FORTY years ago, Margaret Thatcher went to war against “the enemy within.” Striking miners were subject to the full force of the British state as the Conservative government sought to defeat Britain’s most powerful trade union, decimate their industry and clear the way for economic shock therapy.

With the prime minister’s authorisation, a covert campaign was waged to discredit Arthur Scargill “politically and socially.” MI5 informants were placed inside the NUM. Wiretapping was endemic. Paramilitary police placed pit villages under effective occupation. The forces of state repression were mobilised on an industrial scale as the ruling class ensured their victory in what became the defining political moment of Britain’s post-war class struggle.

Earlier this month, on the steps of Downing Street, Rishi Sunak identified a new “enemy within.” The Prime Minister described the anti-war movement as a “force here at home trying to tear us apart.” Thatcher’s language echoed down the decades as the Prime Minister said British democracy had been “deliberately undermined” by groups who have “hijacked our streets.” His words were welcomed by Starmer’s Labour, who themselves have promised to “take back our streets” — although from whom it is not entirely clear.

Britain’s political class are unified in their support for this latest clampdown on our right to protest. This is telling. Many politicians have already conceded to the central demand of the anti-war movement — an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Those who haven’t have proved incapable of putting forward, let alone winning, the argument. Their only remaining option is to attempt to forcibly break up the mass movement that has exposed their political weakness.

The repression of the miners was an assault on working-class organisation and collective power. The Conservative government took its lead from the 1977 Ridley plan, which proposed a “long-term policy of fragmentation” to “to break up the power of monopoly public-sector unions” and “facilitate denationalisation.”

Nicholas Ridley noted in his appendix that “the only way to do this is to have a large, mobile squad of police who are equipped and prepared to uphold the law against the likes of the Saltley Coke-works mob” — a reference to the humiliating climbdown forced on Edward Heath’s government in 1972 after 20,000 flying pickets descended on Saltley Gate coke works. The Ridley plan was a how-to guide for taking power from people and handing it to capital.

Just as in 1984, today democracy itself is again under attack. Sunak’s latest efforts to restrict protest follow his government’s attempt to restrict the right of workers to withdraw their labour, the introduction of voter ID and the passing of the draconian Policing Act in 2022. 

Thatcher deliberately picked a fight with the miners to create the political climate for her monetarist revolution. Today Sunak is stoking hate and Islamophobia to justify curtailing our hard-won democratic rights.

Across the Atlantic, Washington is taking similar steps. A recent study from International and Public Affairs at Brown University explains that “the US national security apparatus quietly broadened its definition of terrorism to include peace activists, environmental justice activists, animal rights activists, Black Lives Matter activists and others.” Perhaps then these trends are symptomatic of something broader.

Israel’s war in Gaza has once again exposed the myth of the so-called “rules-based order.” To anyone with a Twitter account, it is clear that international law is applied selectively depending on your relationship to imperialism. 

Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger once suggested waging war in the “grey areas” as a means of asserting the hegemony of the US empire. Social media has ensured these “grey areas” no longer exist. The days of “mowing the lawn” are over. “Forget about rules, forget about world order. They [the global South] won’t ever listen to us again,” said one senior G7 diplomat in October.

Paralysed by their hypocrisy, international leadership cannot come from the global North. Instead, it is South Africa which has initiated proceedings at the International Court of Justice, Bolivia, which has cut its diplomatic ties with Israel, and Brazil, which forced a ceasefire vote at the UN security council in October. 

Meanwhile, the 81-year-old leader of the “free world” calls President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt the “president of Mexico” and confuses other world leaders with their long-dead predecessors.

Faced with the realities of imperial decline, the political class in Britain and the US are insulating themselves from the domestic political threat bred by this instability and creating a new “enemy within.” 

In December, 71 per cent of the British public found almost no representation for their support for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza among Britain’s dominant parties. Similarly, around the same time, 60 per cent of US voters supported a ceasefire, while only 11 per cent of Congress did. Out of step with the public, but tied to Netanyahu’s collective punishment, Downing Street and Washington are cracking down on the anti-war protests that offer political expression to this alienation.

In Britain, resisting this repression will require placing it in the context of other attempts to undermine democracy mentioned above, creating the broadest possible alliance to defend our right to protest.