.

A non-linguistic vocal sound such as keening carries the metaphorical, if not literal, hope of “penetrating the building”. It harnesses the physicality of sound as vibrational force. Returning to my earlier question: can these outside sounds audibly resonate inside? There are fascinating examples of sounds outside the Commons-in-session audibly marking proceedings and vibrating into the chamber. In the recent past, the 2017 President Trump: State Visit debate, ¹⁴ in particular, acknowledges there are other voices that can be heard “off”: the collective protesting voice of those outside. ¹⁵

While today we have access to Parliamentary TV, in the official written documentary report of Parliamentary proceedings, Hansard, non-linguistic sounds and noise are officially rendered illegible. They cannot be comprehended. This edited verbatim report of all parliamentary debates, from which I was able to read the Commons sitting relating to the Greenham Common women and the Trump state visit debate, embeds such non‑linguistic, non-verbal sounds of applause, laughter, cheering, muttering in the House of Commons reports only when referred to explicitly in the speech of an MP. This includes what one MP, Mr Charles Walker, called “offstage noise” in his opening of the Trump debate.16 As such, non-linguistic sounds must be made legible, with reason and cause, and their action reported in speech, or else they are – as John Vice, editor of Hansard, told me – “almost always silently dropped”. ¹⁷

In the context of the Trump state visit debate, so as to make sure these protesting voices go on record as a vocal mass, a small number of MPs make reference to what they are hearing, appearing to know that without description in speech the voices of the public in Parliament Square will disappear out of the “official report”. Labour MP Tulip Siddiq calls on the house to listen:

If we listen carefully we can hear the thousands of people outside the House right now, saying they do not want Donald Trump to come to this country on a royal state visit. We have a duty to listen to those people and give them a voice. ¹⁸

Ushering the protest into the room, and into the report, two Labour MPs and two SNP MPs repeat “we can hear outside” in their contributions. Among them is MP Tasmina Ahmed Sheikh, who says “the voices we can hear outside are perhaps more demonstrative of who we are as a country of many nations than some of the voices we have heard in here today”. ¹⁹ Ahmed Sheikh rhetorically positions those outside as vital community, as “more demonstrative of who we are”, more the commons than the Commons.

Returning to MP Robert Hughes’ defence of the women of Greenham Common in the House of Commons debate of July 1983, what makes Hughes’s defence so striking, for me, is his focus on the voice of protest as “the voice of reason and dissent” . Like Ahmed Sheikh, Hughes stewards the voices outside from the square into the Commons by identifying their necessary value in providing critical feedback. Inside the House of Commons on that day in 1983, the case was made for the validation of transgressive voices, voices that “speak” in other ways. In the wake of the keening action I might even read in Hughes’ words a call to hear reason in the resonance of the Greenham Common protest in Parliament Square, a call to use the ear, in Veit Erlmann’s theorising, as “something we think with”. ^{20 21}

back to contents

back to contents