By a convenient coincidence, Michael Gove’s burning desire to banish extremists from every area of our public life matches the long-held ambition of a succession of home secretaries to ban protestors from every area of our public spaces.
While the secretary of state claims the right to decide who is and who isn’t allowed to possess a dissenting voice, the Defending Democracy Policing Protocol (DDPP) will decide where anyone who he’s let slip through the net is allowed to raise it.
If Gove’s pronouncement has left you pondering who exactly counts as being beyond the pale and whether you might know any of them, it’s worth remembering that for hundreds of years governments have branded pretty much anyone who ever joined a protest as an “extremist”, especially when they were protesting against them.
This ‘E’ label has always been one that politicians have enjoyed attaching to the banners raised at demonstrations. You see, while a protestor may try to persuade you, an extremist is too frightening to listen to. A protestor may want to change society, but an extremist wants to tear it down and destroy everything you hold dear. So, if you can be convinced that the former equates to the latter, you’re more likely to want the scary people locked up than you are to consider their point of view.
Governments want us to accept that protestor is actually a synonym for extremist because the arguments of extremists can be dismissed as well … extreme.
Three point guide to demonising protestors
And it was ever thus. From suffragists to CND and every popular protest in between, the trick of adding horns and a pitchfork to a caricature of people asking for change has been used for generations.
Not sure that’s true? Here’s three tactics to watch out for whenever a politician criticises an inconvenient protest. Humphrey Appleby’s guide to demonising campaigners:
- Insinuate that their stated aim is merely a cover for a more terrifyingly, seditious ambition.
- Imply that even if they are well intentioned, they are being manipulated by or have been infiltrated by devilish “outsiders”.
- Proclaim that they are a threat to something called, “The British way of life”.
Pick almost any campaign that’s ever taken to the streets of our country, don’t worry if you agreed with it or not, and you’ll see at least one of these charges levelled against it.
Supporters of slavery warned that abolitionists would ruin the British way of life by robbing the empire of free labour. The suffragettes attacked by Churchill’s police on Black Friday 1910, supposedly wouldn’t rest until the country was run by women while their menfolk were emasculated. According to politicians of the day, the anti-Aparthied movement was supported by terrorists, the quakers who founded CND were controlled from Russia, the striking miners were “the enemy within” and pretty much every one of the hundreds of thousands who protested against the poll tax were actually “outside agitators.”
Any readers so young that they have to ask Alexa if those protests actually happened, might want to consider the draconian sentences handed to climate activists accused of holding the British public to ransom while being banned from even telling the jury what they were protesting about. And the spectre of the malign, surprisingly well travelled, outside agitator was never more frequently invoked than during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations of 2020, whose followers were said to roam from city to city attempting to literally overthrow the landmarks of British history.
A concept more vague than a pledge from Keir Starmer
Parliament’s pre-Gove official definition identified as extremist anyone who “showed vocal or active opposition to British fundamental values”. So, point three of Sir Humphrey’s mantra was built in.
This British values thing that apparently gets extremists so worked up is a concept more vague than a pledge from Keir Starmer. Which values are we talking about here? Perhaps there’s a clue from Gove’s own stint as education secretary when he was very keen that schools taught “British values”. The history curriculum he pushed on them concentrated on what he called the heroes and heroines of Britain’s past including figures like Clive of India, presumably considered heroic for maintaining a bloodstained grip on the Empire.
Post-Gove and British values has been updated to the UK’s system of liberal parliamentary democracy as the thing that extremists are chomping at the bit to do away with, another catch all phrase that allows for everyone’s personal interpretation. After all, after the most recent by-election, our unelected prime minister, apparently terribly concerned about the extremist threat to British democracy, rushed to his lectern to condemn the democratic decision taken by the people of Rochdale. Sunak clearly doesn’t do irony.
And he’s not too hot on integrity either. While his government is encouraging us to spot extremists around every corner, he refuses to see the ones on his doorstep.
Any definition of extremism that doesn’t encompass an inclination to hate all black women ora suggestion that an MP should be shot, is going to be about as useful as Lee Anderson’s guide to good race relations. Asked if he intends to return Helicopter Hester’s extraordinarily large donation and ban his companies from receiving any more government contracts, the prime minister suggested that his was one form of extremism we should simply move on from. Apparently, he can think of ten million reasons why we should.
A steep and slippery slope
An impressive range of groups and individuals, from Amnesty, to Oxfam and most recently a couple of archbishops, have voiced their alarm at the expansion of the term extremist and the increasing tendency to hurl it at anyone with a placard along with other dog whistle phrases like radicals and hate marchers. There is a real concern that the DDPP will curtail the actual British value of free speech and prevent opposition voices being heard in exactly the places they should be loudest such as outside parliament and party conferences.
Gove’s shiny new explanation of extremism is so open to interpretation that even as he unveiled it to the world, he was unable to say if it covered Hester’s revolting opinions, while making it clear that decisions on which people, chants or groups fell under the definition would be for the police and ministers to decide.
So, the new definition is just as subjective as the one it replaced, and that of course is the point.
When governments are allowed to dictate who is and who isn’t an extremist, the slope its citizens find themselves on is likely to be as steep as it is slippery.
In Saudi Arabia its extreme to believe you can own a car and a vagina at the same time, in Russia an extremist is anyone who thinks Putin shouldn’t poison his critics, while in Hong Kong it’s anyone who votes the wrong way.
In the hands of a government keen to demonise opposition, extremist isn’t just a pejorative noun, it’s also an irregular verb;
I have a reasonable opinion, your views are a little unusual, she is a dangerous extremist.
