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 fearânot 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 noisyâ protests
It is therefore far from surprising that the UKâs draconian new Police and Crime Billâconcentrating yet more powers in the policeâhas arrived at this moment. It means that the police can prevent non-violent protest that is likely to be too noisy or might create âuneaseâ in bystanders. Protesters risk being charged with a crime if they cause ânuisanceâ or set up protest encampments in public places, as the Occupy movement did a decade ago.
And damaging memorials â totems especially prized in a time of fear for their power to ward off dangerâcould land protesters, like those who toppled a statue to notorious slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol last summer, a 10-year jail sentence.
Police & Crime Bill allows for:-
⢠Gypsy & Traveller vehicles to be seized;
⢠3 months jail or £2.5k fine for a nomadic life without a travellers passport;
⢠Banning of âdisruptiveâ protests;
⢠Up to 10 years jail for damage to a statue;Dangerous, totalitarian legislation.
— Howard Beckett (@BeckettUnite) March 15, 2021
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 âuneaseâ?
The UK bill is far from unusual. Similar legislationâagainst noisy, inconvenient and disruptive protestâis 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 virusâ 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 upâin part a generational oneâbetween 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 childrenâs 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.
âKill the Billâ
Where this leads was only too visible in the UK at the weekend when protesters took to the streets of major cities. They did soâin another illustration of binary choices that now dominate our livesâin 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 protestersâmost peaceful, a few notâtrying to achieve? In the media, all protest at the moment is misleadingly lumped together as âanti-lockdownâ, appealing to the wider publicâs fear of contagion spread. But that is more misdirection: in the current, ever-more repressive climate, all protest must first be âanti-lockdownâ 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 âKill the Billâ.
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 freedomsâthe right to protestâdeserves 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 oneâs own homeâlike free speech in a prison cellâis 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 donât like or fear. They are equally fine, it seems, with locking up people who cause a ânuisanceâ or are âtoo noisyâ in advancing a cause with which they have no sympathyâespecially so long as fear of the pandemic takes precedence.
My latest: Trump is not the cause of US political woes, he is one obnoxious symptom. For that reason, banning him from Twitter will not heal the US political divide, it will deepen and inflame it https://t.co/Qe5FYwSICN
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) January 11, 2021
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 authorityâthe medical establishment. Because todayâs mantra is âfollow the scienceâ, anyone who demurs from or questions that scienceâeven when the dissenters are other scientistsâcan 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 oneâs irrationality, of the menace one poses to the collective.
But medicineâthe grey area between the science and art of human healthâis 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 âfollow the scienceâ implies that issues relating to the virus and how we respond to itâor how we weigh the social and economic consequences of those responsesâare 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 peopleâprecisely the world we live inâprotest is the main way to hold these elites accountable, to publicly test their political and âscientificâ priorities against our social and economic priorities.
That is a principle our ancestors fought for. You donât have to agree with what Piers Corbyn says to understand the importance that he and others be allowed to say itâand 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 crisis âmost 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.
At what point does the UK officially become a banana republic? At the point when its health secretary awards a massive contract for medical supplies to his former neighbour and pub landlord? https://t.co/9DPlVXj5DB
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) November 27, 2020
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-scienceâor whatever other pretext they think will play best with the âresponsibleâ public as they seek to cling to power.
And because otherwise, the government may decide it is in its interests to stretch out the pandemicâand the emergency regulations supposedly needed to deal with itâfor 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.
A reactionary police force full of white men picked chiefly for their physical attributes is not only inherently violent, institutionally racist and hostile towards political protest but also anti-women. Now who would have guessed that? https://t.co/PfCYwwmF1N
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) March 15, 2021
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 allowedâif we âfollow the scienceââthen 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 protestâwhether 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 livesâor 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 UKâs Police and Crime Bill does, like similar legislation in the U.S. 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 ânuisanceâ and which do not.
The political logic of the Bill is being contested by a minorityâthe 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 downâas 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.
Decades late we *again* learn that corporations lied to us, knowing they were destroying our health, and regulators failed to act.
Decades in the future, we'll learn exactly the same: that these corporations were lying to us right now and got away with it https://t.co/gj3UOqEbZq
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) March 19, 2021
Already a small minority understand that we are running out of time. Groups like Extinction Rebellionâjust like the suffragettes before themâbelieve 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 âanti-lockdownâ protesters whether you support their cause or notâfor they carry the heavy weight of tomorrow on their shoulders.