A Pincer Movement Against Our Civil Liberties.

 

The civil liberties that have always been seen as an intrinsic part of being British are under serious threat. Not, as has been the case at other times during our long history from some outside aggressor. The threat comes from our own government.

The threat comes in the shape of two bills currently grinding their way through the mills of parliament. There are, respectively, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill (PCSC), and the Elections Bill.

The Elections Bill, by making it a legal requirement for people to produce photo ID before being allowed to cast their vote at a polling station will make it harder for citizens, often from communities that most need to do so, to exercise the most basic of democratic rights.

It has, according to the authors of the bill, been made necessary to do so to combat the threat posed by ‘personation’, the act of voting under a name other than your own. A crime so lacking in prevalence in the UK that most lawyers have probably never even heard of it, for the record between 2010 and 2018 just two convictions were recorded.

In an article published in The Independent this week Green Party MP Caroline Lucas identified requiring voter ID for what it was, the insidious introduction of voter suppression. A tactic to keep the poor away from the ballot box and the rich in the seats of power that disfigured US politics in the pre-civil rights era and is creeping back into some Republican states today.

Quite correctly she points out that considering turnouts in UK elections have been below 70% for the past twenty-five years, we should be encouraging people to vote; not putting barriers in their way.

The PCSC Bill will deny people in England and Wales the right to protest by using vague wording around protests that cause ‘noise’ or are ‘inconvenient’ to lower the threshold for the police to set prohibitive conditions.

Amnesty International and, in a rare break from their tiresome in-fighting the opposition Labour Party have identified this as, to quote Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner writing in the Guardian, as a ‘threat to our democracy’. Also as being likely to further entrench existing structural inequalities around race, class, and access to social and economic capital.

Taken together the PCSC and Elections Bills represent a pincer movement against our civil liberties that could kettle us, like members of one of those inconvenient protests, into a narrow and ultimately unsatisfying version of citizenship.

The assault on our freedoms has a long and inglorious pedigree, for the PCSC Bill it goes back to the Public Order Act (1986) and further, all the way back to the Peterloo massacre or the Peasant’s Revolt.  A cursory glance at the travails women went through to win the vote in the early twentieth century demonstrates all too graphically how the powers that be would rather we still lived in the days of rotten boroughs, when the lord of the manor appointed the local MP as he did the parson and expected both to do his bidding.

What should cause the most alarm is the way that the PCSC Bill manipulates moral panics, something we allegedly pragmatic Brits find all too tempting, around the threat to public order posed by groups like Extinction Rebellion. This is done through a deliberate ‘othering’ of protesters, separating them from a ‘hardworking’ and biddable silent majority.

This is a blatant distortion of the truth, there are no separate categories for ‘protesters’ and the ‘people’; protesters are the people. Any one of us, at any moment, might be driven to protest when we encounter something we cannot countenance and retain either our principles or our personal autonomy.

There is also a deliberate, they all did PPE at Oxbridge, misunderstanding of the nature of protest itself. To have anything like meaning protest must be noisy and disruptive to wake the wider population from the slumber it has been lulled into.

If we the people allow the rights our forefathers and foremothers fought for, and in the case of women are still fighting for in many ways today, we risk being inducted against our will into a painfully narrow world. One where the only roles open to us are those of producer and consumer, both involving being shackled to a treadmill forcing us to strive endlessly after the false needs created for us by those who own the means of production.

Any ‘safety’ from threats imagined or real this provides would be entirely illusory because it works to deny what Marx termed as our ‘species being’, that sense of purpose and autonomy entirely outside our utility to the economy that is intrinsic to being fully human.

Instead of a spurious safety we should instead embrace the noisy, sometimes dangerous and, to those who hold the levers of power, almost always inconvenient thing called freedom.

The best place to start would be by protesting however we can and whenever we can against these two fundamentally illiberal pieces of legislation.