by Claire Bailey

In the weeks leading up to Christmas, messages went out on social media calling on people across the world to join a global credit card strike and to use cash only for their purchases. As reported in The New Arab on December 19^th: “Under the hashtag #StrikeForGaza, the campaign asks people to stop using their credit cards between 24 hours and a week, withdrawing in cash only the amount they need, and avoiding online credit purchases.” Support was strongest in Turkey and the Middle East, especially in Lebanon and Jordan where the strike was widely observed on December 11^th in solidarity with a strike in the West Bank and East Jerusalem called by a coalition of Palestinian resistance groups.

In the west, support was haphazard and harder to track but the call was widespread on social media and it had a particular virtue: while we still have cash, a credit card strike is a difficult type of protest to police, at a time when in many countries protest of all kinds is being criminalised by law and suppressed by police violence. 

GROWING PROTEST 

Protest worldwide has been growing – from Amazon workers starting to coordinate action globally and the Gilets Jaunes creating a national network of resistance in France in 2018-19 to 250 million farmers in India striking against the 2020 Farm Bills, laws extending the corporate stranglehold over Indian agriculture. After a year of demonstrations, hunger strikes, blockades of roads and railways leading to Delhi and bloody confrontations with the police, the farmers won: the government repealed the laws in full.

According to David Bailey writing in The Conversation in 2020, the number of protests in the UK, including official strikes, more than trebled in the decade after 2008. They involved transport workers, lawyers, and doctors as well as workers starting to organise in the gig economy. There were protests organised by housing activists, and the Occupy movement. There were more than 3000 individual hunger strikes in 5 years by immigrants and asylum seekers in Yarls Wood detention centre. Extinction Rebellion took off in 2019 and its events accounted for 45% of all protests recorded that year. Nationwide strikes in the universities have repeatedly brought teaching and assessment to a standstill in the last few years while students have organised demonstrations in support of their lecturers as well as to protest against terrible student housing conditions. Campaigns in defence of the NHS and strikes by health workers at all levels in the service have taken place, attracting strong public support. Just Stop Oil has adopted the tactic of a slow march.

UK public support for any protest is usually recorded in the mainstream media as very divided at best, with a focus on the stories of inconvenienced individuals, but the reality is that recent protests and official strikes have mobilised millions, many for the first time. Support for striking health workers was solid throughout 2023 with local groups of all kinds joining picket lines, and it became increasingly clear that NHS workers were themselves ‘the public’. The obvious coincidence of protestor and public does away with the old fiction of an absolute divide between ‘rioters’ or ‘extremists’ and ‘decent hard-working citizens’ that the government works hard to create.

While the number of protests is an indicator of the widening gap between governments and people as conditions worsen, more protests do not in themselves lead to significant victories. Every protest is, however, a potential risk for the UK government and its policing of the population because protest teaches people important lessons about cooperation and courage. How precisely to respond to any single event is a difficult calculation for the authorities as was clear on the occasion of the November 11^th Palestine Solidarity Campaign demonstration when internal disagreements led to the sacking of the Home Secretary. But because any protest has the potential to ignite a chain reaction and because the connections between protests are growing fast, the direction of travel is towards authoritarian rule.

REPRESSIVE LAWS 

Anyone taking part in a protest is liable to learn where their rights come to an end; from now on it’s going to happen much sooner and faster. A barrage of four new laws in the UK – three already on the statute books and one with its 3^rd and final reading on January 10^th 2024 – drastically reduce basic rights and extend state powers to an extent few have recognised. Between them they demonstrate the ways in which the government is willing to infringe international law to get what it wants.

THE POLICE, CRIME SENTENCING & COURTS ACT 2022 focuses on “disruption to the life of the community” and gives the police very broad powers to decide what this means, including noise triggers. Significantly it makes all protestors vulnerable to the charge that they “ought to have known” that police conditions had been imposed on a particular protest. If found guilty of causing a public nuisance under this Act protestors could face up to 10 years in prison and/or an unlimited fine.

THE STRIKES (MINIMUM SERVICE LEVEL) ACT came into effect on December 8^th and targets workers in the emergency services, border security, education, passenger rail and the nuclear sector, effectively removing the right to strike in those areas. Workers who don’t comply will face instant dismissal and their union will incur massive fines.

THE PUBLIC ORDER ACT 2023 again focuses on “disruption” and introduces a new offence of “interference with key national infrastructure”, that is anything that hinders or delays the operation of airports, railways, printing presses or oil and gas installations. The cross-party Joint Committee on Human Rights objected at the report stage of the Bill that the proposed law would “pose an unacceptable threat to the fundamental right to protest as guaranteed by Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights”.

THE ECONOMIC ACTIVITY OF PUBLIC BODIES (OVERSEAS MATTERS) BILL 2022-23 is explicitly aimed at the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement and will prevent “public bodies when making decisions about procurement and investment from considering a country or territory of origin or other territorial considerations in a way that indicates political or moral disapproval of a foreign state.” Four UN Special Rapporteurs wrote to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in mid-December to express their concerns about this Bill and its intended interference in human rights and freedom of expression.

OPEN CONFLICT 

Oliver Eagleton writing in Jacobin in November 2023 asserts that “Britain’s ruling bloc” is not especially concerned by recent protest of whatever sort, having successfully “seen off the challenge of Corbynism”; in his view, these new laws simply formalise hitherto arbitrary police powers. But this is both to underestimate what is new in the laws and to ignore things like the conviction of climate activist Stephen Gingell under Section 7 of the Public Order Act for taking part in a peaceful slow march. Gingell was jailed in December for 6 months. Looked at from a less parliamentary perspective than Eagleton’s, the “challenge” of the Corbyn vision of a possible UK is both ongoing and more complex, and its effects can be seen in the experiments a much more defensive establishment is conducting, with politicians like Suella Braverman who favour open conflict.

There is in fact a growing sense that all protests are now existential on both sides of the police line and that time is running out. The government’s growing intolerance of dissent reflects its failure to carry on as normal as custodian of the territory in which profit can be made. On the other side, a growing number of people are making it publicly clear that things can’t go on as they are, that power cannot be left in the hands of elites, whose idea of the future is a defended ‘Green Zone’ outside which everyone else can starve and burn.

The huge UK demonstrations against Israel’s uninhibited ethnic cleansing in Gaza have steadily taken on the form of a broad anti-war coalition. There is an anti-imperialist dimension to these protests and, importantly, rapidly developing international connections that enable coordinated events. Protests in central stations, for example, have taken place in many cities, each one learning from and building on the last. Alliances have been created via social media across the world, from Jordan and Yemen, where millions have marched and volunteers have crossed borders to fight, to health organisations in Europe raising money to send to the desperate hospitals in Gaza.

When on November 11^th, 500,000 people marched in London to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, it was in defiance of the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary’s combined warnings that decent people should steer well clear of an anti-semitic mob intent on desecrating war memorials. And when half a million protestors decide to turn out, there is not a lot the police can do, other than blind and mutilate as they did the Gilets Jaunes in France.

Shortly afterward, when the Home Secretary was sacked for criticising the police refusal to ban the march, she said this in a letter to the PM, “I have become hoarse urging you to consider legislation to ban the hate marches and help stem the rising tide of racism, intimidation and terrorist glorification threatening community cohesion. Britain is at a turning point in our history and faces a threat of radicalisation and extremism in a way not seen for 20 years…Rather than fully acknowledge the severity of this threat… you sought to put off tough decisions in order to minimise political risk to yourself. In doing so, you have increased the very real risk these marches present to everyone else.”

The “everyone else” is of course imaginary. But she was right that people who refuse to be intimidated pose a threat to a government unable to govern without constantly extending its powers of repression. She may also be right about the turning point.

 

Palestine solidarity protestors, London October 2023 pic by Alisdare Hickson

...a growing number of people are making it publicly clear that things can’t go on as they are, that power cannot be left in the hands of elites, whose idea of the future is a defended ‘Green Zone’ outside which everyone else can starve and burn.