‘I’ve looked at your website and it says you embrace democracy,” Tory MP and Conservative party deputy chair Lee Anderson said to Graham Smith, chief executive of the anti-monarchist campaign group Republic, during a parliamentary select committee hearing last week. “If you embrace democracy so much, why don’t you put your placards away and stand for election?”
Smith was one of six Republic supporters who had been pre-emptively arrested on the morning of the coronation. Other protesters, including from Just Stop Oil, and people who had no intention of protesting, such as volunteers from Westminster Council’s “Night Stars” women’s safety team, were also arrested.
Anderson’s question to Smith came as the latter was giving evidence to the select committee on the “policing of public protest”. The committee chair, Diana Johnson, declared it inappropriate for the session, and it was not pursued. But, however Lee Andersonish the query may have been – he had previously told anti-monarchists that they could emigrate if they objected to the king – it is also an important one, because that is how many think; that the beginning and end of democracy lie in the polling booth, and that disruptive protests are undemocratic and should be curtailed.
Democracy, though, is not just about placing a cross on a ballot paper. It is also about the contestation of power. Those with power, from employers to religious institutions, seek to restrain and influence the democratic process, to protect their own privileges and to diminish the voice of the masses. To view democracy as merely the filling in of a ballot paper is to envision a quiescent polity in which class interests, institutional players and entrenched social forces mould the democratic process.
We might vote as individuals in the privacy of the polling booth, but we can only defend democracy by acting collectively. This requires the creation of a robust public sphere, of a democracy that is contested as much in the streets and the workplace as in the polling station. From women’s suffrage to equality in employment, it is protest that has brought about democratic change. Without the right to free speech, to protest, march and assemble, and to strike, the right to vote becomes hollowed out.
Smith and the other Republic protesters were arrested under the new Public Order Act, which had received royal assent just four days earlier. The act extends stop and search powers, allows the police to ban people from participating in protests and criminalises many forms of protest, such as the obstruction of transport, interference with “key national infrastructure”, and “locking on” to people or objects. Even the “intention” of locking on is now a criminal offence. The wording of the law is open-ended, giving police great licence, including the warrant to pre-emptively stop protests before they have happened.
The Public Order Act follows on from last year’s Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, which allowed the police to stop protests deemed too noisy or disruptive. Between them, these are two of the most ferociously illiberal laws of recent times. In 2006, the court of appeal ruled that protest “becomes effectively worthless if the protester’s choice of ‘when and where’ to protest is not respected as far as possible”. Under the new laws, the police and the home secretary can decide not just when and where a protest can be held, but also how it can be held and how noisy it can be. It transforms protest from a right to a privilege. It also, as the campaign group Liberty has observed, helps to “normalise the criminalisation of protesters”.
The most vital form of protest in modern industrial societies is the strike; and the most essential form of collective organisation the trade union. Where employers can assert their economic power in the marketplace to impose their will on workers, from driving down wages to enforcing mass redundancies, the only power possessed by workers lies in their ability to act collectively and to withdraw their labour.
Unsurprisingly, the authorities have sought to diminish that power, successive governments since 1979 imposing ever more onerous conditions on the ability to strike, stripping away the possibilities of effective action and outlawing most forms of solidarity, from secondary strikes to flying pickets. All this has made British law, in Tony Blair’s appreciative words, “the most restrictive on trade unions in the western world”. But the recent strike wave, which showed the willingness of workers from nurses to train drivers to take action, has led the government to impose even more draconian legislation.
On Monday, the strikes (minimum service levels) bill returns to the House of Commons for a final vote, in response to which the TUC has called for a rally in protest. The bill allows employers and the government to impose minimum service levels in a range of sectors, including health, education, transport and fire and rescue services. It would, in effect, force nurses and ambulance workers and bus drivers and train guards and teachers and firefighters to break their own strikes, with the threat of being sacked if they don’t. It gives the government, as employment lawyers have observed, “unfettered power” to determine the extent to which workers can “lawfully exercise their freedom to strike”.
Those who try to limit democracy don’t begin by scrapping elections. They begin, rather, by allowing people to place a cross on a ballot paper every four or five years, but placing restrictions on the right to protest, to take collective action, to speak freely. From Russia to Venezuela, from Belarus to Saudi Arabia, that is the playbook of authoritarians.
Britain, of course, is not anything like those countries, and nor is it likely to be. But authoritarian states provide warnings of how democracy becomes eroded; not by the removal of the right to vote, but by the authorities insisting “you have the right to vote, so why do you need the right to protest, to strike, to speak freely?” By asking the Lee Anderson question. And because the right to vote becomes detached from other democratic rights, it becomes less and less meaningful.
At the select committee hearing last week, Anderson claimed that he had received many emails from people supporting the coronation arrests and dismissing the protesters as “trouble causers”. That may well be true. What is also true is that it’s the “trouble causers” who help keep democracy alive.
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
