Audrey White - 40 years of campaigning for justice
We are living in a moment when politicians of all sorts - both reactionaries and declared social democrats - promise an increase in police powers against protests. But we also live under a state which for decades after 1945 prided itself on its commitment to democracy. The Cold War was fought through the claim that the West meant freedom, the East dictatorship. The recent ideological reconstruction of western politics around the idea that, actually, the most desirable society would be a police state is accordingly a contradictory process. The dictators achieve a breakthrough in one area; activists respond, innovating with new protest forms. Even in our own times of far-right electoral advance and soft-left moral failure, repression hasn’t been as total as the politicians hoped, spaces remain for social movements to win victories.
For that small group of columnists who are given a platform in the Guardian to speak on behalf of the movements (George Monbiot, Owen Jones, Nesrine Malik…), the starting-point is the anti-protest laws passed by the Conservatives or now proposed by Labour. I am not criticising my comrades who see the new laws and point out their reactionary content. What I am saying, rather, is that it is a mistake to think these are always the cutting edge of authoritarian advance. Activists who accepted that reasoning are, against their better judgment, following the Jones and the Monbiots with their reformist conception of politics in which either dictatorship or social democracy must, by definition, start with the acts of Parliament, since MPs are in all possible circumstances the most important people to watch.
But if we are to understand the moves which have made the police more powerful or the courts more repressive, Parliament is the wrong place to begin. Over the last two years, the worst authoritarian acts have been, the attempted mass sacking of pro-Palestinian activists from their jobs, and second, the increased and now draconian sentences handed down to environmental protesters. In both cases, repression has emerged “from below” through people who are relatively junior in the system, not politicians, judges hearing trials rather than appellate courts. It’s the same when you think about the conditions which have been placed on demonstrations, the police’s innovation has been their more regular use of laws which were introduced in the Public Order Act 1986. In each of these three cases, there are no new laws. The reactionary advance has originated outside Parliament.
This has been clearest in the case of Gaza. Very few cases against Palestine solidarity activists have made it through the courts. Of those that have, quite a number have resulted in acquittals or discharges. Since Israel’s accelerated genocide began, the most dictatorial act has not been the criminalisation of pro-Palestinian protests or the mass arrests of protesters. It has been rather the way in which right-wing commentators sought to have any pro-Palestinian person sacked. Hundreds of people have been named in the press and threatened with dismissal; several dozen have actually lost their jobs. Had this happened in the US, the story would have been reported in the Guardian; because it happened in here, the paper is silent.
The principal actors in that dynamic of repression-from-below were journalists and campaigners in lobby groups (the people who made allegations), and managers in the public sector and business (the people who adjudicated them). In the cases where people were threatened with losing their jobs because they used social media or wore a Palestinian scarf, Israel’s supporters did not use the state to achieve reactionary ends, they sought to manipulate the power of capital over labour. That wave of repression was not prepared by Acts of Parliament. The laws which the advocates of authoritarianism relied on were decades old.
Workers mobilised forms of counterpower in their defence: trade unionists defended their fellow workers at disciplinary meetings, through pro-Palestine campaigns (ELSC, CAGE, BRISMES Campaigns) activists shared skills and knowledge.
Liberal commentators sometimes talk as if the state has acquired such an arsenal of anti-protest powers as to make campaigning almost impossible. Those powers include the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 which gave police wider powers than ever to put conditions on protest marches, and the Public Order Act 2023, which criminalised “locking on”, and which enabled magistrates to make Serious Disruption Prevention Orders banning protesters from attending demonstrations, etc. It would be wrong to minimise the evil ambitions which underpinned both pieces of legislation. But if you look at how those powers have been used in recent months, they have not had their intended effect of chilling left-wing speech. Fewer than half a dozen people are subject to Serious Disruption Prevention Orders.
At the crucial moment in autumn 2023, the police hesitated to use them. Suella Braverman and Rishi Sunak tried to label the demonstrations against Israeli’s war on Gaza hate marches and called on the Metropolitan police to ban them. The police refused. Even the proscription of Palestine Action has not changed the Met’s calculation that the movement is too large.
There are lots of reasons why they held back. Unlike politicians, the police have to be present when any ban is enforced. They are the ones who make the arrests. They know that it is easier for them to do that job if they can work with a degree of popular consent. Where a protest movement feels like it has only minority support, the police show no reservations before attacking it. Where a cause has majority backing, however, as the call for a ceasefire in Gaza does – senior police officers get nervous about attacking it.
Another of the reasons why the police declined to wade in is that, while the state in general is becoming less democratic, small but important parts of its machinery remain subject to forms of public control. Limited as those protections may be, they still exist. The custodians of the state hate to be held accountable by them.
To see the point I am making, it is worth thinking through the division of labour between different parts of the state when activists go on trial. When members of Insulate Britain or Just Stop Oil cause damage to a building owned by a business or the state, the protesters are charged, plead not guilty, and then go to crown court (in other words, jury) trial.
The main decision-makers are 12 jurors. They are members of the public, chosen at random. They attend the trial. These days, they are likely to hear a judge telling them that the accused have committed a very serious criminal offence. Probably, the judge will spend hours preventing the Defendants’ lawyers from putting forward a political defence exposing the effects of global warming on the natural world. Just as activists innovate tactics (digging tunnels to action on roads, marching slowly down the street), so do Crown Court judges, removing long-established defences of proportionality and lawful excuse, increasing the sentences for mundane acts of protest, threatening defendants with further jail terms should they do anything to explain why they carried out their protest. Even while the rules of the battle are changed, so as to make life easier for the oil companies, certain bastions of democracy remain. At the end of the hearing, the jurors have what lawyers call “jury equity”: the power not to convict a Defendant, even where that Defendant seems to have no defence.
In 2024, the Solicitor General sought to prosecute for contempt a Quaker, Trudi Warner. She was lied about, forced to wait for a year before a hearing, after she stood outside a trial of green protesters with a placard reading, “Jurors, you have an absolute right to acquit a defendant according to your conscience.” The case against her was eventually thrown out of court. The High Court judge who took that decision cited principles from UK law which have been copied by judges in the US and around the world. They grasped that a great deal of the UK’s soft power still rests on its self-projection as a liberal state. The prosecution’s fantasies of a society where every trial ended in conviction were, on this occasion, unacceptable. Even in these wretched times, the state still accepts the fundamental rights of jurors – the one democratic element in the criminal system, and the most important part.
It would be wrong to prettify the system as a whole. While democratic elements remain, a much larger part is played in most trials by petty autocrats. If a protester is convicted of criminal damage, it is the judge who decides what sentence the protesters will be given. It is the judge who takes the initiative in finding ways to punish protesters. Most judges were educated at a private school and at Oxbridge. Most have worked for decades as a prosecutor, the others in civil law always representing business or the state. Most judges listen to Radio 4 in the morning. They hear Conservative and Labour ministers, both Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer, demanding ever tougher sentences for the people protesting against ecocide. They don’t need new Acts of Parliament to tell them to act like bullies, rather they shift in that direction instinctively. They do, without questioning, whatever ministers ask.
When activists say that the politicians are getting worse, they’re right. But when people on our side react pre-emptively to the authoritarianism of the judges by talking or by planning activities as if we were already living in a police state – they’re wrong to do so. Creating a functioning dictatorship is harder than either politicians or indeed activists realise.
I am posting this piece on the day when Palestine Action seeks to judicially review its proscription. That act was unusual for the last two years in that it did begin at the top of politics, among politicians (the Home Secretary) rather than at the base. I accept that it is an exception to one of the central points this piece has been making, that we need to watch the reactionaries at the base of the global authoritarian shift. Sometimes the exception is just that; it does – as the cliché goes – prove the rule.
At any event, the proscription of Palestine Action is not an exception to the other main point I’ve been making, that the authoritarian turn produces waves of street activism and these are capable of defeating our antagonists. Just think of the huge wave of ingenuity the ban has unleashed – the people carrying banners, experimenting with language which invokes the statutory permission of campaigning against proscription in section 10 Terrorism Act 2000, or which can plausibly be denied constitutes “support” for the banned group.
The police have had to respond with innovations of their own – charging under section 13, which carries a lower penalty, as a way of avoiding jury trials.
But this move does not avoid the central problem that the police are arresting people who plainly aren’t terrorists – 83 year old vicars, on this last weekend Audrey White, whose life of activism protesting against sexual harassment was turned into a Glenda Jackson film. This is not the way to build a credible or popular police state, it is Labour telling everyone who listens that it has become a party of authoritarians and bullies.
For the moment, politicians are still better at promising great public acts of cruelty than they are at transforming how the state works. The innovations which have been used against climate protesters may threaten to become the general approach towards all protest – but that change hasn’t happened yet.
The most effective social movements are ones which are always escaping their bounds: strikes which spread and which inspire secondary action; protest movements which begin among the people who work for a particular service and then drag in the people who benefit from the service too; protest camps in one city which inspire emulators in other cities even across the world. The problem with fearing the state is that it can cause activists to limit their ambitions, to aim lower than we need to aim if we are going to win. Fear makes protest the work of minority subcultures, when if Communism is ever going to happen we have to be a movement of majorities. Our fears can make state repression seem more effective than it is, when it does activists limit our movements and prevent a healthy dynamic of outward growth.
Of course, in every protest movement you have to appraise the situation with fresh eyes. Sometimes, the most radical thing any activist can do is in fact a militant, spiky, act. On other occasions, the best you can achieve is to persuade a movement to halt and regroup – like the miners at the end of the 1984-5 strike, who went back to work with their brass bands playing and their flags flying, because so strong was the state power wielded against them, in the end, all the workers could defend was their own dignity. Sometimes, that’s all you can do.
But when the left gets the politics of protest wrong, our most common mistake is not to underappreciate the power of the enemy. Our greatest weakness is rather that we fail to sense the numbers who support us. Too often we forget the power we have to change the world.