“I looked at your website. It says you support democracy," Tory MP and Conservative Party vice-chairman Lee Anderson said to Graham Smith, leader of the anti-monarchy campaign group Republic, when he testified before a parliamentary committee last week. "If you believe in democracy, why don't you throw down the banners and wait for the elections?"
Smith is one of six members of the Republic who were preemptively arrested on the day of the coronation. Other well-known protesters were arrested, such as those from Just Stop Oil, and even people who had no intention of protesting, such as volunteers from the Westminster women's safety group Night Stars.
The question was asked as Smith testified before a parliamentary committee on the "police crackdown on public protests". Board President Diana Johnson dismissed it as irrelevant. But no matter how it is judged - Lee Anderson is also known for his message to anti-monarchists that if they don't like the king they can move out of the country - that question is very important, because a large number of people think exactly that: that the beginning and the end of democracy voting at polling stations, that public protests are undemocratic and should therefore be abolished.
Democracy cannot be reduced to rounding the number on the ballot. An important part of democracy is criticism of the government's actions. Those in power, from employers to religious institutions, have always tried to rein in and control the democratic process to protect their own privileges and silence the voice of the masses. A democracy reduced to rounding numbers is a democracy of a silenced electorate in which the democratic process is shaped by class interests, institutional factors and marginalized social forces.
It is true that in the privacy of voting booths we vote as individuals, but we can only defend democracy if we act as a community. For that, it is necessary to build a robust public sphere and a democracy that will live in the streets and workplaces as much as in the polling stations. Major changes, from the right to vote for women to equal rights for employees, were achieved thanks to the protests. Without the right to freedom of speech, protest, assembly and march, without the right to strike, the right to vote loses its significance.
Smith and his associates were arrested under the new Public Order Act which had been passed just four days earlier. The law expanded the right of the police to stop and search and gave them the right to ban certain people from participating in demonstrations. Many forms of protest are criminalized, such as stopping traffic, endangering "important national infrastructure" and "tying" to other people or objects. Even the intention of "tying up" has been declared a criminal offense. The provisions of the law are broadly worded and give the police many new rights, including the right to prevent protests before they happen.
The ground was set by last year's Police, Crime, Punishment and Courts Act, which allows police to break up protests deemed excessively noisy or disruptive. These are the two most illiberal laws adopted in recent times. In a 2006 decision, the Court of Appeal opined that protests "will be virtually meaningless if protesters' decisions about 'when and where' protests are held are not respected to the greatest extent possible." According to the new laws, the police and the interior minister have the right not only to decide when and where protests will be held, but also how they will be organized and how noisy they can be. Protest was once a right, now it's a privilege. As stated in the report of the Liberty group, such an approach "normalizes the criminalization of protest".
The most vital form of protest in modern industrial societies is the strike, and the most important form of collective organization is the trade union. While employers can use economic power to impose their will on workers, reduce wages or lay off workers en masse, the only power workers have is that which comes from the possibility of collective action and work stoppages.
The authorities, of course, were looking for a way to reduce this power, so starting in 1979, the new governments set increasingly strict conditions for using the right to strike, which made effective labor action practically impossible, and most forms of solidarity were outlawed, from secondary strikes until joining workers from other places. All this, as Tony Blair himself notes, makes the British law "the most restrictive trade union law in the world". When the latest wave of strikes showed that workers - from nurses to train drivers - were still ready to take action, even tougher regulations were passed.
Recently, the draft law on the minimum work process during the strike returned to the lower house for a final vote, which is why the trade union federation called for a protest rally. The law leaves it up to employers and the government to define minimum work processes in several sectors, from health, through education and transport, to firefighters and rescue services. This means that nurses and ambulance workers, bus drivers and train drivers, teachers and firemen, under the threat of dismissal, will have to become strikebreakers in their own strikes. As labor law experts have noted, the government has thus been given an "unlimited mandate" to determine the extent to which workers may exercise their "legal right to strike."
Attempts to subvert democracy do not begin with the abolition of elections. The enemies of democracy will allow people to circle the numbers on their ballots every 4 or 5 years, but at the same time restrict their right to protest, collective action and freedom of speech. From Russia to Venezuela, from Belarus to Saudi Arabia, this is the path followed by authoritarian forces.
Britain, of course, is not like these countries and is unlikely to become one of them. But the examples of authoritarian states show how democracy collapses: not by abolishing the right to vote, but by insisting on the question: "Since you already have the right to vote, what will happen to your right to protest, strike and speak freely?" This is a question that Lee Anderson also asks. . But the right to vote cut off from other democratic rights has little meaning.
At a parliamentary committee meeting, Anderson claimed to have received many messages from people who supported preventive arrests ahead of the coronation ceremony and condemned the protesters as "seditious and malcontents". It is true that "insurgents and malcontents" are what keep democracy alive.
(The Guardian; Peščanik.net; translation: Đ. Tomić)
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