‘It’s a free country!’ we in Britain are routinely told. But is it? What exactly does it mean, this freedom that our extolled political leaders and ‘free’ press continually spout about?
Is justice meted out to those perpetrating conscious crimes against the people? Are those who illegally accused and jailed post office submasters held to account? Are water company bosses punished for putting profit before people and allowing raw sewage to poison our rivers and drinking water?
Are we able to access legitimate information online? Is justice through our courts administered objectively regardless of class? Have Julian Assange and or NHS whistleblowers been dealt with righteously?
When we see that none of the candidates standing in a general election are going to represent our interests, do we have the same access to resources to put up alternative contenders? Can we peacefully demonstrate and use civil disobedience and other collective actions to convey our disagreement with what is done by leaders (of the free world) in our name?
The short answer is no.
Imagine living in a society where the right to protest is heavily curtailed. Where you can be jailed for five years because your protest caused a traffic jam. Where for no legal reason your passport is taken away and you are grounded. Where police are given powers to arrest as terrorists ordinary people, just like you, who have merely used their democratic right to demonstrate against crimes such as ruling-class complicity in the genocide of the Palestinian people. Where the rules determining the parameters of our democratic rights are advocated by unelected lobbyists working for the very organisations that undermine our so-called democracy.
Welcome to Britain. Welcome to the collective west – home of the self-appointed ‘leaders of the free world’.
Lord Walney, aka John Woodcock, is an unelected ex-Labour, ex-independent MP, now ‘non-party political’ (but very far from independent) crossbench peer, who was appointed to his current position following Tory prime minister Boris Johnson’s 2019 election win. His latest incarnation is as Britain’s anti-extremism tsar, tasked with investigating ‘domestic extremism’ (ie, those who do or say anything in public that might undermine the state, which is the new, broadened definition of ‘extremism’.
Lord Walney, who was appointed to his non-salaried (but undoubtedly not unrewarded) role as ‘independent adviser on political violence and disruption’ in November 2020. Which all sounds perfectly reasonable. After all, it goes without saying that we all want to live in a safe society. But working out how to create such a thing is not actually within John’s remit.
What his paymasters want is to maintain a society in which they are free to continue their rape and pillage of the world’s resources; their exploitation of the world’s people, preferably while maintaining the illusion that despite all this we live in a ‘free’ and ‘democratic’ society.
In order to truly understand John’s objective, it is necessary to read between the lines a little. We must question the basis of the language used by politicians and media to present the case that legal reforms which undermine our democratic rights are somehow ‘for our own good’. They are certainly for the good of someone, or they wouldn’t be being pushed so hard, but who exactly?
An analysis of a recent Times article highlighting Lord Walney’s report on ‘political violence and disruption’ helps us to understand the importance of language and how it is used to manipulate us into accepting the steady erosion of long-standing democratic rights that most Britons have been brought up to believe are permanently enshrined in our laws and social framework.
The language of manipulation
Walney himself has said that proscription could give police extra tools for balancing the right to protest against the cumulative effect of weekly marches through central London. Proscription – meaning outlawing, forbidding, banning, excluding, vetoing. The opposite of democratic, in fact.
Giving the police ‘extra tools’, in plain English means introducing new laws that curtail and curb what remain of the basic pillars of the democratic freedoms we have been led to believe are ours by right. It now appears that we only get to have and keep these privileges if we promise not to exert our right to use them in any meaningful way. It seems that when people unite behind a single issue in such a way as to embarrass, expose or undermine the government – or, heaven forfend, in such a way as to garner wide popular support – then our ‘democratic rights’ are up for debate.
Walney has also said that the risk from the “extreme far left seeking to undermine institutions and the basic democratic principles that have underpinned our country for many years” have been “underappreciated”.
Who are these ‘extreme far-left’ actors? Is he referring to the millions of ordinary people who have marched through in British cities nearly every weekend since last October, protesting against the genocide of a people they don’t know much about but nevertheless recognise have the moral right to live in peace in their own land without being bombed to oblivion by weapons that our own government is providing?
Is he talking about all the pensioners, children, teenagers, jews, muslims, christians and others who have taken to Britain’s streets to call for an end to this abomination? This cross section of the good people who make up our population?
In a word, yes. What he is saying is that the establishment is nervous that socialist and anti-imperialist ideas are likely to spread in the current conditions of austerity and war, and so the legal framework must be adjusted to try to prevent the possibility of a working-class challenge arising that could ‘undermine’ the warmongering and profiteering of British monopoly capital.
Freedom to deny truth
Walney has also expressed concern over the “many months that the police do seem limited in what they’re able to do to balance people’s right to protest with the cumulative impact of having marches through central London on a weekly or very regular basis”.
That is: while it might be acceptable to demonstrate and express one’s opposition now and again, letting off a little steam in a harmless fashion, the frequency and extent of said protests should be limited. Why?
Perhaps regular protests convey a depth of feeling that is embarrassing to our government? Perhaps a growing and dedicated movement might build momentum and the potential to start to undermine the ‘business as usual’ genocide-backing working-class-attacking status quo?
Even more worrying, perhaps consciousness might begin to grow amongst those opposing the Gaza genocide and Britain’s involvement in it? What if people began to understand something about the true nature of Anglo-American imperialism and its zionist proxies? What if they began to realise that they don’t, in fact, live in a democracy, and that those they vote into office do not in fact represent their interests or respond to their wishes? What would that do for the sustainability of our great British democracy (ie, for the rule of Britain’s financier elite)?
Lord Walney did not express any concern about the genocide that so many Britons have been peacefully marching to protest against. Every week they march, in their hundreds of thousands, without incident. He didn’t express admiration at their endurance and tenacity, nor at their humanity and restrained behaviour despite their government’s blatant rebuff of their clearly expressed concerns.
That is extremism! That is where the investigation into a withering of democratic expression should truly be directed. Millions of people express their opposition to government criminality, and receive not a single direct word of acknowledgement from their government. They are met, in fact, only with a proposal to curtail their right to express that opposition.
We should all be infuriated!
Walney said that the demonstrations were making “sizeable parts of our jewish community … apprehensive at best about going into the centre of the city”. He presumably wasn’t referring to the sizeable number of jewish people who have been participating in the marches. He must have been talking about the minority of jewish zionists supporting (indeed, publicly gloating over) the genocide of Palestinians.
We should bear in mind that Lord Walney, in one of his other incarnations, is chair of the Purpose Business Coalition, an organisation run by the PR and lobbying firm Crowne Associates, which counts oil company BP and arms company Leonardo among its clients. The very same interests that zionist Israel serves.
He added: “There has been a substantial level of criminality and disorder and antisemitic content around the margins of the marches.” Here we can wholeheartedly agree. White supremacist, fascist groups have attempted to disrupt the Gaza marches and to perpetrate violence – and this is where the police should be actively working: to prevent violent saboteurs from undermining the marchers’ right to peaceful protest.
Democracy for the rich
One of Walney’s recommendations was that organisations such as Palestine Action and Just Stop Oil should be proscribed in a similar way to terrorist groups. Apparently in the government’s view there’s no difference between a group of armed mercenaries bombing or shooting innocent people and the peaceful protesting of British citizens concerned with fighting for justice or worrying over the impact of climate change.
Other recommendations included: that protest groups should compensate people whose lives they disrupt by, for instance, holding up ambulances, causing losses to businesses or preventing students from attending lectures.
We can’t help wondering how Lord Walney would respond to the application of the same principle to weapons manufacturers. Will he recommend that they should be asked to pay reparations to the families of those their weapons have killed and whose homes and businesses have been destroyed? Will he ask the government to insist that arms profits should be used to rebuild the infrastructure that British-made bombs destroy?
And what about the politicians whose inaction perpetuates the continuation of a genocide? Will Lord Walney recommend that they too should pay compensation and face prison time?
Hardly. What he has actually said is that the intense social pressure over the conflict in Palestine has put democracy “under strain and under threat” because MPs who support the genocide are being “targeted” (ie, protested against by outraged constituents, whose interests they are clearly uninterested in representing).
According to Walney, lawmakers are facing “violent threats and intimidation”. Perhaps the fact that at least 180 of Britain’s 650 MPs in the last parliament accepted funding from pro-Israel lobby groups or individuals during their political career might have something to do with their constituents attempting to hold them to account?
One MP thus ‘targeted’ was former Conservative MP for Stroud Siobhan Baillie, who had effigies of blood-soaked babies left outside her office. In her view, this was illustrative not of how upset her constituents are about her support for Israeli war crimes, but of the vile and polarised nature of political discourse in Britain.
Neither Baillie nor the mainstream journalists who reported the incident mentioned that she was a member of, and received funding from, the Conservative Friends of Israel group. The connection between her vile support for a genocidal regime that is massacring babies on a daily basis and her ‘targeting’ by a visually upsetting but entirely peaceful act of protest from her own constituents was carefully avoided, leaving readers with the impression that the protest was somehow irrational and the distress with which they should empathise was not that of the bereaved families in Palestine but of the highly-paid enabler of their calamity in rural England.
Democratic rewrites
What is becoming clearer by the day is that our ‘democratic rights’ are a fiction that will be maintained for only so long as they serve the ruling class. If any form of opposition to the established order becomes too obvious, powerful or inconvenient, the state will act, within or without the law, to maintain its rule by limiting or outlawing entirely whichever democratic freedoms are facilitating that opposition.
A recent indicator of this intention was the four-to-five-year jail sentences imposed on Just Stop Oil activists after they were convicted of “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance”.
The activists were sentenced under legislation recently introduced by the last Tory government, which aimed to enable a tougher response to the disruptive tactics used by environmental protesters such as blocking roads or interrupting sporting events. So now it seems that the reward for peaceful protest is five years in jail. So much for democratic values!
When sentencing the activists at Southwark crown court, the judge said that while “at least some of the concerns [of the defendants] are shared by many”, they had crossed a line “from concerned campaigner to fanatic”. It appears that whilst it is ok to be concerned about issues, we must avoid any depth of feeling if we wish to avoid legal repercussions.
Because we should be in no doubt, while the Just Stop Oil judgement pretended to be targeting environmentalists, and more recent moves to overhaul our judicial processes pretend to be targeting racist rioters, the real target of these measures is the working class, and in particular the growing anti-imperialist core of the Palestine solidarity movement.
So, perhaps it would be safer to stay off the streets? Perhaps instead of demonstrating against Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians we should just comment on social media? But no, hold on, we can’t do that either! Recent raids and arrests of online journalists like Richie Medhurst and Sarah Wilkinson under anti-terror legislation make it clear that opposition expressed in any way to the genocide is becoming intolerable to the establishment.
Following the Just Stop Oil activists’ sentencing, some members of the establishment expressed disquiet. A United Nations human rights commissioner condemned the measures as “deeply troubling” and “disproportionate”. Former justice secretary and lord chancellor Lord Falconer of Thoroton said the sentences made him feel “very uncomfortable”. Not necessarily uncomfortable about the injustice; more likely uncomfortable about their potential to engender a popular reaction and expose the iron fist behind the velvet glove of British bourgeois democracy.
Such sentences should make everyone feel more than ‘uncomfortable’. They have nothing to do with the rights and wrongs of Just Stop Oil’s arguments or their activities. They signal a perceptible change in the management of the illusion that we live in a free and democratic society, in which our voice matters, our vote influences and our opinions hold weight.
As in the case of Julian Assange, they are a warning and a call to action – one we ignore at our peril.
The dangers of complacency in the face of repression
In its most extreme manifestation, when it is no longer possible to maintain the illusion of democracy, fascism takes over the running of imperialist societies, just as it is frequently used to control restive colonial populations.
A recent statement from the Home Office said: “The right to protest is a cornerstone of our democracy but there are clear concerns about the cumulative impact protests are having on some of our communities which we are looking at.” (Our emphasis)
The only right Lord Walney and his establishment handlers are really interested in is the right of Britain’s tiny imperialist ruling class to continue to dominate and loot the territories and peoples of the world. They aim to uphold a democracy for the rich that is based on lies, falsehoods and hypocrisy, while strengthening the dictatorship of capital over the rest of us.
