Let me be absolutely clear. I do not support violence against the person under any circumstances. This doesn’t just apply to MPs, but to all public service workers operating in stressful situations. But the interweaving of arbitrary violence and the right to public protest raises bigger issues about the threads that hold civilised society together.
It is clear to me that the debacle in parliament last week was not about protecting the lives of MPs. It was about covering Labour’s back. The millions of people in Britain who oppose the relentless destruction of Gaza are not mindless militants. Those turning out in support for an immediate ceasefire are not participants in ‘hate rallies’. In the main, they simply want parliament – and the Labour Party in particular – to challenge the humanitarian slaughter taking place in Gaza.
Honest debate on the situation in Gaza
Forced migrations into nowhere lands, the bombing of schools and hospitals, cutting off access to power, clean water and medical supplies, the vilification of aid agencies and the arbitrary assassination of children on the streets, comes as close to ethnic cleansing as you’d ever want to be. But parliament has struggled to say so. Its debates became impaled on the atrocities of 7 October and Israel’s right to self defence.
The UK appears to dance to whatever tune the Biden administration is singing. This increasingly isolates us within the international community and the UN. For Labour, however, it’s a lot worse. Few can understand why Labour has allowed Benjamin Netanyahu and his ultra-right cronies to get away with claiming the obliteration of Gaza is an act of self defence.
If someone discovered there was a Hamas cell in London and its members used the tube network to get around, no one would accept that he then had a right to flatten London in pursuit of its leaders. But in Gaza the absurdity goes unchallenged.
Moreover, Labour has barely made anything of the arbitrary demolition of Palestinian homes in the West Bank, the routine killings by settler communities and the role of the IDF in blocking off the front of Palestinian houses in Hebron so that only Israeli settlers have access to the streets.
Threat to democracy
None of the parliamentary debates so far have taken issue with the fact that Netanyahu is accused of corruption. His whole survival strategy depends on opposing any two-state solution and in nurturing far-right hostilities to Palestinians. Netanyahu is a far bigger threat to Israeli democracy than Hamas will ever be.
For Britain, the problem is that the racism Netanyahu fosters over there plays itself out over here. See how quickly Suella Braverman leapt in, claiming that Islamists are in control of Britain. See how quickly public rights of protest are being redefined as unacceptable threats to democracy. See how any challenge to ministerial whims is being put down to deep state hostility towards ‘the will of the people’. This is Alice in Wonderland politics. It would be absurd at the best of times. Today it verges on the tragic.
Suppressing dissent
Already, climate protesters are denied the right (in court) to set out the risk of environmental collapse as the basis of their actions. Others, protesting about the systematic pollution of rivers and beaches, get no closer to triggering the political changes we need. They too risk becoming criminalised.
The parliamentary call to ‘protect the sanctity of MPs’ homes’ is turning into a front for the wider criminalisation of public protest around public buildings, corporate headquarters and parliament itself. Even the right to project ‘protest’ images onto the House of Commons is being thrown into the ‘criminalisation’ melting pot.
This is what the Tory Right longs for: corporate feudalism under the cloak of nominal democracy.
We are already halfway there. Local authorities that have had billions cut from their budgets are forced into bankruptcy. A fire-sale of remaining public assets invariably follows. Meanwhile, the government is concerned that Ofwat is hesitating to use its enforcement powers against privatised water companies, due to the risk that these companies will go bankrupt. Corporate fiefdoms are protected above all else. How else would you explain the government’s complete funding of Network Rail’s costs during the rail disputes? Dividends and bonuses ran on time, even when the trains didn’t.
Every single privatisation in Britain has left corporate owners richer and the public poorer. It’s no less true of the salami slicing of NHS services through private procurement and PFI schemes. The real debate ought to be about how to re-socialise public services (on a not-for-profit basis) without saddling the public with unaccountable centralised bureaucracies. But Labour’s safety-first politics consistently ducks such issues. That’s what enrages people.
Nicer people running nasty policies will not get Britain out of the mess we are in.
Beyond the wasteland
My belief is that systems-breakdown is now unavoidable. This isn’t because Liz Truss and a platoon of MAGA muppets are determined to rescue us from the deep state. The explanation is much simpler. Climate physics no longer waits for shallow politics to recognise the damage that tooth-and-claw capitalism has done to our prospects of survival. The wasteland beckons. To escape it we will have to break from the self-deceiving comfort zone parliament has trapped itself into.
So too with Gaza. We need a radical shift in deeds not words. Norwegian pension funds have already disinvested from Israeli bonds. Ireland is challenging the 22% of EU Horizon funding that goes to Israel for the development of Pegasus spyware. Slovenia, Portugal, Spain and Ireland are sending extra funding to United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Britain could do the same, along with suspending arms sales, military support and investment until genuine peace negotiations take place.
But this won’t happen until MPs cease playing games with parliamentary rules and, instead, address their criticism to Israel’s systematic destruction of life in Gaza.
Britain’s problems don’t rest with today’s protesters – be they Netanyahu’s opponents or NHS workers, climate protesters or environmental activists. The problem is parliament itself.
No amount of smart procedural footwork will get MPs out of the mess they are in. This week’s shenanigans were little more than a puppet show, jousting between ignorance and emptiness. Our only hope is in finding transformative answers to today’s most towering problems.
And if we want to do that, we have to change the politics, not persecute the protesters.
