law & order
Inequality Demands Oppression
Corporate lobbyists are demanding a ban on protest – and getting it.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 2nd February 2024
Why are peaceful protesters treated like terrorists, while actual terrorists (especially on the far right, and especially in the US) often remain unmolested by the law? Why, in the UK, can you now potentiallyreceive a longer sentence for “public nuisance” – non-violent civil disobedience – than for rape or manslaughter? Why are ordinary criminals being released early to make space in overcrowded prisons, only for the space to be refilled with political prisoners: people trying peacefully to defend the habitable planet?
There’s a simple explanation. It was clearly expressed by a former analyst at the US Department of Homeland Security. “You don’t have a bunch of companies coming forward saying: ‘I wish you’d do something about these rightwing extremists.’” The disproportionate policing of environmental protest, the new offences and extreme sentences, the campaigns of extrajudicial persecution by governments around the world are not, as politicians constantly assure us, designed to protect society. They’re a response to corporate lobbying.
Last week the UN’s special rapporteur on environmental defenders, Michel Forst, issued the kind of bulletin you might expect to see written about the Sisi regime in Egypt or Vladimir Putin’s Russia. But it concerned the UK. It noted that draconian anti-protest laws, massive sentences and court rulings forbidding protesters from explaining their motives to juries are crushing “fundamental freedoms” here. He pointed out that until recently it was very rare “for members of the public to be imprisoned for peaceful protest in the UK”. Now you can get six months merely for marching.
He also highlighted the outrageous treatment of people convicted of no crime. Peaceful environmental campaigners are being held on bail for up to two years, subjected to electronic tags, GPS tracking and curfews, and deprived of their social lives and political rights. This is one of many examples of process as punishment. Even before you have been tried, let alone found guilty, your life is shredded.
This bombshell report was ignored by almost all the media. You shouldn’t be surprised. With a few exceptions, the media belongs to the corporate-political complex that demanded these laws. All over the world, the billionaire press has been demonising peaceful campaigners and lobbying for ever more oppressive measures against those who challenge destructive industries.
However absurd the media’s hyperbole, governments rush to meet its demands. In Germany, the authorities launched an organised crime investigation into the environmental protest movement Letzte Generation. Italy is using anti-mafia laws against an allied group of environmental defenders, Ultima Generazione. In France and the US, peaceful green protesters are labelled and treated as terrorists. These governments must know they aren’t dealing with organised crime, the mafia or terrorists. But by using these labels they hope to isolate and ostracise peaceful protesters while justifying a madly disproportionate legal response.
In many cases, laws are proposed or drafted by corporate-funded lobby groups masquerading as thinktanks, such as Policy Exchange in the UK and the American Legislative Exchange Council in the US. Such groups create legal templates for crushing protest movements, then press for their adoption all over the world. This tactic has been chillingly effective.
In the UK, the government has truncated parliamentary scrutiny to force extreme measures on to the statute books. Judges have jailed environmental defenders for seeking to tell the jury why they took their actions. In 2023, two peaceful protesters who unveiled a banner on a bridge, Marcus Decker and Morgan Trowland, were handed sentences of two and a half and three years: the longest of their kind in modern history. Decker, a German citizen living with his partner in the UK, now faces deportation when he is released. There is nothing just or proportionate about any of this.
Even worse, both public authorities and corporations have been dropping injunctions on people who have protested, and, for that matter, those they believe might protest.As the UN rapporteur pointed out, many peaceful protesters are “being punished twice for the same action”: facing both criminal trials and civil injunctions. Simply being named on an injunction exposes you to potentially massive financial penalties, as the named people – the defendants – typically have to pay the legal costs of the claimants. If the defendants challenge the injunction, the costs can spiral into hundreds of thousands ofpounds. I’ve been contacted by several people who have never committed a crime, who have told me they are being ruined by inclusion on these lists. These costs are, in effect, fines that can be levied by either public or private bodies against anyone who disagrees with them. They amount to punishment of the poor by the rich. Corporations become, in effect, prosecuting authorities.
Worse still, the police can also slap an injunction on peaceful campaigners, even if they’ve done nothing to offend the law. Last year, Surrey police handed an “antisocial behaviour injunction” to Colin Shearn, a retired corporate executive, on the grounds that he had been asking “endless questions about air traffic” at Farnborough airport. His questions, letters and information requests were polite and considered, but this, apparently, counts for nothing. By pure coincidence, three weeks after its most effective critic was silenced by this injunction, Farnborough airport announced that it planned to double the number of weekend flights.
Why is all this happening? Because the UK, the US and many other nations have become closed shops run by the plutocrats’ trade union. This political capture also explains why, despite the alleged perversions of justice that ruined the lives of so many subpostmasters, none of thesenior figures at the Post Office or its contracting companies have been held accountable. It explains why, in the US, you can be imprisoned for possession of a few grams of narcotics, yet no pharmaceutical executive has been sent to jail for peddling opioids that have killed 800,000 people. It tells us why, in the UK, no company has yet been prosecuted for tax evasion under the 2017 Criminal Finances Act, and why Rishi Sunak’s government repeatedly sabotaged parliament’s attempts to clamp down on major white-collar crime. The powerful are protected while the powerless are exposed to ever more inventive laws.
Inequality demands oppression. The more concentrated wealth and power become, the more those who challenge the rich and powerful must be hounded and crushed. In other words, economic inequality is mirrored by inequality before the law. You can dispense with all the other indices of democracy. The best measure of the health of a political system is who gets prosecuted.
Extreme Prejudice
The government, under its own new definition, is an extremist organisation.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 19th November 2023
As good citizens, we are told, we should report extremism to the authorities. It hasn’t always been clear what this term means, so we should be grateful to Michael Gove’s levelling up department, which has proposed a new definition. “Extremism is the promotion or advancement of any ideology which aims to overturn or undermine the UK’s system of parliamentary democracy, its institutions and values.” As a responsible member of society, I would like to report a gang of malcontents whose behaviour clearly fits this description.
For several years, this extremist organisation has been undermining the UK’s system of parliamentary democracy. It has blocked access to voting, deterring perhaps some hundreds of thousands of people from participating in the most recent local elections. One member of the extremist gang freely admitted that this attack on democracy was deliberate, describing it as “gerrymandering”.
Through a combination of organised lying, cheating and a flagrant disregard for the lives of people in this country, expressed most obviously during the pandemic, this gang has trashed public confidence in democracy. A poll this year found that as a result of its antics, only 6% of voters now fully trust the political system. This raises a difficult issue as, under Gove’s definition, it could mean that 94% of us are now extremists. Perhaps we should also report ourselves.
As for our institutions and values, the same extremist organisation, apparently intent on destroying national morale, has turned our rivers into open sewers; allowed schools to face bankruptcy while their buildings collapse through lack of maintenance; undermined the NHS until it is thrown into permanent crisis; excluded millions from economic life, leaving them underhoused and dependent on food banks; failed to prevent the takeover by organised criminals of the waste disposal industry; allowed the City of London to become the world’s major entrepot for money-laundering and corrupt transactions; promoted the extraction of fossil fuels during a climate emergency; and enabled blatant profiteering during a national health emergency.
Mr Gove might also take an interest in this gang’s incitement of hatred for political gain: a mark of extremism by any definition. One leading member of the organisation, for example, has recently described homelessness as a “lifestyle choice” and peaceful protests as “hate marches”. Another proposes that asylum seekers should “fuck off back to France”. Isn’t it time the authorities investigated such people? They’re not hard to find. Gove knows where they live.
Of course, charges of extremism and terrorism have long been wielded as weapons to suppress dissent. They are constantly redefined to include political enemies and exclude political friends. For example, in the 2000 Terrorism Act, the charge was cast so loosely that MPs and campaigners warned it would be used against entirely peaceful people.
They were right. As soon as it was passed into law, the act was used to justify the widespread use of stop and search powers, which the police deployed, to general gasps of surprise, to harass Black and Brown people and arrest and detain peaceful protesters. One police force cited the possession of “anti-Blair info” as grounds for suspectingterrorism. When, in 2005, the 82-year-old delegate Walter Wolfgang shouted “nonsense” while the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, was justifying the Iraq war at the Labour party conference, he was bundled out of the hall and refused readmission by the police on the grounds that he had breached section 44 of the act (pushed through Parliament by one Jack Straw).
Until its dissolution in 2015, the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), a private limited company financed by the government, seemed to operate like a private militia, unaccountable to the people of this country. It ran something called the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, which was supposed to monitor and root out “extremism”. It was this unit that employed the police spies sent to infiltrate peaceful protest movements, some of whom, using their false identities, seduced activists and fathered children with them to enhance their cover: actions that look to me like state-sanctioned rape.
ACPO units ran lists of “domestic extremists”. A typical example was Dr Peter Harbour, a 70-year old retired physicist and university lecturer who had peacefully marched and petitioned against a proposal by a power company to drain a beautiful lake and fill it with pulverised fly ash. Police working for these units were given spotter cards to help them identify the “extremists” on the list, and their targets were repeatedly stopped, regardless of whether they had ever broken any law. The charge of extremism was used then, and is used today, to deter people seeking to hold power to account.
It is not just the law that seeks to tar dissenters as extremists. Those who challenge unaccountable power are largely excluded from public life, on the grounds that their views are “unreasonable” and “extreme”. You might be allowed to contest the outcomes I listed in paragraphs two and three, but not the doctrines that caused them.
When, for example, did you last hear an overt critique of capitalism on the BBC? This is the system that dominates our lives, and is driving Earth systems towards collapse. If we’re not able to discuss it, or to have an honest conversation about what it really is, how can we address our common challenges? But even to raise this – one of the most important issues on Earth – is to find yourself, as I know to my cost, labelled an extremist by senior BBC managers.
When did you last hear a discussion about access to natural wealth – land, water, atmospheric space – an issue that should dominate global discussions as we race towards a series of crises driven disproportionately by the consumption of the very rich? The wealthy can seize and hoard as much natural wealth as their money allows, causing pollution and destruction out of all proportion to their numbers, while billions are excluded from even the barest prosperity.
While those who raise such issues, legitimate and essential as they are, are excluded, genuine extremists now populate the House of Lords. Among these is Claire Fox,who has never disowned her comment, after the IRA’s Warrington bombing, that she defended “the right of the Irish people to take whatever measures necessary in their struggle for freedom”. Why? Because her extreme views on other issues – the freedom of the powerful to do as they please – align with the demands of Tory sponsors.
The kind of extremism that destroys national life is sanctified by power. Under Liz Truss, the neoliberal junktanks of Tufton Street got everything they wanted, and caused an economic shock from which millions still suffer. Since then, they’ve continued to populate the airwaves, promoting their outrageous demands as if nothing ever happened. Liz Truss is seeking to send some of them to the House of Lords.
Laws and powers ostensibly designed to counter extremism, such as the 2022 Police Act and the 2023 Public Order Act, and widespread abuses of the Prevent programme, are themselves a form of extremism: dictator’s instruments undermining a system that claims to be a democracy. Michael Gove’s new proposals are also, under his own definition, extremist, attacking the political freedoms supposed to sit at the heart of British life. He should do us all a favour and hand himself in.