We're Doing Protest All Wrong

Matthew Bolton believes that all employers should pay a living wage. Which, of course, makes total sense. So as part of his work for pressure group Citizens UK, he tried to get the law changed to make the living wage mandatory. Mind you, he didn't do this in the most conventional of ways. Instead of meeting the employment minister, or sitting with heads of industry, he believed that the person who could really make change happen was a cleaner called Joanne.

Matthew met Joanne after handing out flyers in a British university, looking for the worst paid employees. Joanne had been working for the university for over 30 years on just over minimum wage. She never felt the need to move jobs, her employers were always polite to her. But she'd always felt that she wasn't respected by management; that she was being paid too little to live on.

Matthew told her he could improve her and her colleagues' wages. She just had to do what he said.

First, he said, she should recruit the other cleaners who looked up to her. Make them understand that they could improve their working conditions.

Joanne spoke to other service staff about their wages and treatment. She found that not only were they on similarly low wages, but that management refused to replace their equipment when it was broken, and would reduce their number of shifts with little warning. Matthew also told her to share her findings with professors and senior staff, who were shocked at some of the treatment and joined the cause.

The next step was to recruit people outside of the university, so the cleaners shared their stories with community leaders and businesses nearby. With more people onboard, Mathew created a video of everyone involved in the campaign and sent it to the vice-chancellor of the university.

Once they had a big enough support network and had confronted the source of power, the final thing to do, Matthew said, was protest.

Matthew organised a march through central London about low-pay. It was led by two Roman Catholic nuns sympathetic to the cause. A local newspaper caught wind of the story and went with the headline "Nun of You Can Come In". The story boosted the campaign, to the point that Matthew and the group were able to arrange a meeting weeks later with the vice-chancellor and university's head of finance, who claimed to not know the harsh realities of their cleaners' pay. The university immediately decided to introduce a living wage for their cleaners, along with a pension, sick pay and job security.

WATCH: How To Protest

Once you have a goal in mind, you need to find other people who share it, even if their motives are different. He gives the example of a man whose Muslim wife was the victim of racist abuse. The man lobbied for a review of hate crimes, but in doing so he found himself joining forces with feminist anti-hate groups, church activists and others. Ultimately, people don't need to have the same reasons for achieving your goal, as long as they want to help.

The final step is to confront the person who has the power to actually change things. If they don't respond in the way you'd hoped, this is where you protest. If you've already applied an amount of pressure, a protest appears like tactical power-move rather than a random show of anger.

This strategy is almost the exact opposite of the most notable protests of the past few years. The Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter and the Women's March, while all backing important causes, were very abstract campaigns with the loose aim of changing the very nature of society. What Bolton is proposing is a protest that's far more transactional, almost business-like.

"The funny thing about voting is that in many ways it's a sign of democracy, but it can also make you feel so disempowered. It's the minimum we have to do, but there's more," he tells me when we meet at a bakery in Peckham. "Protests like the Day of Rage [that followed Grenfell] are completely useless. They're not thought out or part of a plan, and they actually give protests a bad name."

To many, this attitude will be hard to swallow. Surely there have been protests that haven't necessarily achieved a specific goal, but show that there is a collective resistance towards a bad piece of legislation or foreign policy; that they won't be downtrodden; that they are standing together in solidarity.

"There's a time for that," says Bolton. "Look at the protest following Trump's Muslim ban: it was instant. It needed to happen just to show solidarity, but it was a lot more nuanced – there were taxi drivers refusing to give lifts from London airports, or lawyers helping people with paperwork. It was a show, but with some thought behind it."

That's essentially what Bolton's book preaches: a more methodical attitude to protest, one that prioritises methods over intent. "We don't have anything like my book," he says. "There's loads of books about why we ought to change the world, good things we ought to have in the world, but not how to do it. I'm not an author; I don't write this book as an author. I write this book as someone whose [job this is]. I'm training people to use these methods [so] everyone does it in their own world."

Bolton isn't trying to reach the seasoned activist. He says he's written the book "for the average angry person" – people who want to make a difference but feel like they can't. Those who "voted, marched and don't know what else to do". I, for one, know a lot of people who feel like that, and I'm sure you do too.

The living wage is still not a reality nationally, but the Tory government has continued to increase the minimum wage, and more organisations than ever are voluntarily agreeing to be Living Wage employers. Bolton is not claiming credit for changing national policy, but through many others like him working to change the situation from the ground up, we're closer to having a real living wage than at any time in history.

It could be time to heed his advice, and attempt more disciplined protest in other areas too.

How to Resist by Matthew Bolton. Bloomsbury. £9.99.

@RuchoSharma