Published on
Wednesday, March 24, 2021
byCommon Dreams
We Are Living Through a Time of FearNot Just of the Virus, but of Each
Other
What the UK's Police and Crime Bill does, like similar legislation in the US
and Europe, is to declare some protests as legitimate and others as not.
byJonathan Cook
Police horses are deployed as they hold back people outside Bridewell Police
Station as they take part in a 'Kill the Bill' protest in Bristol,
demonstrating against the Government's controversial Police and Crime Bill.
Picture date: Sunday March 21, 2021. (Photo by Andrew Matthews/PA Images via
Getty Images)
Police horses are deployed as they hold back people outside Bridewell Police
Station as they take part in a 'Kill the Bill' protest in Bristol,
demonstrating against the Government's controversial Police and Crime Bill.
Picture date: Sunday March 21, 2021. (Photo by Andrew Matthews/PA Images via
Getty Images)
Welcome to the age of fear. Nothing is more corrosive of the democratic
impulse than fear. Left unaddressed, it festers, eating away at our
confidence and empathy.
We are now firmly in a time of fearnot only of the virus, but of each
other. Fear destroys solidarity. Fear forces us to turn inwards to protect
ourselves and our loved ones. Fear refuses to understand or identify with
the concerns of others.
In fear societies, basic rights become a luxury. They are viewed as a
threat, as recklessness, as a distraction that cannot be afforded in this
moment of crisis.
Once fear takes hold, populations risk agreeing to hand back rights, won
over decades or centuries, that were the sole, meagre limit on the power of
elites to ransack the common wealth. In calculations based on fear, freedoms
must make way for other priorities: being responsible, keeping safe,
averting danger.
Worse, rights are surrendered with our consent because we are persuaded that
the rights themselves are a threat to social solidarity, to security, to our
health.
'Too noisy' protests
It is therefore far from surprising that the UK's draconian new Police and
Crime Billconcentrating yet more powers in the policehas arrived at this
moment. It means that the police can prevent non-violent protest that is
likely to be too noisy or might create "unease" in bystanders. Protesters
risk being charged with a crime if they cause "nuisance" or set up protest
encampments in public places, as the Occupy movement did a decade ago.
And damaging memorialstotems especially prized in a time of fear for their
power to ward off dangercould land protesters, like those who toppled a
statue to notorious slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol last summer, a
10-year jail sentence.
In other words, this is a bill designed to outlaw the right to conduct any
demonstration beyond the most feeble and ineffective kind. It makes
permanent current, supposedly extraordinary limitations on protest that were
designed, or so it was said, to protect the public from the immediate threat
of disease.
Protest that demands meaningful change is always noisy and disruptive. Would
the suffragettes have won women the vote without causing inconvenience and
without offending vested interests that wanted them silent?
What constitutes too much noise or public nuisance? In a time of permanent
pandemic, it is whatever detracts from the all-consuming effort to
extinguish our fear and insecurity. When we are afraid, why should the
police not be able to snatch someone off the street for causing "unease"?
The UK bill is far from unusual. Similar legislationagainst noisy,
inconvenient and disruptive protestis being passed in states across the
United States. Just as free speech is being shut down on the grounds that we
must not offend, so protest is being shut down on the grounds that we must
not disturb.
From the outbreak of the virus, there were those who warned that the
pandemic would soon serve as a pretext to take away basic rights and make
our societies less free. Those warnings soon got submerged in, or drowned
out by, much wilder claims, such as that the virus was a hoax or that it was
similar to flu, or by the libertarian clamour against lockdowns and
mask-wearing.
Binary choices
What was notable was the readiness of the political and media establishments
to intentionally conflate and confuse reasonable and unreasonable arguments
to discredit all dissent and lay the groundwork for legislation of this
kind.
The purpose has been to force on us unwelcome binary choices. We are either
in favour of all lockdowns or indifferent to the virus' unchecked spread. We
are either supporters of enforced vaccinations or insensitive to the threat
the virus poses to the vulnerable. We are either responsible citizens
upholding the rules without question or selfish oafs who are putting
everyone else at risk.
A central fracture line has opened upin part a generational onebetween
those who are most afraid of the virus and those who are most afraid of
losing their jobs, of isolation and loneliness, of the damage being done to
their children's development, of the end of a way of life they valued, or of
the erasure of rights they hold inviolable.
The establishment has been sticking its crowbar into that split, trying to
prise it open and turn us against each other.
'Kill the Bill'
Where this heads was only too visible in the UK at the weekend when
protesters took to the streets of major cities. They did soin another
illustration of binary choices that now dominate our livesin violation of
emergency Covid regulations banning protests. There was a large march
through central London, while another demonstration ended in clashes between
protesters and police in Bristol.
What are the protestersmost peaceful, a few nottrying to achieve? In the
media, all protest at the moment is misleadingly lumped together as
"anti-lockdown", appealing to the wider public's fear of contagion spread.
But that is more misdirection: in the current, ever-more repressive climate,
all protest must first be "anti-lockdown" before it can be protest.
The truth is that the demonstrators are out on the streets for a wide
variety of reasons, including to protest against the oppressive new Police
and Crime Bill, under the slogan "Kill the Bill."
There are lots of well-founded reasons for people to be angry or worried at
the moment. But the threat to that most cherished of all social freedomsthe
right to protestdeserves to be at the top of the list.
If free speech ensures we have some agency over our own minds, protest
allows us to mobilise collectively once we have been persuaded of the need
and urgency to act. Protest is the chance we have to alert others to the
strength of our feelings and arguments, to challenge a consensus that may
exist only because it has been manufactured by political and media elites,
and to bring attention to neglected or intentionally obscured issues.
Speech and protest are intimately connected. Free speech in one's own
homelike free speech in a prison cellis a very stunted kind of freedom. It
is not enough simply to know that something is unjust. In democratic
societies, we must have the right to do our best to fix injustice.
Cast out as heretics
Not so long ago, none of this would have needed stating. It would have been
blindingly obvious. No longer. Large sections of the population are happy to
see speech rights stripped from those they don't like or fear. They are
equally fine, it seems, with locking up people who cause a "nuisance" or are
"too noisy" in advancing a cause with which they have no sympathyespecially
so long as fear of the pandemic takes precedence.
That is how fear works. The establishment has been using fear to keep us
divided and weak since time immemorial. The source of our fear can be
endlessly manipulated: black men, feminists, Jews, hippies, travellers,
loony lefties, libertarians. The only limitation is that the object of our
fear must be identifiable and distinguishable from those who think of
themselves as responsible, upstanding citizens.
In a time of pandemic, those who are to be feared can encompass anyone who
does not quietly submit to those in authority. Until recently there had been
waning public trust in traditional elites such as politicians, journalists
and economists. But that trend has been reversed by a new source of
authoritythe medical establishment.
Because today's mantra is "follow the science", anyone who demurs from or
questions that scienceeven when the dissenters are other scientistscan be
cast out as a heretic. The political logic of this is rarely discussed, even
though it is profoundly dangerous.
Political certainty
Politicians have much to gain from basking in the reflected authority of
science. And when politics and science are merged, as is happening now,
dissent can be easily reformulated as either derangement or criminal intent.
On this view, to be against lockdown or to be opposed to taking a vaccine is
not just wrong but as insane as denying the laws of gravity. It is proof of
one's irrationality, of the menace one poses to the collective.
But medicinethe grey area between the science and art of human healthis
not governed by laws in the way gravity is. That should be obvious the
moment we consider the infinitely varied ways Covid has affected us as
individuals.
The complex interplay between mind and body means reactions to the virus,
and the drugs to treat it, are all but impossible to predict with any
certainty. Which is why there are 90-year-olds who have comfortably shaken
off the virus and youths who have been felled by it.
But a politics of "follow the science" implies that issues relating to the
virus and how we respond to itor how we weigh the social and economic
consequences of those responsesare purely scientific. That leaves no room
for debate, for disagreement. And authoritarianism is always lurking behind
the façade of political certainty.
Public coffers raided
In a world where politicians, journalists and medical elites are largely
insulated from the concerns of ordinary peopleprecisely the world we live
inprotest is the main way to hold these elites accountable, to publicly
test their political and "scientific" priorities against our social and
economic priorities.
That is a principle our ancestors fought for. You don't have to agree with
what Piers Corbyn says to understand the importance that he and others be
allowed to say itand not just in their living rooms, and not months or
years hence, if and when the pandemic is declared over.
The right to protest must be championed even through a health crisismost
especially during a health crisis, when our rights are most vulnerable to
erasure. The right to protest needs to be supported even by those who back
lockdowns, even by those who fear that protests during Covid are a threat to
public health. And for reasons that again should not need stating.
Politicians and the police must not be the ones to define what protests are
justified, what protests are safe, what protests are responsible.
Because otherwise, those in power who took advantage of the pandemic to raid
the public coffers and waste billions of pounds on schemes whose main
purpose was to enrich their friends have every reason to dismiss anyone who
protests against their cupidity and incompetence as endangering public
health.
Because otherwise, leaders who want to crush protests against their their
current, and future, criminal negligence with extraordinary new police
powers have every incentive to characterise their critics as anti-lockdown,
or anti-vaccine, or anti-public order, or anti-scienceor whatever other
pretext they think will play best with the "responsible" public as they seek
to cling to power.
And because otherwise, the government may decide it is in its interests to
stretch out the pandemicand the emergency regulations supposedly needed to
deal with itfor as long as possible.
Selective freedoms
Quite how mercurial are the current arguments for and against protest was
highlighted by widespread anger at the crushing by the Metropolitan Police
this month of a vigil following the murder of Sarah Everard in London. A Met
police officer has been charged with kidnapping and murdering her.
In the spirit of the times, there has been much wider public sympathy for a
vigil for a murder victim than there has been for more overtly political
demonstrations like those against the Police and Crime Bill. But if health
threats are really the measure of whether large public gatherings are
allowedif we "follow the science"then neither is justified.
That is not a conclusion any of us should be comfortable with. It is not for
governments to select which types of protests they are willing to confer
rights on, even during a pandemic. We either uphold the right of people to
congregate when they feel an urgent need to protestwhether it be against
the erosion of basic freedoms, or in favour of greater safety for vulnerable
communities, or against political corruption and incompetence that costs
livesor we do not.
We either support the right of every group to hold our leaders to account or
we do not. Selective freedoms, inconsistent freedoms, are freedom on licence
from those in power. They are no freedom at all.
Fight for survival
What the UK's Police and Crime Bill does, like similar legislation in the US
and Europe, is to declare some protests as legitimate and others as not. It
leaves it to our leaders to decide, as they are trying to do now through the
pandemic, which protests constitute a "nuisance" and which do not.
The political logic of the Bill is being contested by a minoritythe
hippies, the leftists, the libertarians. They are standing up for the right
to protest, as the majority complacently assumes that they will have no need
of protest.
That is pure foolishness. We are all damaged when the right to protest is
lost.
It is unlikely that the aim of the Police and Crime Bill is to keep us
permanently locked downas some fear. It has another, longer-term goal. It
is being advanced in recognition by our elites that we are hurtling towards
an environmental dead-end for which they have no solutions, given their
addiction to easy profits and their own power.
Already a small minority understand that we are running out of time. Groups
like Extinction Rebellionjust like the sufragettes before thembelieve the
majority can only be woken from their induced slumber if they are disturbed
by noise, if their lives are disrupted.
This sane minority is treading the vanishingly thin line between alienating
the majority and averting oblivion for our species. As the stakes grow
higher, as awareness of imminent catastrophe intensifies, those wishing to
make a nuisance of themselves, to be noisy, will grow.
What we decide now determines how that struggle plays out: whether we get to
take control of our future and the fight for our survival, or whether we are
forced to stay mute as the disaster unfolds.
So pray for the "anti-lockdown" protesters whether you support their cause
or notfor they carry the heavy weight of tomorrow on their shoulders.
This essay first appeared on Jonathan Cook's blog:
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/
Miriam's comment: I really love this guy and what he writes.