The Gagging Bill effectively became the Gagging Law last night when the vote in the House of Lords was a tie – in such circumstances the government gets its way.
The intention of this new law is to end free speech for NGOs, trade unions, charities and the seriousness of it cannot be overestimated. Many of the organisations affected by this gagging law are currently the only people representing the poor, the homeless and social justice generally – they will now have to think very carefully before they dare to speak.
Nervous trustees will surely succumb to worries about these new legal risks and go silent as the 2015 election approaches, just when they should be speaking out on behalf of those without money, agency or power.
This is another example of how right wing politics and the financial elites that are running this country have any and all opposition to a creeping feudalism on the run.
Every day a new horror.
It started with the attacks on the unemployed, the disabled, the sick and the working poor. It has continued with the gradual privatisation of the NHS, the new gagging law to silence charities and trade unions, the London mayor wants water cannons to be turned against protestors and we know about the often illegal surveillance and infiltration being carried out against campaign and student groups.
The left is in disarray – trying to protect what is left of its achievements but its starting to look like little more than a rout.
Those looking to a Labour victory to correct this bleak outlook are grasping at straws. New (Blue) Labour have no plans to bow to public opinion and renationalise the utilities or to reverse the attacks on the poor – indeed in Rachel Reeves they have a shallow careerist who spouts much of the same bile as Iain Duncan Smith. I hate to break it to Labour supporters but they are a party of neoliberalism now.
Ed Balls is committed to the same economic policies as the Tories – determined to ignore the advice of every sane heterodox economist and make the same cuts and follow the same neoliberal path as the coalition.
There will no popping of housing bubbles under Labour, no reform of the monetary system, no house building, no regulation of the banks, no restraint of banker bonuses, no investment in green technology, no curbing of the offshore tax antics of the big multi-nationals, no end to accelerating inequality and certainly no aid for the poor.
Ed Milliband wriggles and spins to try and create the illusion of difference between Blue Labour and the tories – but his “broken markets” cant is almost as empty as the “one nation” soundbite we keep hearing endlessly.
What the “broken markets” hype disguises cutely is that Blue Labour are a party of market forces, but we are invited to believe that the addition of a few more players in the energy market or the banking sector will somehow make neoliberalism work for the common man – it won’t of course, but that is their election strategy in a nutshell.
The next election will be contested between three parties of neoliberalism, all committed to neoliberal values and policies – all will assure the electorate that while there is no alternative to “hard choices” (for the impoverished, the voiceless and the powerless) – they represent the best choice to deliver some future prosperity that will certainly not involve “hard choices” for the wealthy, big corporations or the political establishment.
While well intentioned individuals and groups gather in isolation to offer “resistance” to the rout of embedded liberalism and social justice, it looks increasingly forlorn.
The changes made and the power grabbed by right wing politics on behalf of corporate power look increasingly irreversible. What peaceful resistance can now be realistically offered when the media, the politicians, the police and the banks now effectively all operate together to exclude ordinary people from information, power and any way to influence events?
When charities, trade unions and NGO’s are gagged by draconian laws, when innocent protest groups are infiltrated by the police, when nervous elites demand water cannons and more laws to criminalise protest, when democracy offers no effective choice to the electorate, when governments are riddled with corporate lobbyists and corrupted by corporate patronage then pressure builds.
Where will this pressure go? With no way to speak and no way to effect change via the ballot box what will happen as the effects of neoliberalism become ever more apparent and bleak?
Are we seeing the start of a process that inevitably leads to a major upheaval of the kind seen in the north African states like Tunisia and Egypt? It looks like the more power and wealth the elites of this country gather the more paranoid and fearful they become – they then demand more power, more restrictions on free speech and the right to protest. Presumably this will only leave them even more paranoid and more fearful as this seems to be the pattern observed here and in other countries.
Perhaps forces are in play now even in staid conservative Britain that cannot easily be stopped – with a detached political / financial elite and an increasingly alienated electorate on a collision course.
Political and social historians may mark this day – the day that the gagging law was passed, as the start of a very turbulent cataclysm in British history.
Will Labour reverse this disgusting and disgraceful peace of neo nazi legislation. It beggars belief, that even the Tories have sunk so low, and as for the Lib Dems, well I am speechless!
What with this gagging bill and Boris Johnson wanting water cannons against protestors …democracy is under threat. Where the hell is all this going?
Well despite a draw in the Lords, it got passed, quelle suprise. One more step down the road to a police state.
Yes please. We need an uprising of some kind to get rid of the parasitical classes like bankers and modern politicians.
Well the scary thing is – THE RICH never stop worrying about their lot. Feeling they don’t have enough and getting ever more fearful that somebody might deprive them in some dark imaginary way.
It seems that the more powerful and wealthy people get – the more demanding, paranoid and fearful they get too.
What uprising? The British people are so stupid (I’m sorry, ‘stoic’)that they won’t even bother. The things that have taken place have led to other countries’ citizens taking to the streets, but here, it’s a case of ‘mustn’t grumble’, which is just an excuse for weakness and unwillingness to act. Until that changes, we deserve everything we get, and I mean everything.
Damn right. Blue Tories, red Tories, yellow Tories. Take your pick, citizen, it makes no real difference.
Not enough people can normally be bothered to take to the streets, and when they *do* take to the streets, they riot, steal stuff, kill people and generally act like idiots.
It can be a messy even bloody process its true.
I recall watching the protests in Egypt with open mouthed astonishment both for the violence and the lack of violence given the sheer numbers of people that were involved.
the overwhelming majority of people who protested in Egypt bravely did so peacefully and in spite of violence.