It’s a very recent phenomenon for peaceful protests to be demonised in the way they are right now. The crackdown by the British state and much of our national media on our freedom to protest is also disproportionately targeted at causes which those at the top don’t favour. In the autumn of 2000, lorry drivers and farmers blockaded oil terminals, refineries and petrol stations, bringing the country to a near-standstill.
There was consensus that these blockades were ‘legal,’ and they were supported by the Conservative party and national media such as the Express and The Times.
These protests were over fuel duty, and despite the habit of New Labour governments to infringe on some civil liberties, emergency measures were put in place for the police and army to work around the protests instead of breaking them.
Soon after, the government conceded some ground on the issue of fuel duty.
The ideas of mass arresting protestors or injunctions on oil infrastructure (which mean prison if broken) were viewed as overreaches of the law.
Its worrying that only two decades later, there has been a massive shift away from that attitude.
Today, Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Just Stop Oil (JSO) haven’t managed a protest which comes close to the disruption of those fuel protests, yet they are clamped down on by the British state and national media far more.
The reaction over the past three years to XR and JSO has seen thousands of arrests and over one hundred imprisonments.
This has been added to by the criminalization of mass trespass, noisy protests, and gluing or handcuffing yourself to anything in protest (illegalising past actions by the suffragettes and football fans).
The unprecedented use of injunctions has also been wielded to stop blockades of oil refineries by JSO last year.
The latter prompted JSO’s move to slow marches, which have been common for years and don’t prompt hysteria when used by many causes, yet are decried on social media by The Sun, among others, when JSO organise them.
Furthermore, hundreds of ULEZ cameras in Greater London have been vandalised or destroyed this year, but only five related arrests are listed on the Metropolitan Police’s website, and there’s no sign of injunctions.
The way UK Government ministers respond to non-violent protest also seems ideological; Deputy Conservative Chairman Lee Anderson advocated the decency of anti-asylum seeker protests outside hotels, despite such protests often having proudly far-right organisers and arrests for missile-throwing at one in the month before his statement.
Yet, in April this year Anderson decried the Met Police Chief in a Parliamentary select committee for not clearing Parliament Square of a peaceful protest he didn’t like, and has previously called for water cannons to be used on XR.
Today our civil liberties are being threatened more than any other time in recent history. How badly this affects you depends on if the political leaders and senior journalists of the day side with your cause.
The UK Government and their supportive media outlets are currently against protests from the climate movement, as well as Palestinians, Black Lives Matter and others, in an attempt to deter us from supporting these causes and from holding them accountable in the streets.