11.08.2004

Popular expression and human values

British Museum Status symbols: identity and belief on modern badges free entrance, ends January 2005

I fondly recall my ‘official communist’ mam busting into our front room from a Saturday afternoon shopping trip in Swansea in the 1970s, breathlessly telling me that her newly acquired Anti-Nazi League badge (the ‘official’ CPGB initially held aloof from the ANL because of the influence of ‘the Trots’) had got her into conversation with all manner of people sporting the same: “Young people, OAPs, punks” - her eyes widening at this last, newly arrived category in our dozy south Wales city. “Get your badge on and get down the town,” she told me in her contradiction-proof voice, jerking her thumb in the general direction of the bus stop. “And take some copies of Challenge with you” (the Young Communist League’s paper of the time).

It was a real pleasure to come across an example of the same ANL badge that adorned my mam’s coat on that far-off day in this fascinating new exhibition staged by the British Museum’s department of coins and medals. Other lefties who visit are bound to have similar little twinges of nostalgia, as they look round the display, despite the fact that the number of badges on show is quite severely limited by the cramped space available.

Amanda Gregory, the designer, has, though, used the space well. She can only give us a taste of the huge stock the department has accumulated since it started its collection in 1906, just 10 years after the tin lapel badge first made its appearance. But what she has put together is a thoroughly engaging glimpse of the bigger collection.

The exhibits are grouped thematically - race, war and peace, icons, sexual politics, neighbourhood and nationality, etc - which makes for some interesting juxtapositions. This structure has it strengths, but perhaps it gives too much credit to the right. After all, I’m sure many readers can recall the ubiquitous ‘I didn’t vote Tory’ badges touted by the ‘official communists’ in the early 1980s. (I occasionally run into a slightly flaky old member of the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain who still sports a dilapidated example … and on the same 1980s blazer, it seems). But can any reader recall actually ever seeing a pro-Thatcher badge, a ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’ or a ‘Support Desert Storm’ pin? So the exhibition itself perhaps has an imbalance in its presentation, though this is redressed in its companion book by the museum’s curator of badges (great job title), Philip Attwood, and on the museum’s website (www.thebritishmu-seum.ac.uk).

Attwood describes the antecedents of the modern badge in the first mass-produced examples in Rome during the 12th century - they depicted St Peter and St Paul and were purchased by pilgrims to show their devotion and as proof of their pilgrimage. Members of guilds (associations of merchants or craftsmen) then started wearing badges to indicate their professional status. Cheap and quick badge-making technology later captured the imagination of campaigners: in 1807 William Wilberforce ordered 50,000 anti-slavery medals.

However, the badge as a genuinely mass form of protest grew qualitatively in the 1960s. Since that heady decade, we have seen an explosion in the volume and variety of political badges. Attwood explains this by the “trend towards more informal dress” and the rise of “a culture of protest” (P Attwood Badges British Museum, p28). True, and this rise was also underpinned (no pun intended) by some technical developments. In the 1970s, the London Emblem Company responded to this new market by starting to sell cheap, easy to use, hand-operated badge-making machines. These quickly became very popular. (Badge-making kits were apparently Britain’s best-selling Xmas toys in 2003). Any political group, campaign or even individual with an ounce of gumption could now produce a range of original badges to publicise their political cause/personal hobbyhorse and to raise funds. The floodgates were open …

I think Attwood points to something important which explains “the popularity of the political badge” when he suggests that they chart a “growing, if unproven, belief that ‘ordinary’ people can help make a difference”. Thus, the exhibition constitutes something more than a colourful collection of oddities: it represents “material evidence of this gradual change” in consciousness, “as well as a visual record of the crucial events and transitory issues that together constitute history” (p14).
This is the point. Overwhelmingly, the history of the badge in the 20th century has been that of the struggles of the oppressed, of the working class and progressive movement. This form of popular expression has been seized on and made its own by the left. The right and privileged sections may occasionally respond. (For example, the exhibition features ‘White Power’ badges alongside those of the Black Panther Party; a ‘Love Maggie’ response to the left’s ‘I didn’t vote Tory’ and pro-Vietnam war pins). However, the form is not a natural one for them. The political badge has become a medium for dissent from the status quo, for protest and radically confrontational statements. (Just think of two Rik Mayall creations from the 1980s. First, the nerdy student revolutionary, Rick, from The young ones. Then the self-serving pond-slime that was the Tory MP Alan B’stard in the New Statesman. Who looked more natural festooned in badges?)

Thus, it is instructive that the badges in this exhibition also chart a history of many defeats for the left. From ‘Tony Benn for deputy’, to ‘Coal not dole’, the ‘Official Wapping picket’ and the ‘Support Timex workers’; from ‘Don’t attack Iraq’ to the 1970s ‘Solidarity with the people of Chile’, to the poignant 1969 ‘US out of Guantanamo Bay, end the blockade of Cuba’. If Philip Attwood is right that these small bits of metal are a visual record of the events that “constitute history”, the terrible history of defeats for the progressive left in the last century could have you leaving the museum with the firm conviction to throw yourself under the 73 bus.

Actually, the opposite is true. This small exhibition should be a quietly uplifting and inspiring event for any leftwinger. It underlines that it has been the communists and the left in contemporary society that have actually been the standard-bearers for general human values, even when these have been distorted through the prism of particular political trends like Stalinism. The mass culture from below this has engendered - including in the apparently ‘frivolous’ form of the political badge - has had real vitality and at its best embodied genuinely noble values and aspirations. True, the miners lost the Great Strike of 1984-85. But then, we had all the songs, the poems, the festivals, the joyous marches, the plays, pantomimes - and the badges, of course. Apparently, there was a ‘Privatise the pits’ badge at the time, but I’m not surprised I never saw one. Given the mood of the masses of people, wearers would have had their teeth kicked down their throat. Millions consciously voted for Thatcher due to what they knew to be a narrow self-interest: you didn’t meet people who were proud enough of that sentiment to wear it on their lapel.

Today, left badge-making collectives - such as Campaign Badges - abound. The volume of their output over the past few years has been massive - the Stop the War Coalition produced 200,000 ‘Not in my name’ anti-war badges alone. If you didn’t spot one, what planet were you on?

There is an important point about the political badge as a personal advert for your beliefs. Yes, the preponderance of badges of the left underlines that we have been a movement of protest against the established order. But the absence of mass, popular, rightwing examples - certainly in the second half of the 20th century - underlines that the left has also been widely perceived of as representing something more decent in human terms than the right. Imagine a badge bearing the legend that encapsulates an attitude to life along the lines of ‘Me, I’m satisfied with my lot, am creepily deferential to my betters and really couldn’t care a fuck about any other human being’. Just not sexy, is it?

Lastly, it is a shame that the museum’s web-based introduction to the exhibition for “children” attempts to depoliticise the form to an extent. On the adult equivalent, of the 12 badges featured, nine are political/campaigning examples. On the children’s section, only two of the six are political and the intro to the section tells young people that badges are an “easy way to show the world what they believe in. Instead of going about the streets shouting, ‘I love Busted!’, they can wear a Busted badge.”

Given that 2003 saw tens of thousands of school students - rather patronisingly referred to as “children” by the mainstream media - take heroic strike action, join the largest demonstrations in world history against the war and go about the streets shouting their lungs out about rather more weighty matters than the dubious merits of Busted, the tone of this seems curiously misplaced.
That’s a quibble, however. This is an interesting, if limited, exhibition. See it if you can.