Just Stop Oil protests: E P Thompson on Britain as a police state
Just Stop Oil protesters are disrupting London life every day during October, primarily by small scale road protests. It is effective in terms of publicity for an extremely important issue. Those involved face arrest and likely imprisonment.
How effective the protests will be in getting the Government to act can be debated elsewhere. In a democratic society there is a right to peaceful protest including civil disobedience, balanced with the possibility of a legal penalty.
Britain however has become an increasingly authoritarian society. Hence The Times (Editorial 11th October while claiming that the right to protest is ‘sacred’ believes this to be so only if it does nothing to disrupt the day to day profit making of capital. In the case of Just Stop Oil protests therefore it demands that the police use ‘pre-emptive’ powers to stop them before they even take place.
The current Home Secretary Suella Braverman might notionally agree that there is a right to protest but In practice can’t find any context in which it should be legal.
In 1980 the now defunct journal Camerawork published an issue (No.19) which contained amongst other things a page long commentary by the socialist historian E P Thompson together with a photomontage by Peter Kennard.
Thompson focused on the inquest into the death of Blair Peach, a socialist who was killed by a blow from a police truncheon at an anti-fascist demonstration in Southall in 1979. Thompson was very critical of the decision of the Coroner in the case Dr Burton not to appoint a jury.
He went on to criticise the views expressed in the memoir of the Head of the Metropolitan police Sir Robert Mark (1972-1977) as ‘illiberal’
Thompson concluded that:
As a historian I can say that I know of no period when the police have had such a loud and didactic presence, and when they have offered themselves as a distinct interest, as one of the great institutions
The undermining of democracy is certainly going on and at an inflationary rate
They wish to push us into a managed society, whose managing director is money, and whose production manager is the police…
The complete issue of Camerawork 19 is at this link
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