ACFM - #ACFM Microdose: Kill The Bill

Episode Date: May 15, 2021

The proposed new Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill is an obvious assault on the right to protest, threatening penalties of up to 10 years in prison for “causing public nuisance”. With the bill on its way to becoming law, Jeremy Gilbert, Nadia Idle and Keir Milburn draw on their own experiences to discuss the […]

This is acid, man. Hill LaVelle, Hill LaVelle, Bill, Hill McHell, Hill McHell, Hill McHell, Hill McHell, Hill McHell, Hill McHell, Welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Nadia Idle and today, as usual, I'm joined by Jeremy Gilbert and Kea Milburn. Hello. And on today's microdose, we're discussing Kill the Bill. So, guys, why do we want to talk about Kill the Bill, which is obviously a big thing that's going on right now?

Yeah, well, basically, we've done a few microdoses where we've talked about current affairs, which is slightly outside of the normal pattern of our episodes. we did one about the Extinction Rebellion protests. And so this kill-the-bill movement and this police crime sentencing and court bill, it seems quite significant. It seems to point to a few things. I think it's a good way to get into the precise moment where we're at. So I think that's why we want to discuss it.

And I think what we should probably start off by doing is set in the context for why the bill has been proposed at this time and perhaps what the bill proposes, I'm not sure everybody's clear on that. Nadir, I think you might be able to help with that part. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I can give a short summary of this. So this is the police crime sentencing and courts bill 2021, PCSC bill. So this is kind of going through Parliament at the moment, and it is the first major change to the Public Order Act, 1986, since 2003. And it's important for, you know, for several reasons. So firstly, if all of these different bits of the bill go through and become an act, it renders the UK as an outlier in terms of international human rights norms,

because it does basic things like it threatens the right to free assembly, and it threatens basically Britain's institutional capacity to function as a democracy, which arguably is already kind of going down the pan, but it includes things like you get 10 years in prison if you damage a memorial like a statue or whatever in Parliament Square. So that's like a good example

of the sort of thing that's in it, which David Blunkett, out of all people, who used to be Home Secretary under Blair, has actually come out, or he did this in March, you put out a statement saying that's just ironic. I mean, he's against the bill because Mandela and Gandhi's statues in Parliament Square all led the sort of protests that this bill would ban.

But one of the other really dangerous things in it, it's a serious expansion of the Public Order Act, is that the argument is from even a legal perspective, is that it's not workable in practice, because it has things in it. So apart from, you know, if you spray paint a statue, you can get 10 years in prison. Okay, that's more or less clear.

I mean, it's horrific, but it's clear. But it's got lots of stuff in it about like chanting or noise and whether that noise causes distress or alarm or harassment to a certain group of people or not. Or annoyance, isn't it? Or annoyance. Yeah, you're right. The other really important one is annoyance, which, I mean,

the main thing around this is that is what protest is supposed to do. it's supposed to be disruptive like let's get very clear on this which is why and we'll get onto this i'm really interested in what the center left and the soft left response is on this which i don't know much about but it's almost like it sits within a kind of uber discourse that i think's been you know banded around by people on the left as well about this this obsession with you know that you might perhaps offend somebody else's ears by some kind of dissent. So it's really interesting that this kind of language has been brought in to this bill where suddenly you could be chanting too loud or if your voice is too shrill, it might be a little

bit too annoying. And that gives the police the right to shut down the demonstration or to say, actually, you were supposed to do this from, you know, 10 o'clock to 12 o'clock or whatever. And now you have to go home. And the powers which they have to arrest people are just a lot more draconian than they were before. So I'm interested in, you know, I will get to this, like what the establishment is trying to do by putting this stuff through. And I think the last thing to say on that is, is it's the 24th of June when this, when the public bill committee reports back to the House of Commons on this. So this is why this is such a live issue now between March when the bill first went through the Commons and now. So that's just like a summary of it.

but obviously it kicked off in London and Bristol and, you know, loads of other places, which maybe you guys want to talk about. Yeah. Well, look, let's talk about the context of why the bill is introduced and where it fits in. Because one of the, all of these things, they provide an opportunity to think about what's going on, basically. So one of them is what's going on with the Conservative Party? What's going on with the right globally? They are in a period of change, I think, with Boris Johnson.

And I think Boris Johnson is probably closer to. to the general trend towards a sort of authoritarian rights who need to roll back democracy, basically, and they're going to use that through using the law to restrict who can access democracy and the ways in which you can hold government's account. They're going to use the law to do that, and they're also going to use public spending

in a sort of pork barrel way. What that means is that they're going to target public spending as a sort of bribe to particular areas who have voted conservative. We'll see how far that'll go, right? Because I think there'll be severe limits on that. So we should put this act, this bill, next to the proposals to bring in ID cards for voters.

So a restriction on the right to vote. Very similar. I think there's something like 36 bills in the US going through various state-level assemblies that the Republicans control to try and restrict the amount of people or to make it more difficult to vote, to make it more difficult to participate in democracy.

And what that points to is they've given up on this idea of ruling with the whole nation in mind. So one nation conservatism is out the window. It's very much, you know, the right is being forced into a position of minority rule, of trying to set the context in which minority rule can take place. And so they're going to address the needs of the minority. which make up their social coalition, basically. This is going to be a difficult argument to make at the moment, but I think that indicates that this bill has been introduced

actually from a position of medium-term weakness, short-term strength, but medium-term weakness for conservatism around the world, I think. Yeah, and the reason behind that is there's a changing class composition, you know, the wider context is changing, and demographics in the medium-to-long-term are not favorable to the coalitions that the conservative have put together and the conservatives are trapped by those coalitions

there's no way out because those coalitions you know I talk about age quite a lot in my work and burblings you know but that's linked to things such as asset ownership etc you know and these things like the conservatives are trapped in this in this you know their reliance on older voters older asset-hold owning voters and then you know a shift away from talking about material interests, serving material interests of that coalition,

but then shifting to talk about cultural issues, the culture war, that's the conservative playbook around the world at the moment. So that means that you have to erect barriers or rely on the anti-democratic barriers we have in place now in order to protect that coalition from the majorities which oppose them, basically. So first past the post is the thing in the,

the UK. So what do you think, so what do you think their vision is or was of the sorts of demonstrations or the sorts of expressions of public dissent that they are putting through this bill to try and stop in the future? That's the thing that I don't really have a vision of like what do they think is going to happen in the next six months to a year that they want to stop happening. But the image that still haunts them is that image of Churchill with a bit of, you know, turf on his head to create a sort of Mohican. We were all there, weren't we? Yeah, we were all there, but that's still the image.

May Day 2000 for people, yeah, Parliament Square, for people who don't know, yeah. That's the image that horns them. And I think, in some ways, I think there's a sort of nostalgia amongst the Tories, actually, for this, that's that historical moment when are the only people who seem to be dissenting from the kind of mainstream consent as it then was? I mean, then it was more a kind of neoliberal. globalising consensus, but the only people who were visibly dissenting from it in public were sort of presented by the media, by the press, and were sort of experienced by a lot of people that's just completely outside, like ordinary political processes.

And I think there's this sort of, you know, in the same way, you know, I know, I know people don't like me saying this, but in the same way historically, people on the far left enjoy a bit of a fascist revival. not a serious one, but enough of a one to, you know, excuse some street-level punch-ups and some exciting organisation. I don't think that's controversial, I think. You're right. People on the right absolutely love the spectacle of, like, dirty protesters, preferably with plenty of brown-skinned people in the crowd, too. Like, threatening images of kind of the things which are supposedly precious to, you know,

the Great British public, like statues of Churchill. I think that one of the issues with the Kill the Bill legislation is, I mean, I think the ID card thing is much more sinister, to be honest. I don't really think Kill the Bill is actually intended to make an intervention at what is seen as a real site of kind of potential popular mobilisation. Because I just, I don't think the kind of ritual protests around Trafalgar Square and Parliament Square have ever achieved much ever, really. anyway. They've never posed any serious threat to ruling class power or even to the authority of the government. And it doesn't only curb that, right, if we're to be fair, a story to interrupt you. But the powers that will come in this bill will affect the, you know, the women who went out in Clapham Common in our way. Well, I agree. It is aimed at them. It's aimed at them, but I think

it's aimed at them as part of a sort of cultural war strategy. It's aimed at it. It's basically, it is itself. the kill the bill, I'm not saying it's not something to be opposed, but it is a sort of act of symbolic revenge aimed at those people on the behalf of, you know, resentful, you know, resentful old white men. But I don't think it's because anybody really thinks those women are going to, about to bring down the ruling class or even really significantly dent the Tory vote. It's more that, you know, part what the Tories offer,

what the contemporary right the Keir was describing, what it offers to its supporters around the world, is partly the spectacle of a kind of sadistic and largely pointless kind of punishment of various social groups against whom they feel very resentful for various reasons, including women, including young people, including non-white people. So there's no question it's a really regressive and reactionary piece of legislation. But I think it's sort of, I think the ID card thing is an interesting contrast because that is a very serious attack.

I mean, they are really looking to weaken the. capacity of anybody to challenge the status of the Tories as a one part, you know, the status of England, at least as a sort of one-party state. The bill, I think, is, there's no question it is completely tied up with all the processes that Keir was talking about. I just don't really, I don't think, I don't think, I don't, I think the stuff it's aimed at symbolically curtailing is stuff that I don't think anybody really poses a serious threat to the status quo. It's more that it, it's a kind of, you know, like I say, it's a sort of symbolic, of resentment and of, you know, and of repressive power on the part of these groups

who, indeed, as Keir says, I think it's a really important point. It's a really important point that the people who this is pandering to are people who, despite the fact that they're rich, the fact that they've got everything they ever wanted, really, on some level. They're the people who've got houses. They're the people who've got pensions. They're the people who have jobs all their lives. Despite that, there's this profound sense of loss amongst them, loss of status, this kind of loss of cultural centrality. I mean, it's something that, you know, sort of mainstream political science.

I mean, people like, you know, Sobuloskwin Ford in their book, Brexit land, talk about this. You know, in a slightly confused way, I think. But they talk about how, you know, there's these constituencies who are fairly economically well off, but they're also very conscious that the world they came into adulthood was a world in which straight white men were the center of the cultural universe,

and they're not anymore. and they feel kind of left out of that, and they feel angry and excluded. So, and so they enjoy this sort of spectacle of imaginary revenge on all these subjects who they think have weakened their cultural status. I mean, it was the same, it was exactly the same Trump. I mean, it was the whole logic of Trumpism. The whole logic of Trump, really, was this sort of series of symbolic attacks on constituencies that old white men felt had somehow displaced their cultural authority and centrality.

So I think this sort of adding to Keir's analysis, really, that it does, it is about a kind of weakness, actually, for the right. And it's about a sort of, it's about the fact that there's this constituency who right now, especially in Britain, because of the electoral system, because of the asset economy, they are absolutely the most powerful constituency in the country. But nonetheless, they somehow feel that the world, the world is slipping through their fingers and they want to lash out of the people who they blame for that. I think that, I think there's something missing there, though, because I think, yeah, because it's not, it's basically, it's not, it's not, um, it's not, um, the, the, the green mohican on Churchill in 2000 and, and, what was that? 2000, yeah. Uh, you know, it's, um, it's the statute being pulled down in Bristol, basically.

That's, that's the direct, that's the direct precursor. And what we saw just before the pandemic, we did see this huge upsurge, and actually during the pandemic, didn't we? But before the pandemic. pandemic as well, you had the things such as Friday's for future, you know, the school walkouts, these sorts of things, extinction rebellion, and then Black Lives Matters. And so, you know, it's not just that this is some sort of resentfulness. I think that that's a really good, it's a good argument that this feeling that there's a loss of cultural centrality. And I think just on slightly,

just on that, I think it's a displacement therapy on that point, which is that there are things in the country that have experientially changed for those people. And it's where the blame, where they lie the blame, which is problematic. Yeah, that's right. But it's also, it's a backlash against something that they can sense. Right. So it's always difficult when we're talking about what's in what's in the mind of conservative party politicians. I don't want to get in there. I don't know. Don't come from that background. It'd be hard to do that. But what we can say is that there has been an upsurge of social movements, and those social movements has been moving their way

towards more disruptive action, towards things which disrupt business as usual. You can see that in Extinction Rebellion, you can see that in the direction that the sort of Fridays for Futures were moving in and the logic of the situation that like any renewed climate movement, you're going to be moving in that direction of disruption,

causing annoyance, causing, right? I think you're right. actually, I think this is, if there was one, if there's one set of protests that will have led to this, to answer my own question, based on reacting to what you guys have been saying, I actually think it's XR, I think it's what happened with Extinction Rebellion in 2019, actually. And the BLM protests as well. And BLM, of course. I mean, there were much smaller in the UK, but like it had this simply huge movement in

US hanging over it in the in the background. Yeah. And so it's obviously aimed at BLM. Yeah. It's aimed at it. I just don't think it's aimed at BLM because they think BLM poses a serious political threat to them. I think it's aimed at BLM because they're pandering to a set of voters who like to

imagine the BLM poses a serious threat to them and want BLM to be symbolically punished for existing. But I don't think that's the same thing as them actually believing that, oh, if we don't stop BLM, there's going to be a revolution. Oh, no, no, I agree. But, like, I think, so where I'd go for that is, is, if you had to look at the, if we, if we, if we, if we look at the situation in the UK, or actually, you know, in many parts of the world, but perhaps not in the US at the moment, right? But if you look at the UK, it's, it's like a textbook example that, that people like social movement theorists and sort of scholars of contentious politics, you know, they could use the example now in the UK to predict a, big explosion in what they call contentious politics, which would be like social movements, protests, riots. And so the frame they use for that is they call it

political opportunity structure theories. And it just goes like this. You know, if you have a large cohort of people who have got grievances, their living standards are going down, they're feeling very disgruntled, and yet they have no opportunity to have that disgruntlement expressed or those interests or desires expressed, with a political system as it exists,

that's when you have these upsurges in contentious politics. And you could add to that, actually, because there's also this, they call it the J. Kerr theory of revolution. But you could just say the J. Curve theory of contentious politics. The idea is this, is that the theory is you tend to get revolutions when you have rising expectations which get confounded. So basically you have a moment where your interests and disgruntlement was being expressed through the political system,

i.e. in June the Corby moment, which then gets confounded. If you look at the political system in the UK, every major political party is just predicated on denying the actual experiences of everyone under 45, let alone expressing their interest. They're just like, you do not exist. And like, so the JK Theory of Revolution, we are not on the brink of revolution.

There's nothing to indicate that at all. But you could just say, like, this is the thing which you'll, you could just predict that like this is the sort of circumstance where you would expect a big absurd. Upheaval. In protest. I thought the protest, well, it's still going on now,

but the reaction to the European Super League, the proposal for a new league in football. And, you know, this has led to big protest by football fans. You know, the Mani and I did Liverpool game. The stadium was invaded, and that game was abandoned because of protests.

And those protests were quite young, actually. If you look at the pictures, they were all young. They all fit the brief, you know, they all fit the brief apart from there probably don't look like the dirty, hippie protesters the Jeremy was referring to. Let's not get too carried away, but that does look like the sort of different constituencies reacting in a sort of similar way because of the circumstances that you would expect, you know, that the theory would predict, I think. And you've got to remember that, you know, this started with the Sarah Everard protests. So we have to think of it. It's not just an anti-protesting, that,

this series of demonstrations to kill the bill. It started off fitting into the sort of general disgruntlement with the police, which you see in the Black Life Matter movement, etc., this sort of the idea that we have to roll back police power or abolish the police as the ultimate horizon of that movement goes. But it also fits into a general rise in feminist movements around, you know, the Me Too movements. and then there's been these women's strike movements

which have been very, very big in certain countries in Poland and Argentina, etc. But also reclaim the night, I think that's really important. In this specific case, it was the irony of a woman walking down the street at night back home like being abducted and killed and then other women going out for a vigil and then being like treated like horrifically by the police.

I mean, it's even worse than that, isn't it? because the person who allegedly killed, they would probably say that was a policeman, a serving policeman. It's just that it's, yeah, it's just, and then the police saying, and then the police, the police saying to women in Clapham that night,

when she was abducted, like the official advice was women stay at home. And, you know, for this to be 2021, like I completely get why women, especially with the reclaim of the night movement, We're like, we're not having that. We have to mark this. And we also have to, you know, take back the streets as human beings.

And then for that to be the reaction, it was just, you know. So you're right, basically. It's a compounded, is a compounded effect of how BLM and then, you know, the case of Sarah Everett and others link back to each other in this kind of spiral way. So it's not just about the bill. it's about policing and it's just about the right to protest, etc. But I'm wondering, like, which is going to be the first demo to break that? If this bill goes and becomes an act, how is that going to affect people on the protesting side?

Basically, it's like this, when you have this huge expansion in police powers, which this does. And so, you know, the prospect is that you could have, you could face 10 years in jail for, a protest that causes disruption or annoyance. So the fans who invaded the Man United, Old Trafford, the other day, Man United Football Ground, they could be in jail for 10 years. Now, it's unlikely that that would happen to them because that was not the constituency

in which a police would want to make an example, right? But it could be, it could, you know, it could happen. So what would happen would be, the way it would affect it is that that would be hanging over people. And so it wouldn't just be like big protest. be like protests in central London, you know, the first target, I think, would be things such as the sorts of protests that renters unions do outside landlords' offices and these sorts of things, right? I think that's the sort of thing that would be cracked down on first. The police

will say, well, this is illegal. If you don't disperse now, you know, you're going to be, you're going to be held under the whatever it's called PCSC bill, and that's a maximum when it was 10 years. So you raise the potential entry costs into any sort of form of movement quite high. Yeah, it just becomes an actual deterrent for people. I mean, I remember this happening back in, I think it was 2007, but it might have been 2009, with the Gaza demonstrations where there was Operation Ute, I think it was called, and I know people who had their doors kicked in at 4 o'clock in the morning, and 100 people in Greater London, and, you know, were taken in, for violent disorder for like throwing an empty plastic bottle or whatever

and people were you know arrested and thrown into jail and by the way they were all brown so that that sort of stuff has happened before but it's been but it was under I just wonder whether this solidifies that in practice is the police just going to do the stuff they could do before or is it like you said it's going to be that sort of smaller picket you know even is it going to be stuff that NGOs do You know what I mean? Is it like the little, is it like the little, it's not even a protest, whatever you call it, standing outside, you know, a shop with a banner?

It's probably going to be used very arbitrarily, isn't it? I think that's the answer. Citizens, United will never be defeated. Sisters United will never be defeated. This is United will never be defeated. It might be useful to talk about whether. But our circumstances different to the whole Anti-Criminal Justice Act things now. Like, how might it play on, basically?

Well, I think we should put it in the big, just the bigger context. I mean, there is a context of the criminalisation of protest. I mean, Britain historically doesn't have a good record of protecting things like the freedom to protest, basically. We don't have, I mean, it's worth saying this for international listeners. Britain doesn't have a written constitution. It doesn't have a Bill of Rights. So the British, you know, what passes for the constitution in Britain is the fact that essentially the government at any given time, which is completely controlled by one person, by the prime minister, is able to just do anything they want, basically. There is no, you know, there's some notion of sort of custom and practice like, you know, protecting certain rights. But basically, there isn't like a constitutional right to assembly. There isn't a constitutional rights of freedom of speech or anything. like that. And historically, you know, to be honest, governments of right and left have been pretty

free and easy about banning stuff that they didn't like, that they thought most of the public either didn't like or were indifferent to. I'm not trying to downplay the significance, because I think it probably is true that it means coming in partly for the reasons we said. Probably they are anticipating that they're anticipating a historical period during which the government clearly doesn't have majority support, clearly isn't governing with consent, clearly is going to be openly antagonistic towards constituencies that its constituency doesn't care about in a way that governments have been reluctant to be since the 80s. And it probably is anticipating all that. But similarly, I mean, really, you can, because I'm trying to think of the historical precedence, you can go back

to the 80s, to the trade union legislation, to the police brutality against kind of peaceful protests. There was a really regular thing in the 80s. I mean, it was a really regular thing in the 80s for mounted police to just mow down protesters on things like student protests, just basically if they thought they could get away with it. We've talked about the Battle of the Beanfield before on the show. And you can go back, you know, you can go back, you know, to previous centuries. I mean, there's a terrible history of kind of brutal, violent,

quasi-military repression of demonstrations. So there's no question that they're bringing in the measures for specific reasons, but it's also, there is no sort of historical period in Britain when we've really enjoyed the right to peaceful assembly without that being just suspended any time people thought there was a threat. You know, there's a period, like in the, you can say in the late 19, 30, 20th century, once actually the Conservatives in the 1870s decided to start trying to legalise and decriminalise trade unionism,

for example, some of that shifts. But any time, like the government or the ruling class thinks, there's a threat, you know, like in the 20s, like multiple times in the 20s, culminating in the Great General Strike in 26, they'll just suspend it, like send in the army. You know, any time they think like workers are getting too out of hand, they'll just brutalize them. So I suppose that is one reason I find it personally. That is honestly the reason I find it personally hard to get over-excited about the current bill, because I just think the whole, it's definitely something we should fight against, but, you know, there hasn't

been a time and the British government hasn't been willing, the British state hasn't been willing to just use swift, brutal and arbitrary violence and incarceration against some protesters. So, Jeremy, what you're saying is you're comparing the UK to itself, like in, you know, the last hundred years or whatever, you know, and that, and it is really important to situate things historically, but the class composition of also how people identified and, you know, class power was in a different situation in the 20th century or a lot of the 20th century than it is now. And I think it's interesting to look at it in terms of recent history. Like, what is it going to do to people who have had some experience of protest? In the same way that I would ask the

situation of, you know, for people who experience the movements of the squares all around the world, you know, be it in Tahrir or be it in Madrid or be it in Occupy or whatever, for for that cohort of people who, you know, may be, you know, older, younger, whatever it might have been their first protest, like whether this is in the context of, you know, coming out of a pandemic, you know, another prospect of another five years of a conservative government, whatever, what is it going to do to them? And, you know, as Kea said, like, clearly it's a deterrent,

but as always, I'm interested in the tipping point. Like, will people have a kind of historical, lens and go, oh, well, you know, we have to go for it anyway, if we're really pissed off about this, we have to be part of some kind of dissenting movement, because this is how the government reacts anyway, or is it really going to function in terms of putting people back in their box? And my personal view on it is that something that hasn't been considered, and I don't know whether this is part of the government's plan, is the effect of the pandemic. Like, I just think this summer people are going to want to be outdoors. And I think that's

both going to come in terms of wanting to party and socialise, but also wanting to demonstrate. I think that's all going to come together. I think that's going to be linked, though, because part of what you do with these bills, it's a signal to the police, basically, that you're let off the leash. You can do what the fuck you like this summer. So there's going to be lots of fighting around parties and all these sorts of things. You know, I could imagine a very long hot summer, basically. What that does politically is another question.

In a way, I sort of see this as part of a... You know, we have to situate this, as I sort of indicated earlier, as the end of like the Corbyn cycle, the closing off of the opportunities within the political system, although we have to keep as many of those open as absolutely possible. And then you have this sort of like period in which people find new ways to sort of try to exercise some power or something like that. But I think it would be an absolutely disastrous thing if we just did this, if the movement as a whole did this swing, you know, oh, well, we tried the streets in the, 2011 cycle, then we tried Parliament, now let's go and try the streets again, we're back to square one. I don't think that is the situation, right? And so the really key problem is how does this, we can understand the context, we can predict and say, look, this is probably going to lead to an upsurge in sort of street politics, and they're going to be quite

conflictual because, you know, all the circumstances indicate that this is when, when sort of contentious politics take off. All the, all the, all the, all the, all the, all the, all, caters when the conservatives are they want to turn this into violence as soon as possible so how do you stop the protest movement becoming this small thing and how do you get it

to a stage in which it doesn't matter what, when you get to a certain level of scale it doesn't matter what the law is because the social forces are balanced in the other way and how do you get that so that the majority sees the sort of like the protests

that are coming and sees this in particular, this sort of, the shift towards constriction of democracy, and I think it's really important that we keep that in the frame. We have to see that as part of this wider war against democracy, right? And so the sort of response has to be, to sort of position it as within this wider crisis of politics in the UK. So basically we have to have to position it as as part of the left's politics have to be about look we need to extend we need to defend democracy and we need to extend democracy not just by protest but also by addressing all of the other limitations of the democratic system in the UK and and I have been brought around to

PR be an important part of that but also like at some sort of settlement with the different countries and regions in the UK and like the left's role in that is to is to shift it into, you know, we need to democratize the economy. And the way you do that is because, you know, if you're going to tackle climate change and not going to tackle climate change in a way that just reinforces the huge inequalities in the world, then that has to be, you know, you have to talk, I start talking about democratizing assets and workplaces. I'm not sure I entirely agree with the language used there,

but I think that's probably for another episode. You hate democracy, don't you? Yeah, well, yeah, we have been here before. I'm much more interested in freedom. I think we've completely devalued the currency of talking about democracy if it's not about the economy and assets. So I'm well up for democratizing the economy and assets and that sort of stuff, but I don't think using the term democracy means anything anymore.

I think it has to be about freedom. And I think the left has massively devalued the currency of talking about a crisis in the UK politics. We've been saying that for 150 years. So, you know, of course there's a crisis because it's a crisis until we win, right? Yeah, but the 2020s are, the 2010s were like basically

an impasse following a crisis. The 2020s, like, this is the shit hits the pan period just for climate politics alone. Do you know what I mean? You can see that that's already, that's just something we can't get away from. Big, big shifts have to happen in the 2020s. or we're in a really, really, really terrible, much, much worse situation.

And you can already see that, like, you know, in other countries, such as in the U.S., there are shifts towards that. You know, there are shifts towards recognizing that things are going to have to change. But this is a crisis, like, this is a world historic crisis situation, not just in terms of the economy, but because of, like, a much longer cycle of politics, not like the 10-year boom and bust, not like that sort of 50-year epochal crisis we have. But like the climate crisis, which is, you know, basically the coming, this decade is when the last 200 years of industrial capitalism come to the crunch point, basically, which is why I think this is the period of like, it doesn't matter if you're, if you ramp up, you know, or what I mean to say is ramping up the, the entry costs for politics that will have an effect, but it's not going to stop the stuff that's coming, basically. Yeah, I agree with you.

I don't, I suppose it's worth thinking, like, well, what is the, that's one scenario. Like, is there any other scenario, is there any scenario in which that's not the case? Is there any, like, version of that not being the case? Because it seems like, you know, Biden seems like he's presenting the possibility of a scenario in which, you know, capital makes enough compromise. You know, if it suppresses its own, like, fossil fuel fractions, it makes enough compromises. is to pretty much re-establish control of the situation. Get a handle on the ecological situation. So is this going to stop you going to a demo, though?

That's what I want to know. So with all of that being, you know, I agree on all of that. But is it, how is this going to affect our interaction? It's not going to stop me going to a demo. Is it going to stop you? I mean, it might do. I haven't been on a demo yet. But the reason I haven't been on demo is because I've made the choice that it's not safe because of COVID.

So I don't know how I'm going to feel about it. I feel the stakes are pretty high. I don't want to go to jail for 10 years, for sure. So it does affect me. It does affect how I think about it. It's a good point, yeah. You know, like I don't want to go to jail for 10 years being at the wrong place and the wrong time. Like, I've given enough.

Like, capitalism is taken enough from me, you know. But it won't be going on a demo for that, though. I think it'll be something like, would you go and stop a coal train going into a power station. I mean, I wouldn't do that anyway. Yeah, I was never very big. So I wouldn't do with that anyway. So, no, but I think you're right, actually.

So I keep on bringing this back to like street demonstrations when actually what we should be looking at is a lot more of the direct action stuff. You're right. So I think that's the question. You know, I was never involved in that sort of stuff. I'm not arguing that's a good strategy unless it happens on a really huge scale.

but like that and it's a really good question jem's raising about like will biden offer a path out of this you know and i think we're both reading like adam twos's articles at the moment but it's adam twos's latest article on bidenism you know it looks at the scale of both infrastructure spending but also the sort of like green new deal elements that biden's offering and and he just says like like this is just basically Biden is really pushing that the boundaries of what is possible at the moment to get through US politics. But when you look at like, when you compare it to what is necessary, the gap is just simply huge, right? And so that's why I think it's not going to come without struggle basically. Bridging that gap will have to, will involve changing what seems

socially and politically possible. That comes with a change in the balance of forces. And that comes with politics and it will involve well street politics it will involve sort of like disruptive politics like whether we like it or not the point is like how do we how do we make that you know not a minority politics how do we make that like a a big enough politics which which keeps its foot which keeps at least some sort of links open so it can be articulated with with the politics of of the state, basically. Well, that's a really good question now. Okay, now I think, okay, I'm finally waking up a little bit now.

I think, look, there's a really open question for me as to whether the kinds of politics that we're mainly talking about that we think the bill is mainly targeted at, whether they've ever played a very significant role in actually achieving any sort of progressive or radical gains. Because mostly what we're talking about is sort of adventurist politics, symbolic protest, you know, what came to be called direct action in the 90s,

but actually the anarchists who first coined the term direct action would never have recognised the direct action because that term was supposed to mean interventions that had some permanent effects, you know, not just sort of symbolic street theatre. So there's a real open question as to whether that kind of politics has ever really mattered that much to anything. Whereas the things we're talking about,

that do make a difference. They include a range of activity from community organising, trade union activism, through to political, you know, sort of political party work. But I'm not sure if those,

I'm not sure that that kind of protest politics ever plays much more than a kind of cosmetic role outside of actual pre-revolutionary situations. I mean, if you want historical examples, once you get into an actual pre-revolutionary situation, then take into the streets, toppling the statues and all that.

stuff actually does play a fairly significant role at certain junctures. But outside of pre-revolutionary situations, I'm not sure it does make a huge difference. 15th of February 2003, Iraq War demo. You don't think that made any difference? Or to the war? Didn't make a difference. It's any difference. You don't think that that is like a seminal point in UK history in terms of that. what we're talking about. I mean, the whole point about, I mean, that demo in Britain was it wasn't, it didn't involve any of this kind of stuntism. It was a peaceful mass demo that was,

that was massive. And a massive, it let us never forget. The reason that demo was massive was because the Daily Mirror supported it. The Daily Mirror put on its front page to telling people to go to it. Really? You think that's why it is massive? Yeah. Everyone knew someone who went to that. Because of the daily mirror. There's loads of people who went to that demonstration who are small C conservative, and that's why it was significant because everybody knew somebody who went to that demonstration. And there are plenty of other people who couldn't go to that demonstration for childcare reasons or whatever. But the point is socially it had a really important position because of A, the effect that it had.

I mean, people still cite it, I think, obviously it's anecdotally and from stories. that I come across and read, and I don't know the actual figures on this, but I think that was really important in terms of people's understanding of democracy, because so many people genuinely thought that they would stop the war, like genuinely thought that if two million people went on the street, they couldn't possibly bomb Iraq. And that was a turning point, I think. I think we haven't had a demonstration that big since then. It's not just because of the daily mirror. It's because of where that's situated in the British imaginary of what democracy is. Yeah, I agree it had that effect, but it was largely, I mean, I think it has an international

effect as well, which is a whole other set of questions. I think it's, but I think it, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm with you there. I think it made it difficult. I've always said it made it difficult for, the America couldn't pursue its historic, its traditional policy in Latin America, because it had blown its legitimacy, because of the, because it was so clear that the, the, the, the Iraq invasion just didn't have international legitimacy and that that was what created the window for the pink tie to some extent I think and it had reverberations on Cameron and Syria later and on Tony Blair and all of that and all of those things. Well that's all true but the immediate effect here was just demoralisation I mean it wasn't like a bad thing. It was the immediate

effect here was that people just you know people that utterly demoralised and this huge demonstration hadn't been able to change the course of the you know hadn't been able to change the policy and yeah I mean it demonstrated something to people but it demonstrated to people that democracy was totally broken. And then it took another 20 years, 15 years before people's response to that was, well, maybe we should get involved in mass parties and fixed democracy. Like for the next 15 years, it was either we do nothing or we just do sort of symbolic street protests. We just do sort of climate camp and things. They don't really that ultimately have no outcomes. See, but I think those are two different constituencies there.

The activists, you know, the people who always go to demonstration, because let's face it, the vast majority of people don't go on demonstrations. For the vast majority of people, going and standing up and protesting and something is like not the normative form of behavior. Like, you know, it isn't. Like all three of us have been on loads of demos. It isn't for the vast majority of people. And I think Iraq, for this generation, was different in that case.

So I think the way looking at how activists reacted to that and whether it was good or bad for them to be demoralized, is one thing, but the effect that it had on other people who are not activists, I think is different. Do you not think the effect on other people was demoralizing? I think it was massively demoralizing, but it wasn't demoralizing in any way that situated itself within a set of political thinking where people were like, right, what do we then do now? Because those were not people who were going to be politically active. There were just people who felt really strongly about the war.

What do you think the effect of it was then overall? That's what I'm trying to get at. What do you think the overall effect of the experience was? I think the overall effect of the experience is that people realized that they were not able to participate, that democracy wasn't working, and it created a neutering effect, where people thought, oh, demos don't make a difference. I think that's not a great analogy to what Jeremy was saying. And in fact, I'd offer a completely different example of those sorts of things which have

had really, really big effects on politics. And the first one is the Black Life Matter movement in the US or the several waves of it. That along with like, you know, the sort of Corbyn, sorry, Sanders wave, that sets the context in which somebody like Biden, who's a bit of a politician, sniffs the wind and sort of basically accepts the analysis of the left, basically. which is sort of where we're at. But I'd also say that, like, you know, the sort of what you call stuntism

or, you know, the sort of like, in my example of a small group of people who are going to go and blockade a train or something like that, in a way, that's not a way, well, I don't know. The climate movements has got its own sort of problems of how you turn that into actual politics. But what I'm thinking about about

things that are going to get disrupted or made more difficult, are the things that you need to do in order to do stuff like community organizing and build renters unions, and to build unions, basically. You know, they all rely on the idea of you get small, getting small wins, and you get small wins by threatening disruption, basically. That's how you build.

In public, you mean? So, like, the little actions in public? Yeah, yeah, little actions in public, as in, yeah, demonstrations outside, outside landlord's offices, wild cat strikes and these sorts of things, and the sort of things that allow you to, to at least point to, you know, potential of winning something in the short term. You know what I mean?

It's those sorts of things, which I think are the biggest threat of getting disrupted. So there's an acorn I hold in a protest in Leeds tomorrow when we're recording this, because it basically gets, this bill, if it goes through and it gets enforced, it disrupts their strategy for growth, basically, which is about having these sorts of protests, trying to get some sort of sense of collectivity amongst renters and all these sorts of things. I mean, that's the sort of danger of the disruption that'll take place. But I think the sort of 10-year thing will just be used as a sort of, on a discretionary basis

and just in an exemplary way. So basically, it won't be the NGO protest. It'll be a much more favourable target for the Conservatives and the Tory press, basically. But, you know, if you get some like black radical group who have defacing a Churchill statue, you, then that acts as a sort of exemplary thing as a precaution, you know, a warning to everybody, basically. I think that'll be the way it'll pan out. I think you're right. Yeah. And I think it'll be used against, I mean, it'll be used in way, but I think, I think it in some ways, probably when we'll look, yeah, historians will look back on it in a hundred years and see it more than anything

as a sort of codification of the responses to the, not the student protests, but the sort of riots in the quote unquote riots in 2011 because to a certain extent on some level that it's that sort of stuff they're more scared of I think and that sort of and also they I think you know they've maintained a strategy for decades of really coming down very hard on kind of poor communities like urban communities black communities they've maintained a strategy of coming down very very hard on those communities very quickly because essentially those those communities all already suffer such high levels of oppression. You know, they don't have the kind of social capital.

They don't have the kind of educational capital, you know, to protect themselves. And so they really, they get smacked down, like every time they start to, you know, look like they might start to become a threat. And I think that is probably a reason why BLM is, I think this is, I think it is a response to BLM, actually. I think it is, it will be used more in response to stuff like that, actually. And I think, and also, you're right, it'll be used arbitrarily against forms of community. organizing. Yeah, it seems to be vague enough in terms of how it's actually written up that

like you guys were saying before, it'll be confused. Like the police will use it sometimes like this and sometimes like this. And we've gone over time, but we haven't talked about the thing Nardia said at the start she rightly wanted to talk about. Because I'm worried that a lot of what we've said so far is just like ACFM truers. It's like we've got an authoritarian right. The right is bad. Do community organizing. I'm worried about. But Nasi, you raise this question, like, well, how is the, how is the kind of formal left and the centre left responding to it? Because one of the huge differences between the Corbyn moment and every other moment in the Labour Party, like, since the mid-80s, is, you know, when we had Corbyn as leader,

we had some, we did have stood up and opposed something like this and defended the right to protest. But I don't even know, what is the party's position on the, I don't even know what the party's position is. Have we opposed it? What is the party's position? I understand what we were not opposing it and then there was more pressure that we might oppose it and then what is it? I don't know about the we anymore

especially because it's the day after election day. I'm not sure I can get on board. I think the actual position was that they were briefing that they were going to support it and then the opposing committee stage. And opposing committee stage but then the Sarah Everard protests happened. and the wave of like revulsion around that meant that they,

I think they opposed, I can't remember. There they are, you're right. No, no, you're remembering right. That is what happened. That is what happened. No, that is important. So what happened is they basically brought in this bill to give the police all these draconian powers

to crack down on protests. And it was clearly a direct response to Black Lives Matter and a way of pandering to their constituency over it. Then the Sarah Everard protest happened, were coming from a constituency, who is completely different from the constituency, they thought they were suppressing with the bill in the first place,

which is essentially, you know, the urban black community who's they've been willing to smack down violently for decades. Instead, oh, no, it's like, it's middle class white women. Women, I'm not sure it was middle class, it was just women, all sorts of women. If it had been only women, if it had only been sisters uncut, like it wouldn't have, I don't think it would have changed the ecology. It was all sorts of women who went out on those demonstrations.

Yeah, no, of course, it was all sorts of women went on the protest, but it was the fact that it was, you know, nice white middle-class women that changed the attitude of the labour leadership in particular, wasn't it? I mean, that was what... I see what you're saying, yeah, but I just wanted to be clear that the demonstrations had, on the Sarah Everard stuff, had all sorts of women on it. Yeah, sure. That's right. And the labour leadership were basically, like, not willing.

They were showing themselves totally unwilling, weren't they, to... to actually line themselves up with BLM or figures on the left to oppose it. And then they kind of had to change their position. So that is interesting, isn't it? I also think it offers an opening for the Labour left, I think, in that the Labour leadership are pretty anti-democratic in their organisation of the Labour Party, in their attitude towards policy.

But also, you know, I remember all of the sort of the liberal commentariat and the sort of like, the sort of bizarre comments, there's bizarre fantasies about Corbyn rounding people up and putting him in camps and all these sorts of things, right? When he was like, you know, probably he's got the biggest civil libertarian record of any parliamentarian. And so the first, this is like this, oh, actually it was the second, because it was the sort of spy cops.

There was the bill which basically gave immunity to undercover officers for anything, including rape and murder, which Stama supported, if you remember. It's just like the direction of the sort of Labor right who either Stama is or has been completely captured by, it is incredibly illiberal. That's the politics of the much more illiberal

end of the new labour years sort of politics, that sort of authoritarian and liberal politics. Well, that's true. That's true. But I think this all illustrates your analysis care, actually, that it's basically, you know, it's a very feebrile situation. The right are not as strong or as confident as they probably look at the moment and as an 80-seat majority in Parliament we team to imply. I think that is registered by the Labour leadership kind of wavering so much.

one hand wanting to embrace this like authoritarian social conservatism and on the other hand being quite quickly spooked, you know, by a big section of their own base, the metropolitan base, into having to oppose it. I mean, I think overall the situation is just a lot more open than people thinking it. I think this is, I think this is, I think this should be that this would, in some ways, this should be the theme of the show, I think. I mean, on the one hand, superficially, it looks like really terrible. Like we've got an 80 seat tall, we majority, got the, The Tory is running ramp into the local elections. We've got a right-wing Labour leadership,

like hysterically, like trying to kind of stamp out of the left. And we've got a government, we've got a country that has never really placed a high value on democracy or freedom of assembly, just cranking up the authoritarianism. But underneath all that is the fact that, well, ultimately, the actual social constituency that is in favour of all this stuff is pretty small. No, they're just massively overrepresented. They're the only people voting in the local elections yesterday

because everybody else knows perfectly well their votes don't count for anything. But they're small and they're shrinking and they're getting older. And we've got the Summer of Love post-COVID coming up unless we have some massive crisis, so everyone's going to party and that can only be good for us. That's right. That can only be good for it.

Is it either going to be the summer of love or the summer of rage, or perhaps, perhaps both? Well, we can go together. Yeah, get back for our autumn edition of people. Thank you.