There so much happening every day that stories which would once have made national news and debate aren’t even mentioned.
After successive authoritarian public order legislation was passed by the Tories, Labour MPs just voted to pass yet more repressive laws using their undeserved thumping majority. (Not that any except the Greens oppose them)
The Crime and Policing Bill is now at the final stage and will almost certainly be passed unamended unless there is stiff opposition in the anachronistic Lords. I’m not holding my breath.
Amongst other things, police will be handed the power to ban any protest on the grounds of ‘cumulative disruption’ – basically if a protest happens once, that’s it. You can’t come back and do it again if nothing changes. Bizarrely, they can also ban protests happening in the same place even if previous protests had nothing to do with what you’re protesting about. Whitehall for example.
Effective protests often recur in the same or similar places. And no protest movement has ever brought about change through a one-off demonstration. Landmark democratic struggles, such as the campaign for women’s suffrage and the movement against apartheid in South Africa, all relied on the ‘cumulative’ impact of repeated protests over many years.
We’ve reached a stage now where everything is banned except what is permitted, in very specific ways, determined by police. If you don’t ever think about making any protest you might not be bothered. But on the day when things get so bad you feel the need to do something about it, you’ll find you’ve been gagged and your hands tied as soon as you set foot outside your door.
The new powers within the Crime and Policing Bill were motivated by lobbying from the Zionists following the succession of huge anti-genocide protests. But the powers will apply to everything and everybody, the ratchet is always up. It never comes back down.
Progressive and democratic politicians would be repealing clauses in the authoritarian laws passed by Patel and Braverman but Mahmoud, Starmer, Lammy and the rest of Blue Labour are just the same Right wing Zionist stooges as the Tories were.
G
