Statues and Statutes

 

If we needed any more proof of the Government's inherent illiberalism, and the range of prejudice and bigotry that accompanies it, the last week has surely provided a surfeit. The awful murder of Sarah Everard was a shocking example of how, allegedly, the mere impression of acting on state authority can be misused to appalling ends. 

Yet the response of Boris Johnson and Home Secretary Priti Patel has been to seize the moment to propagandise and push through even stronger laws to control and squash the citizenry - literally hours after the terrifying image of a 5foot2 woman thrown to the ground and cuffed face down by police as they broke up the vigil for Sarah on Clapham Common, one of the last places she passed through alive. The apparent circumstances of her murder prompted women and men to come to remember her and to "reclaim the night", just as women did decades ago when Peter Sutcliffe's killings in Yorkshire led to the authorities telling women not to go out alone, a suggestion echoed in the wake of this latest murder. The same authorities had the option of allowing an organised, socially distanced gathering, but chose instead to deploy public health rules to forcibly break up the spontaneous one that took place anyway.

In as tone deaf an example of misogyny as you could get, the Government's proposed initiative to protect women now is to deploy large numbers of undercover police to trawl post-lockdown pubs and clubs to identify and supposedly detain potential rapists and murderers. With the endorsement of Opposition Leader Keir Starmer, the alleged misdeeds of one police officer will apparently be solved by having more police officers mixing secretly with the public.

Except we know how that has gone in the past. Police spies infiltrated a wide range of peaceful groups, particularly in the environmental movement but also trade unions, race justice groups and others pursuing perfectly legal aims. 

Supposedly to remain undercover, some of them developed relationships with women activists, living with them and even fathering children before disappearing. Some acted as agents provocateurs, initiating others to commit often trivial offences but offences nevertheless that got them criminal records and were used by the state to tighten legislation against its opponents. One case, highlighted repeatedly by Green Party MP Caroline Lucas using parliamentary privilege, allegedly involved a police officer setting off a bomb outside a department store in order to frame an animal rights activist.  

In this new paradigm, how far will undercover duties involve officers mingling in night clubs acting "in role"? What potential is there for abuse of position and power to do quite the opposite to protection? Rather than acting to counter the cultural objectification of women, it seems more a very conscious misrepresentation of a terrible event to enable an ever-creeping interference in normal social life and activities.

Yet this same week's Policing bill uses precisely the zeitgeist of peaceful activism as a national secruity threat to enact the most draconian legislation in our history - now past its second reading in the Commons, the new laws as they stand will make it illegal to protest too loudly, or to "cause annoyance" to even one person. If you commit such an appalling excess, you can face ten years in jail.

The legislation is clearly pitched at environmental protests such as Extinction Rebellion - demonised by a former police officer's report for the rightwing Policy Exchange thinktank in 2019 and listed as an extremist ideology by Counter-Terrorist police a few months later. Also in sight are initiatives like the Black Lives Matter protests last summer and many of the anti-fracking protests that spiked the attempts to destroy swathes of the English countryside in the entirely unnecessary search for shale gas. While most fracking is now cancelled or on indefinite hold, the Tories' funders have long and unforgiving memories and a long backstory has been created all the way back to David Cameron's Coalition era pledge to crackdown on "non-violent extremism". 

Be too different (travelling communities will now be required to have special identity cards), or too radical and it doesn't matter how pacific or law abiding you are, you are still an annoyance - a decade in the clink beckons.

Attack a woman, of course, is a different matter. Almost simultaneously to passing the policing legislation, the Government turned down a range of proposals to make it easier to protect women facing domestic violence and to turn misogyny into a hate crime, although a very recent concession will involve recording gender and sex-based crimes where these are judged to be factors. In a blatant lie, the ill-titled Safeguarding Minister appeared on TV to claim that hate legislation is "mainly for minority groups" and  as women are the majority, it couldn't apply to them.

Never in the field of British politics have so many been misled so much by the guardians of the few. To paraphrase that Tory icon, Winston Churchill.

Unlike women, though, this much "white"-washed character, with his very mixed legacy of wartime leadership, anti-Indian racism and sexist jibes about women's faces, is carefully protected: deface Churchill's statue, or those of any of

the slave traders and mercantilist thieves that grace our cities, and a special place awaits you in Patel Hell. For, it seems, these lumps of Victorian marble that stare down silently on largely disinterested people, who barely give them a passing glance, are integral parts of our national culture. And the snowflake fascists can't bear the idea of anyone disrespecting them by doing something like drawing attention to the historical facts of their icons' lives and deeds - leading to a police guard being set around Churchill's image near Scotland Yard this week, just in case. 

It seems that when the Left disagree vocally with something, such as Rees Mogg speaking at a university or an AltRight candidate speculating about raping a Labour MP, this is "political correctness gone mad" and "cancel culture" - even although the perpetrators are pretty free to carry on sounding off as much as they like: witness the oaf Piers Morgan's tantrum when he was criticised by a weather presenter over his highly personalised attack on Meghan Markle last week. He chose to walk, but no one made him. No one actually shut him up - someone simply disagreed with his pompous bombast.

But now, block a road with a demonstration, shout too loudly or spoil someone's enjoyment of their day by warning about climate catastrophe, or campaigning about racism - or remembering a murdered woman...  and the freedom-loving Tories will lock you up for the next decade. The same people who wax lyrical, tearfully even, about the Magna Carta and mythical English rights to avoid wearing face masks during a deadly pandemic will incarcerate those who offend or annoy them. Cancel culture deluxe.

So we face what so many of us have long feared and warned about - post-purple wave, the Conservatives are no longer small state advocates, but rather Big Statists. Not the sort who want to use the state to better lives, or at least not the lives of all. Instead, they are seizing and deploying state power to embed themselves and their friends and funders into the ownership of the nation. 

The market system, bad though it was, is decaying, replaced not with the common good, but instead with the rise of  the nobility of Varoufakis' "techno-feudalism". This is now a place where an Etonian chumocracy acquires the state and its authority to preserve and extend their writ indefinitely, and where  the last serious socialist challenge to its ascendancy is demonised into a hate-filled totem of fear and loathing; Jeremy Corbyn channelled as the Emmanuel Goldstein of the 21st century.

A place where the future is a boot - a copper's boot - stamping on the face of change, the face of hope. Forever.

And yet, thousands commemorated Sarah Everard around the country; thousands turned up outside Parliament to oppose the new legislation. And hundreds of thousands joined the BLM protests and XR actions. You can kill the canary if you like, but the fires are still burning - our species and our planet are at severe risk; people still demand justice - for racial minorities, for the female majority and for all society. No politician can legislate these truths away. 

And we won't let them.

The Time of Monsters

It's almost passe to say the world is in turmoil. And while to some degree it always has been, a glance at today's news shows just how much: mass street protests from Baghdad through Beirut to Barcelona and beyond to Chile. Governments in paralysis of one kind or another in Israel, the UK, Canada, the USA. Violent protests in Hong Kong, military conflict in Rojava,Yemen... and so on.

Underpinning all of it are two consistent factors. Extreme levels of economic inequality, often accompanied by increasingly visible poverty, and a collapse of faith in political classes seen as self-serving, corrupt and alienated from the Governed. Liberal democracy is teetering on the edge, its once universal nostrums of elected parliaments overseeing a modicum of public services in market economies with private property and supposedly "free enterprise" stripped bare and exposed for the lies that they have been.

Increasingly, we see the vast wealth accumulated by tiny, tiny portions of the population, acquired through a hypocritical combination of ripping off taxpayers through state-appointed contracts for tens if not hundreds of billions of pounds, euros or dollars and in turn corporate and personal tax avoidance. As the system slowly breaks down, no longer responding to the macroeconomic management of the past fifty or sixty years, the social contract is under ever growing pressure.

While as many as two million domestic properties are empty each night in the UK, 25,000 people sleep on the streets. While hedge fund managers speculate and earn millions betting on the future price of food, "gig" economy workers die at 53 years of age because they can't afford time off to visit their doctor - and in one recent Amazon case, they are sent back to work immediately the removal of the corpse of a colleague who collapsed and died on shift after being told to get on with his job by the company doctor.

Globally, resources once prized as being for the common good of all - such as the rainforests and natural sources of water - are seized and commodified by multinational companies with the backing of compliant governments and international agencies such as the World Trade Organisation. Trade treaties like the EU-Canada partnership allow companies to sue the taxpayer if, for example, a hospital contract is taken back into public hands, damaging the private firms profits. The whole system is stacked in favour of the wealthy becoming ever wealthier, even at the huge risk it creates to the future of life on Earth. As the Roman writer Tacitus once lamented of his own society's colonising of all it could grab hold of, "they make a desert, and call it peace."

Here there are dangers and opportunities, and both are already becoming nakedly apparent.

Unreformed, the system will stumble on, the super-rich gradually incorporating it even further to serve their own ends through funnelling public contracts and taxpayer cash into their ever deeper pockets. They will continue to extend surveillance over everyone else, initially in the name of consumer support, but already to control our thoughts, expectations and actions. In such a culture, they will continue to foster and sponsor division - between old and young, white and black, indigenous and migrant. They will fund wars and build walls. To divide is to conquer.

We can see the fruits of this just this week - a survey in the UK, divided between pro- and anti-Brexit supporters, found that a substantial majority on both sides support violence where people can be seriously injured as a valid means of achieving their respective objectives of remaining in or leaving the European Union. This includes those who claim to be anti-populist liberals, their anti-democratic prejudices showing a bit more nakedly than their leaders' spin doctors might ideally like. While actual political violence against individuals remains relatively rare in Britain, we only have to look at the 2016 murder of Jo Cox and the death threats routine received by her successor and other predominantly female MPs to sense that it doesn't lurk far beneath the surface.

Political violence in the USA has risen sharply in recent years - many of the mass shootings covered so luridly as the work of unstable loners in truth the work of politically motivated fascists and white supremacists, while a 2018 survey found that one in five Americans on both sides of the mainstream political divide felt that the country would be improved if a large number of  supporters of the other party could "just die". Similarly, 17% of Democrats and 24% of Republicans believe that is is acceptable to send threats to public officials. One in ten support violence if the candidate of their choice doesn't win the 2020 Presidential election.

In "The Common Good", the linguist Noam Chomsky wrote that “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....”

Noam Chomsky

This could not be truer than now. The poisonous Brexit debate in the UK has pitched ordinary people against each other in ways that have destroyed any faith in ballot box democracy and in each other: different groups denounce each other as traitors and morons, both sides parade guillotines and scaffolds on marches and politics have growing into a new form of sectarianism. Facts do not matter on either side: it is sheer, naked, visceral hatred and distrust. All in the name of what type of trading relationship we have with a free trade block which in truth is neither the colonising behemoth claimed by its opponents, nor the guarantor of civilisation claimed by its supporters.

Happily skating above all this, moving with some ease between both camps, is a rich elite, untouched and unmoved by whether the UK is in the EU or not, but either way continuing to rip off society on an almost unparalleled scale and quite content for the paralysis and division to continue: for as long as it does, they are unchallenged and untroubled. The real issues are ignored.

We can take on the rich and make a better future. For we already live in a world of abundance. There is already more than enough food to feed almost 50% more souls than currently walk our Earth. And just this week a study showed that offshore wind power alone could provide more energy that the world is every likely to need - clean, cheap, and permanent. Artificial Intelligence is posited to "do" almost half of current paid human work by just 2030 - a decent society could use that to give every worker 4 day weekends. A capitalist society will put half of the workforce on the dole: it won't pay a company to keep humans on where robots can take over.

The choice seems obvious, but with all the vested interests and established Power in place, change will not come easily. It will take much more than a visit to the ballot box once every four or five years. The mass demonstrations we see around the planet now have to be the harbingers of wider, deeper change.

But first, we need to make peace with each other and turn together on the real issue, the real problem before the Monsters in charge of our world finally make a desert of it and continue to charge us admission to the "Peace Experience."