BRITISH democracy is under attack. The threat comes not from foreign bogeymen but from our own overbearing state.
Lord Walney — as hard-right ex-Labour MP John Woodcock renamed himself after his ennoblement for services against Jeremy Corbyn — wants to ban protests, at least if they aren’t bankrolled by the rich.
The demand that protest organisers meet the cost of policing demonstrations is as dangerous as it is dishonest.
Woodcock claims “disorder” at Palestine demos justifies billing the organisers.
In fact the mass peace demonstrations (which Woodcock, who called on the public to vote for Boris Johnson in 2019 to dash prospects of a socialist government, terms “anti-Israel marches”) have been strikingly peaceful.
Clashes with police, where they have occurred at all, have taken place away from the main demonstrations and certainly beyond the reach of the organisers’ stewards. They have been rare, with most arrests taking place for allegedly hateful speech or signage rather than violence or vandalism.
It adds insult to injury that Lord Walney advises the Home Office to start charging people to protest when the most serious recent disorder on our streets featured far-right hooligans incited to mob the Cenotaph on November 11 by the then home secretary herself.
There are two reasons the demos have entailed a large policing cost. One is police over-reaction, with unnecessarily large deployments of riot squads in a bid to intimidate citizens.
The other is sheer size. The peace marches for Palestine are the biggest street movement this country has seen since the campaign to stop the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
That exposes this anti-democratic threat for what it is — an attempt to undermine mass movements by punishing their success. Palestine demos are huge because Westminster is at loggerheads with the people it claims to represent. There is a gulf between the government and opposition’s endorsement of Israel’s murderous war and the popular demand for peace.
Woodcock’s suggestion is made in a review sent to the Home Office. His mandate is being the “independent adviser on political violence and disruption.”
He was appointed in 2020 to investigate the “extreme right and left,” prompting alarm from socialist MPs: while in the Commons Woodcock derided Corbyn supporters as “extremists” and his vitriolic hatred of that movement was expressed on a weekly basis.
The reasons Johnson appointed him were clear. The Corbyn movement had seriously shaken the ruling class when it came close to winning a general election in 2017.
Woodcock was made a lord precisely for betraying his party to help defeat that movement, something Lord Rooker (another ex-Labour MP) described as a “national service.” He was tasked by the serial liar he backed for PM with advising the British state on how to stop such movements arising again.
This is a cross-party ruling-class project. It is pursued by the Tories through ever harsher restrictions on civil liberties and protest rights, so you can now be jailed for years for causing a “serious nuisance” and demos can be shut down before they even begin.
It is pursued by Labour through purging Britain’s traditional vehicle for working-class representation of all voices for peace or socialism, and committing to maintain the repressive Tory policing laws.
The war on democracy is the Westminster consensus, and that could hardly be better expressed than through its latest offensive stemming from a Tory-supporting, Labour turncoat cross-bench unelected peer.
Charging protest organisers for policing costs will make the right to demonstrate prohibitively expensive for most campaigns, besides being inherently unfair since protest organisers have no control over what resources the police decide to deploy.
The proposal sits with the Police, Crime, Sentencing & Courts Act and the Public Order Act as a bid to dismantle our basic right to make our voices heard. The battle to defend our liberties must become central to left campaigning.
