Labour’s war on protest
JVL Introduction
We now live in a state where the penalty for joining in an ‘annoying’ peaceful protest could be a ten-year prison stretch .
Tribune assistant editor Francesca Newton wonders why the Labour government shows no intention of repealing the Tory laws that ushered in this threat, among other draconian measures.
Is it because Starmer & Co also have no intention of taking the political action that would make unnecessary the kind of protests their predecessors were trying to repress?
Newton writes:
The Tories were invested in suppressing protest both because it was disruptive to their big business backers and because they knew anger was proliferating in the face of their failure to improve the climate outlook, or living standards, or Britain’s position on global injustice. Labour now appears to be doing the same thing, preemptively insulating itself from the dissent it fears its (in)action is liable to cause.
NWI
This article was originally published by Tribune on Mon 18 Nov 2024. Read the original here.
Labour’s War on Protest
The Tories introduced laws that criminalised protest to deal with the disorder they knew their policies would cause — and Labour’s refusal to repeal these laws indicates their interest in protecting that status quo.
Loading article text…
They are not even committed to repealing the Conservative vote-suppression legislation.
However, there is an EDM on this.
Please ask your MP to sign it:
https://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/62409/voter-identification
It is only in our corrupted news media that Starmer can get away with his ‘Labour is not the Party of Protest’ gibberish. Labour’s roots are in the Chartist and Trade Union campaigns for the poor. The Party’s founder Keir Hardie was Pacifist and Socialist. He died in 1915 while trying to organise a Pacifist General Strike against the Great War.
It is only Blairite entryists who come up with these ‘you have to kiss the a#se of power to get progressive things done’ nonsensical sentiments. This while they reverse the progressive achievements of genuine Labour governments, and line their pockets with lobbying donations.
Labour seem to be in it (“in government”) for a quiet life. They will do nought that would upset their paymasters’ applecarts. So in reality doing sweet FA is their strategy. And for us it means we get robbed again and again.