This is another message I got from the organisers of the Arise Festival of left-wing ideas. They’re organising an online meeting on the 31st May 2023 about defending our right to resist from the highly authoritarian and illiberal legislation that was used to arrest the anti-monarchy protesters at the coronation.
The shameful rushing through of anti-protest legislation in the run-up to the Coronation – & how police treated protesters during it – starkly illustrate how a deeply unpopular Government has had a major authoritarian shift on top of years of attacks on our democratic rights. As John McDonnell noted yesterday, “There’s a comprehensive assault on basic civil liberties – the right to strike, right to protest peacefully & right of journalists to report without arrest.. Time has come for a new movement to defend our civil liberties.”
Yours in solidarity, Matt Willgress , Arise – A Festival of Left Ideas (via Labour Assembly.)
Our Right to Resist
Major online rally. Wednesday May 31, 6.30pm. Register here // Retweet here & spread the word.
John McDonnell MP // Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP // Kate Osborne MP // Lord John Hendy KC // Zita Holbourne, BARAC // Myriam Kane, Black Liberation Alliance // Mish Rahman, Labour NEC (pc) & Momentum NCG // Rob Poole, Strikemap // Chris Peace, Orgreave Truth & Justice Campaign // Hasan Patel, Young Labour/ / Fran Heathcote, PCS President // Alex Gordon, RMT President // Video message from Shami Chakrabarti.// Chair: Christine Blower // & many more tba.
The deeply unpopular Tory Government has had a major authoritarian shift, with a new assault – on top of years of attacks – on our basic civil liberties and democratic rights. As part of the growing opposition to this, we are bringing together a wide range of voices to stand up for our right to resist and say no more.
Opening Arise – An Online Festival of Left Ideas 2023. ‘
I got this email early this morning from the pro-democracy group Open Britain. They see the mass arrests of the anti-monarchy protesters at the coronation as showing that the right to protest in Britain is dead. They are also unimpressed with Wes Streeting’s pronouncements on the matter, as he failed to say whether Labour would repeal the legislation or change the approach to policing such protests. Starmer’s own comments on the matter are highly ambiguous. He states that he won’t repeal the legislation as it needs to ‘bed in’, and just because the cops have the power to do something, it doesn’t mean that they will on every occasion. There are other views and vloggers, which claim that Streeting has supported the anti-monarchy protesters’ right to demonstrate and that the legislation needs to be amended rather than repealed. But nevertheless, it strongly gives the impression that Starmer and the Labour right are deeply authoritarian who don’t support this key democratic right.
‘Dear David,
Whether this coronation weekend was one of celebration, quiet acceptance, or frustration for you, we can all agree on one thing – the right to protest is dead.
On Saturday, the met police hauled away peaceful republican protestors. They wrapped up their placards and signs and loaded them into the back of trucks. All told, 62 arrests were made, with charges including “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance” and possession of a bike lock (which could, in the Met’s eyes, be used to “lock on” to objects in protest).
In a free society, the state tolerates dissent. Even if the monarchy is a symbol of pride for many of those in Westminster, they can’t just have anyone who disagrees thrown in a police van.
This is the logical outcome of this government’s slide into authoritarianism, with policies like the Policing Act and Public Order Act granting officers sweeping powers over anyone creating a bit of noise or voicing a difference of opinion. So much for the “freedom of expression” that they’ve been ranting about – that only applies to discrimination or racist dolls, apparently.
The scary part of this story is that the entire power centre of British politics is already accepting this state of affairs as normal. Labour’s Wes Streeting declined to confirm that his party would repeal either of those illiberal bills or change the approach to protests in any significant way if in government. Keir Starmer’s comments today echoed Labour’s refusal to stand up for basic human rights.
In a 2021 poll, 63% of Britons said that “people should have the right to attend a protest to stand up for what they believe in” – and only 9% disagreed. How is it, then, that BOTH of the two major parties are now firmly against peaceful protest? In an odd twist, the Lib Dems, Greens and SNP – the UK’s smallest parties – are the only ones committing to reinstate the right to protest.
This proves beyond a doubt that what we need is a united movement to reclaim our rights and make Britain a real democracy again. We’re building that movement as we speak, bringing together everyone who will speak out against Westminster’s broken system. It’s deeper than partisan politics – it’s about pulling us out of the mess the country as a whole has fallen into.
As a small team, we need all the help we can get to make it happen. We’re working tirelessly with our allies in civil society, Parliament and the general public to shake this country out of its authoritarian stupor. We greatly appreciate whatever you can do to help us revive the right to protest.
I haven’t donated to the organisation, but am posting this message here as I believe it is an important comment on the current lack of proper democracy under this highly illiberal Tory legislation.
Mea culpa! Yesterday I put up a piece reporting that David Lammy had declared that Labour would not repeal Tory legislation, as otherwise the party would spend its time doing nothing else. This raised questions about whether it was worth voting for Starmer’s party in the first place if they weren’t going to repeal deeply unjust and illiberal Tory legislation. Now it seems I may have jumped the gun somewhat. The left-wing vlogger, A Different Bias, has put up a video stating that Lammy may have been somewhat clumsy in the way he answered the question, and that the Labour party certainly does not support the Tories’ anti-protest legislation. He states that Wes Streeting condemned the legislation and supported the anti-monarchy protesters’ right to demonstrate, and denounced their arrests by the Met police. As for repealing legislation, he states that this would indeed take up too much time as the bills were passed from one committee to another. He also argues that while the legislation against demonstrations does contain deeply illiberal curbs on freedom, some of it is still worth keeping. This includes the prohibitions on demonstrations outside abortion clinics. This legislation needs, therefore, to be amended rather than repealed. Furthermore, repealing it would take up too much that could be better spent on measures to grow the economy, stop the health service being run down and improving conditions for ordinary Brits.
I was influenced in my views about Lammy’s comments by Robespierre, who has since declared he made a mistake and issue this video retracting his views.
I hope I have been wrong about this, though many of the commenters on yesterday’s blog post pointed out how authoritarian Labour was, with their plans to introduce national ID cards. The pro-democracy group Open Britain don’t seem to be entirely convinced that Streeting genuinely objects to the Tory legislation. And there is the general problem of credibility. Starmer has broken every promise and pledge he made as leader of the Labour party, and I doubt he’ll change once in government. He may still end up supporting the anti-demonstration laws if he decides it suits his purpose.
I’ve said before that I’m a monarchist, but I am also aware that some the protesters against the monarchy have very good reasons for doing so. One of these is the immense cost of the Coronation when three million Brits have to use food banks to stave off hunger. The mellifluous voiced Irish vlogger, Maximilien Robespierre, put up a very pointed video about this the other day, commenting on a clip from the news in which Joanna Lumley commented on the monarchy’s generosity. The guest’s going to the event had the cars valeted and refuelled free. Robespierre commented that the monarchy wasn’t paying for this, but the British taxpayer. It wasn’t done free of charge, but the cost was being placed on the British taxpayer at a time when very many ordinary Brits are finding it extremely hard to make ends meet.
Rather more troubling is the allegation, which I’ve heard has been made by the Labour MP Clive Lewis, that our sovereign lord Charles III exempted himself from something like 120 different laws in order to rake in a cool £2 billion. If that’s true, then it’s just greed as well as using his personal position as head of state to unfairly enrich himself. When ordinary people do this, like politicians and government officials, it’s called corruption and ends up with an investigation from the rozzers. And it’s also an affront given the three million or so ordinary Brits, who are now forced to use food banks and the rising levels of real poverty in general in the United Kingdom.
People have been criticising Charles for years. Some of this has been general attacks on the monarchy, but some of has been about his personal profiteering. One documentary – I think it might have been ‘Charles: The Man Who Shouldn’t Be King’ – pointed out that normal jars of honey are below a pound in price. Unlike the honey Charles is producing from his estates in Cornwall, which is over £4. Other issues are that he doesn’t observe the same distance the Queen did between the monarchy and politics. There was an article in the Independent or the Groan years ago about the numerous letters he wrote to various authorities calling for the return of grammar schools. Some of Charles’ causes have made him genuinely popular. One of these was his attack on modern architecture, which he derided as ‘monstrous carbuncles’. This enraged various elite architects, but captured the mood of many ordinary people sick of grey, concrete monstrosities. After he made his stinging remarks, some wag wrote on the hoardings surrounding a building site in Bristol ‘another monstrous carbuncle – way hey, right on Charlie!’ But this attitude is dangerous, as not everyone shares his opinions. There have been a number of posts from various right-wing types who believe in the various conspiracy theories about the World Economic Forum and the Green Movement expressing their paranoid fears about Charles’ sympathies and connections to them. Charles is almost certainly correct in his support for Green issues, but it does mean that there is a section of right-wing opinion now alienated and distrustful of the monarchy.
I don’t think there are very many of them at the moment. A far more serious issue is the king’s profiteering. If he continues to do this as poverty in Britain grows, then more people will justifiably become anti-monarchists.
I hope you’re all enjoying this Bank Holiday Monday, despite the drizzle. The Met police has been widely criticised for its heavy-handed conduct during the Coronation. They arrested 50 or so anti-monarchy protesters simply for standing there and protesting. According to this Channel 4 news report, the arrests were made under legislation that permits this to be done during large events. From what I’ve seen, some of the arrests were ‘pre-crime’, where someone was arrested carrying a banner or placard before they could demonstrate. This is, as I believe Mike over at Vox Political, has pointed out, another infringement of democracy. People have a right to demonstrate and protest, even at events like coronations. He fears, rightly, that this is going to have a chilling effect on young people’s engagement with politics. They will feel that they cannot express their views and so there is no point in becoming politically active. And so democracy withers away, rather than be felled in a swoop through a Fascist or Communist coup.
One of issues is the Met police’s arrest of three volunteers from the 5-Star movement – not the right-wing Italian party or the 1980s British pop band – who were handing out rape alarms the night before. The police claim that they had intelligence that the alarms were going to be used at the coronation to spook the horses. They alleged that some of the protesters were even planning to through them at the horses, causing them to bolt into the crowd. The volunteers, who I’ve heard were giving them away at 2 O’clock in the morning, have explained on the other hand that they do it to protect vulnerable women on girls on a night out. This seems to me far more plausible than the Met’s story. I’ll be interested to see what evidence the Met has for this intelligence, assuming we’re allowed to see it and it’s not another fairy tale to allow the cops to clamp down on peaceful protesters and perfectly innocent volunteers in a fit of judicial paranoia.
I’ve been looking through Roy Palmer’s A Ballad History of England for anything suitable to put up for the coronation. I thought of something written for the restoration, but the only piece I could find like that is this ballad by Henry Jones of Oxford, published in 1660. It celebrates Charles II hiding from Cromwell and his troopers in the oak at Boscobel, which then became commemorated every year afterwards as Oak Apple Day. Palmer gives a description how it was celebrated in one school in Leicestershire, which is rather alarming: the children went around with stinging nettles wrapped in dock leaves looking to inflict a few stings on people who were insufficiently royalist. Given the debacle yesterday, when the Met police was arresting anti-monarchy protesters simply for the terrible crime of protesting, I think some of those cops have the same mentality. The ballad goes on to describe how Charles pretended to be the servant of the serving maid helping him to escape, and there’s several touches of humour as the disguised Charles comes a cropper in front of Roundhead troopers, who all have a good laugh. He finds sanctuary at the Three Crowns in Bristol, where he’s told to wind up the jack, but overwinds it instead. The ballad finally ends with Charles catching a ship to safety in France.
I recite the ballad’s lyrics and also play the tune as reproduced in the book. I don’t, however, do the two together because words and music are printed separately and I haven’t worked out how to fit the one to the other. Sorry.
I hope people enjoy it, whatever their views on the monarchy.
PoliticsJoe posted this video on YouTube yesterday. Its title declares that its about ‘Just Liz Truss Being Fully Mental’, which I supposed is one way of describing some of the antics and pronouncements of this contender for the Tory leadership. It consists of a series of clips, not edited together to have her singing a stupid, satirical song about herself, as PoliticsJoe has done, but something just as damning: it shows some of her deranged political statements, together with her failing to answer tough interview questions about her broken promises and falsehoods from people like Andrew Neil. And mixed in with that is previous footage from years ago of her speaking at a Lib Dem conference when she was a young activist with them.
The younger Truss seems like a normal, sane, politically idealistic and passionate human being. She praises Paddy Ashdown and the political potential and right to self-government of the British people. A self-government that is being denied by the monarchy, whose abolition she demands. It’s a very radical proposal, and one which you tend to hear from those further left, such as the left-wing of the Labour party. But by the time she’s a Tory MP and cabinet minister, she’s been transformed. The eyes have got madder, though not nearly as bog-eyed as Nicky Morgan, and the voice has taken on a harsher edge, so that at one point she did sound a bit like Anne Widecombe. And instead of radical democratic change, she was wibbling on about having secured a prize deal for exporting pork to China. Just like she steered through a deal to export cheese to Japan, where most of the country is lactose intolerant. And other great results for Brexit.
What should really bring her down is her lies and broken promises. She’s asked by Neil how many of the 200,000 social houses she declared she was going to build were actually put up. She can’t remember. Neil tells her that it’s not hard to know how many: zero. And the end of the video shows her being patiently asked by a female journo about various promises she made when she was in office, one after another, all of which she broke.
This is the woman now trying to get her backside into No. 10, and in many ways a true protege of Boris Johnson and the Tory machine. A woman who ditched democratic idealism for class reaction, Brexit and just telling one lie after another, while gripping desperately at the tiniest success in the Brexit negotiations in order to show it as some kind of magnificent success for Britain.
The Tories are destroying the British economy, and have only succeeded in making this country’s great people desperately poorer. Brexit has actively damaged our industry, agriculture and even the financial sector, which the Tories and New Labour have favoured so much. And Truss has been a vital part of all that under Johnson and before.
The chapter I found most interesting in Aidan Nichols’ book, Catholic Thought Since the Enlightenment: A Survey (Pretoria: University of South Africa 1998) was on 19th century Social Catholicism. Social Catholicism is that branch of the church that seeks to tackle with social issues, such as working conditions and justice for the poor, women’s rights, the arms race, the problem of poverty in the global south and so on. It’s governed by the doctrine of subsidiarity, in which it is neither politically left or right. Nevertheless, there are some Social Catholic thinkers whose idea were very left-wing, at least for the 19th century. The chapter mentions two 19th century French writers, whose ideas could be considered socialistic.
One of these was Alban de Villeneuve-Bargemont, who retired from public life following for the overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy, taking the opportunity to write a book on Christian political economy. He advocated state intervention, not only to relieve poverty and distress, but wanted it to ensure that workers could conduct their own economic activity aided by credit unions, mutual aid societies and other institutions. This was when the economy was still dominated by cottage industry and many workers were self-employed craftsmen.
Rather more radical was Philippe Benjamin Joseph Buchez, who wrote a forty volume history of the French Revolution, which was later used by the British right-wing anti-capitalist writer, Thomas Carlyle. In his treatise Essai d’un traite complet de philosophie au point de vue du Catholicisme et du progress and his journal l’Europeen, as well as his presidency of the French constitutional assembly during the revolution of 1848, called for the establishment of cooperatives for skilled artisans, the state regulation of working conditions and a minimum wage. (p. 92). The chapter also goes to note that other social Catholics favoured private initiatives and charity to tackle the problems of poverty. Others also went on to recommend a corporative solution to social problems, in which workers and masters would work together in decentralised self-regulating organisations based on the medieval guilds, very much like the corporate state as promoted, but not practised, by Mussolini’s Fascist Italy.
Villeneuve-Bargement’s and Buchez’s ideas ran directly counter to the laissez-faire economic doctrine of the 19th century and clearly anticipated some of the developments in the last and present centuries, such as the establishment of the minimum wage in Britain and America. While people can disagree with their theology, depending on their religious views, it seems to me that their ideas are still relevant today.
And I rather people looked to their Roman Catholic solutions to working class poverty and labour, than Iain Duncan Smith. Smith seems to use his Catholicism and his supposed concern with eliminating poverty as just another pretext to cut benefits and make the poor poorer.
So dump Smith, and return to 19th century French Social Catholic radicalism!
Private property is very much at the heart of modern Conservatism. Conservative intellectuals, politicians and activists maintain that private industry is more efficient and effective, and has raised more people out of poverty than alternative economic systems. It’s also a fundamental right, a mainstay of western democracy that has prevented Europeans and Americans from tyrannical government, whether absolute monarchies or soviet-style communist dictatorships. It’s also supposedly the reason why Britain and the West currently dominate the rest of the world. The Times journo Niall Ferguson wrote a book about this a few years ago, which accompanied a TV series. In his analysis, Britain was able to out-compete Spain as a colonial power because British democracy gave people a stake in their society, while the only stakeholder in Spain was the king.
This can be challenged from a number of directions. Firstly, early modern Britain wasn’t democratic. The vote was restricted to a small class of gentlemen, meaning people who were lower than the aristocracy, but nevertheless were still able and expected to live off their rents. At the same time, although the power of the monarchy was restricted by the constitution and parliament, it still possessed vast power. Kings could go for years without calling one. As for Drake and the Armada, we were also saved by the weather. There was a ‘Protestant wind’ which blew apart and disrupted the Spanish fleet. As for capitalism, more recent books like The Renaissance Bazaar have shown that the new capitalist institutions that were introduced in Italy and thence to the rest of Europe during the renaissance were based on those further east in the Islamic world. And far from western global domination being inevitable, in the 15th century Christian Europeans feared that they would be conquered by Islam. The Turks had blazed through the Balkans and took 2/3 of Hungary. One fifteenth century German soldier and writer, de Busbecq, feared that the Ottomans would conquer Christendom because of the meritocracy and professionalism of their armies. The Ottomans, along with other Muslim states, recruited their armies through enslavement. It’s the origin of the Mamlukes in Egypt and the slave dynasties in Delhi. But these slaves were given an intensive military training, as well as education in Islam and the Turkish language, and promoted on their merits. Jonathan A.C. Brown in his book, slavery & Islam, how further back in Islamic history Black African slaves had been appointed the governors of parts of Iraq. The result was that while the European armies were feudal, led by aristocrats who had been born to their position and held it despite their ability or lack thereof, the Ottoman’s were manned and led by well-trained soldiers who held their commands by merit. We had better armour than the Ottomans, but they were able to defeat us because they were simply better soldiers.
Property rights have been a fundamental part of western political theory for a very long time. The social contract theory of government held that the primordial human community had elected kings to protect their lives and property. But Islam also maintained that property was a fundamental human right. According to Jonathan A.C. Brown’s Islam & Slavery, from the 700s AD Muslim jurists discussed the issue of human rights – huquq al-‘Ibad, or the rights of (God’s) slaves, i.e. humans, or huquq al-Adamiyya, or Adamic rights, or human rights. These were held to be the rights possessed by all humans, whether Muslim or not. Under the great Islamic theologian al-Ghazzali, these were expanded into five universals: protection for the integrity of life, reason, religion, lineage and paternity and property. He concludes that ‘The Islamic rights of physical inviolability and property can be seen as counterparts or perhaps forerunners of these aims.’ (pp. 299-300). I’ll admit this came as something of a surprise to me, because unless you study Islam at a higher level, you don’t hear about it. And you definitely don’t hear about it from the conservative right, who seem to believe that property rights and virtuous capitalism are something that only the Anglo-Saxon peoples invented. Remember George W. Bush’s famous, ludicrous sneer at the French that they had ‘no word for entrepreneurship’. Well,, they have, as attested by the word ‘entrepreneur’.
And property rights are not automatically intrinsic to modern concepts of freedom and democracy. They arose long before the expansion of the franchi8se in the 19th century and the emergence of universal adult suffrage in the early 20th century. Over much of western history, property rights meant the rights of the property owning upper classes against the working masses. And slaves could not own property, as legally, following the precedent of Roman law, they were property. Anything they had automatically belonged to their masters. Property rights were also regularly invoked to defend slavery. That’s very apparent when you read the protests against the British government’s attempts to regulate and then finally abolish slavery in the 19th century. The slaveowners were incensed by what they viewed as a tyrannical governmental interference in their property rights.
Now I agree people do have a right to private property, though private enterprise in many spheres is certainly not adequate to provide decent services. These are the utilities, education and healthcare. I also believe that, following Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, the west was able to gain ascendancy through technological and scientific advances, particularly military. I think the development of western capitalism also played a part in creating a mass, industrial society that was more efficient and advanced than the craft economies of the Islamic world. But this does not mean capitalism, or at least its antecedents, were absent from Islam or that Islam had no conception of property rights.
Perhaps, before we go to war with these countries to liberate them for multinational corporations, we should stop listening to Conservatives and listen more to those academics and experts, who actually know something about Islam.
I’ve already written a long piece about the acquittal of the four people responsible for the attack on the statue of Edward Colston. They were accused of criminal damage, but successfully defended themselves on the grounds that the attack was justified as the statue constituted a hate crime. The 12 good men and women true agreed, or the majority did, and so they were found not guilty. The right has been outraged, fearing that this defence leaves other controversial monuments at risk of destruction by the woke. I don’t believe that this is necessarily the case, and think that the threat to Britain’s heritage is probably exaggerated. As for the case of the Colston statue itself, there were campaigns to have it taken down going back thirty years or so. The people of Bristol voted for it to stay when they were polled, but now that it’s been torn down I think probably most people in the city are sick and tired of hearing about it.
But not, it seems, the Conservatives. Suella Braverman, our wretched attorney-general has apparently appealed against the decision. Mike and Zelo Street have both put up excellent articles stating what this appeal actually means. It’s another attack on British justice. Braverman and the Tories have no evidence and don’t allege that there was a mistrial, and so there is no real justification for an appeal. It’s just the Tories trying to revoke a decision they don’t like. This is an attack on the independence of the judiciary, which is one of the fundamental constitutional checks against government power. And the Tories aren’t just doing it with the verdict for the Colston Four. They’re also trying to pass legislation that would allow them to set aside judicial decisions against the government and its policies. It’s another step towards the right-wing dictatorship Johnson and co seemingly want for this country. It’s not too far from the way judges in the 17th century would send juries back to reconsider their verdict, and even imprison them, if they gave one they disagreed with. That power was undermined and discredited in a historic trial in Bristol in the late 17th century when William Penn, a Quaker and the founder of Pennsylvania and a group of his co-religionists were put on trial for seditious preaching. The jury repeatedly refused to convict them, and so the beak kept sending them back until he had them imprisoned until they came in line with his views. Which they didn’t. As a result, Brits not only have the freedom to be tried by their peers, but their peers have the freedom to deliver verdicts which accord with their consciences, not the authorities. Braverman’s appeal isn’t going to restore this unjust practice exactly, but it is doing something similar.
But it may also be a case of ‘be careful what you wish for. You might just get it’. Zelo Street’s article gives the learned opinion of lawyer Adam Wagner, who tweeted “there is a basic issue which will be becoming clear to ministers – a jury verdict sets no precedent, so the law is as it was, but a Court of Appeal decision would set an important precedent, which may not be the one the govt want”.
The Sage of Crewe also gives the opinion of those other internet legal gents, the Secret Barrister and and Jolyon Maugham. The Barrister said: “Not a single high profile criminal case can now pass without the Attorney General – a person with no experience of criminal law – exploiting it for political gain. It is difficult to think of an AG who has more enthusiastically abused their office”.
And the foxhunting lawyer gave his opinion on how much Braverman’s and the Tories’ determination to attack the verdict showed they really cared about British tradition and liberty: “By attacking the jury verdict in the Colston case Braverman tells a simple truth about how much Government really cares … about ‘British traditions’ … Theirs is a government without principles, without substance, of empty nationalistic signalling”.
But you wouldn’t know that by the way the right keeps banging on about our ancient constitutional liberties and the philosophers and lawyers who contributed to and guarded them. Like Sargon of Gasbag and the other Lotus Eaters raving about John Locke against the threat of the woke. Locke is one of the country’s great constitutional theorists. His Two Treatises of Government attacked autocratic theories of absolute monarchical power and instead provided powerful justification for the people exercising their sovereignty through elected representatives. He wasn’t a democrat. Indeed, the constitution he worked out for Virginia is based very much on the contemporary British social hierarchy and the power of the landlords. But it was a vital step towards modern, liberal theories of democratic government.
The Tories’ attack on the verdict represent another attack on these vital traditions and liberties in favour of restoring the power of a ruling class threatened by any indication of dissenting popular opinion.
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