State clampdown is wider than royal protests

Met cops made 64 arrests during last Saturday’s coronation (Picture: Republic)

It was characteristically stupid of the Metropolitan Police to round up the organisers of the anti-monarchist protest before the coronation last Saturday. The Met is a disgraced institution, which even the establishment insider Louise Casey found to be institutionally racist, sexist, homophobic and corrupt in her report published in March. 

Opinion polls consistently show that support for the monarchy is dwindling, especially among young people. By pre-emptively arresting protesters the Met has put a blot on what will probably be the highpoint of Charles III’s reign. But, of course, the cops weren’t acting on their own. Founded by a Tory home secretary, Sir Robert Peel, the Met has always been a key repressive instrument of the central government. 

The current home secretary, far right demagogue Suella Braverman, has ordered a drive against the right to protest. This upsurge in repression isn’t just confined to Britain. Witness the savage violence meted out by French president Emmanuel Macron’s riot cops first against the yellow vest movement in 2018-19, then against pensions and ecological protesters this year.

Republican-controlled state legislatures in the United States reacted to the Black Lives Matter rising in 2020 by tightening laws against protests. The recent expulsion of two African-American legislators from the Tennessee State House of Representatives for demonstrating against gun violence is a symptom of the reigning mentality.

In Policing Protest (2021), an important study of the US, Paul Passavant analyses the development of what he calls “neoliberal authoritarianism”. This involves the police using and flaunting excessive violence, relying on increasingly sophisticated military hardware, and spying on suspects with the help of statistical models and racial profiling. 

These methods, Passavant argues, were developed to maintain order in cities serving financial capitalism and mass consumption. But the present repressive wave suggests we are reaching a new stage in this process. Even the advanced capitalist states confront an environment that they increasingly can’t control thanks to economic and financial instability, climate change, and inter-imperialist rivalry. 

The neoliberal mantra of the self-regulating market is being exposed as the dogma it always was. State power is becoming ever more important, to manage shaky economies and control populations thrown into flux by cascading emergencies.

In my new book The New Age of Catastrophe I argue that the Covid pandemic acted as a trial run for how states will deal with the disasters to come. They borrowed massively to prevent incomes collapsing during the lockdowns, and drastically restricted movements. These measures could be justified given the previous lack of preparation for pandemics. 

But the rapid run down in Covid safety measures and tracking data means that we may well face similar shutdowns in the face of new viruses. States also started taking additional repressive powers. In Britain the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act targeting protests that cause “public nuisance” has been followed by the Public Order Act that was rushed through parliament giving the cops yet more powers to prevent “disruption”. This legislation emboldened the Met to clamp down last Saturday. 

After coronation crackdown, resist escalating repression

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It’s becoming much harder, despite the efforts of mainstream politicians, to present the geopolitical competition between Western imperialism and China and Russia as a contest between  “democracy” and  “autocracy”.  Just as at the height of the Cold War during the 1950s, neither bloc is willing to tolerate dissent and protest.

But the stakes are now very high, as the present system threatens us with fresh catastrophes. Faced with the disruptions caused by climate change and the danger of nuclear war, we can’t surrender the right to protest.  Back in the early 1980s, what is often called the Second Cold War brought us probably closer to a nuclear exchange between the US and the Soviet Union than we have ever been.  

Then the great radical historian Edward Thompson produced a book called Protest and Survive and campaigned to promote mass protests for nuclear disarmament across Europe that put pressure on the rival powers. That’s what we need to do now—protest and survive.