dug 
I’ve been thinking about the ‘Gilets Jaunes’ movement that happened in France a few years ago. I’m trying to imagine what a similar movement in the UK would look like. A large group of broadly working class people decided they were pissed off at everything getting more expensive and their wages not keeping up. Reading about it, it seems like it stood out for having a greater proportion of women and first-time protesters. Also, members of the urban precariat were under-represented.
I try to imagine the LBC broadcast or the Vox pop from the protest. I just can’t imagine a group of anglo-saxons saying things like “we’re angry at the erosion of our buying power”. I mean we don’t even have the language to go there…
In France, the ‘Gilets Jaunes’ movement began with the price of fuel — with the basic sums of making it to the end of the month. And the blame ran straight upward: to the state, to the executive, to the centre of power. They went after the sovereign.
The wonderful thing about that moment is that a large group of working-class people are protesting angrily and nobody’s blaming immigrants or foreigners — they’re blaming their elected government.
In Britain, the same anxiety — flat wages, work that feels more precarious every year, public services buckling — gets offered a different outlet entirely. The other. The migrant. The small boat crossing the Channel.
It would be easy to turn this into nonsense about national character — the French revolt upward, the British blame sideways. But I doubt that’s true, and I think it’s the wrong lesson.
Maybe I only notice this because my defaults point the other way. I grew up in France, where marching alongside your teachers at fifteen was just something you did. The reflex it left me with is that anger goes up, towards the people who could actually fix things.
I once did one of those corporate culture questionnaires on a management course, and secretly hoped it would score me as English. It came back ninety per cent French. That stung, because I thought I’d moved past all that years ago — but apparently it’s wiring, not opinion.
So I’m not writing this as a neutral observer, and I’m certainly not exempt. I’m the one who keeps expecting the anger to travel upward, and keeps being puzzled when it slides sideways instead.
A grievance has no built-in direction. Someone writes it one.
The same economic suffering can travel vertically — toward the people with power, who might actually be able to mitigate the pain or bring about some change — or horizontally, toward a neighbour who can’t.
Which way it goes depends almost entirely on the stories available at the moment the anger arrives.
France in 2018 still had a living vocabulary for blaming the centre: a long republican habit of holding the state responsible for the common good. The anger had somewhere upward to go, so it went there.
Britain’s centre-left seems to have largely abandoned that vocabulary, and so the entrepreneur with the clearest, most human-shaped villain on offer steps into that vacuum.
Sideways is simply the path of least resistance when no one is making the case for up.
Just to be clear, this comparison flatters no one. France has its own powerful sideways channel with Marine Le Pen wearing the rosette. The Gilets Jaunes had their ugly moments too.
The difference isn’t moral. It’s structural. It’s about who happens to be holding the microphone (or who is funding the microphone) when people are frightened, and what they choose to say into it.
What frightens me currently is how cheaply the anger of precarity can be redirected, and how few voices are bothering to point it upward instead of at my Jewish or non-white neighbour.