In its quest to outflank Reform to the right, Labour has not just continued the 2020s Tory assault on protest and left-wing dissent, but deepened it

~ Freedom Press ~

It’s been a busy summer. In that time we watched, somewhat shocked even as anarchists, while the Labour government did its best to out-repress the Tories that had gone before with their crackdown on dissent from the left.

Most notable was the proscription of Palestine Action, using an anti-terror law previously restricted to groups that had actually carried out acts of terror, or at the very least advocated it.

While then-Home Secretary Yvette Cooper (since replaced by the even bluer-Labour Shabana Mahmood) hinted strongly at violence unknown to the public (not very terrorish then) the most anyone appears to have come up with, beyond B&E and vandalism, is iffy insinuations of anti-Semitic intent, someone resisting arrest, and a guy waving a toy gun around on social media.

ISIS it ain’t.

And the government has not, it must be said, helped public perception by negotiating a potential secret deal to pay Elbit, the firm Palestine Action targeted, £2 billion in training fees.

Why did Palestine Action target Elbit? It’s an Israeli arms firm heavily involved with the Gaza genocide, which Westminster is supposedly not in favour of.

£2 billion, incidentally, is also what Chancellor Rachel Reeves put aside for affordable housing in the most recent Budget.

But this is far from the only repressive activity to have been overseen by Keir “I was a human rights lawyer donchaknow” Starmer and Yvette “got crushed in a leadership election by an elderly allotment socialist” Cooper.

Also notable was the imposition of the Online Safety Act, risibly and pathetically used to try and tar Nigel Farage as a paedophile protector when he criticised it as a troubling case of State overreach.

While Farage certainly doesn’t care about public safety of any kind (he’s been the main Frankenstein electrifying racist thugs for decades) he is, in this case, correct. A self-serving stopped clock because, like the anarchists (and probably most of the radical left), his boys on the far-right stand to be silenced by this sort of legislation.

Who decides what’s “appropriate?” Why the government of the day, of course. The same one that wields the Terrorism Act like a bad line manager throwing around disciplinaries. Radical politics are easily redefined as “not for children”, while the status quo and its deprivations sail onwards.

Then it’s a skip and a jump to discussion of unflattering periods of history, or modern culture war topics, if Reform gains power.

And that’s before you get to the bizarre train of thought which has led to “security measures” involving the uploading of your face and multiple other forms of identity to random websites. A more thoroughly implemented tool for bad actors would be hard to find.

Perhaps, if you have anarchists reluctantly agreeing with Toad of Toad Hall’s fascist cousin, that too isn’t a great sign for your government’s commitment to civil liberties.

It isn’t only Starmy’s army that’s been fulfilling anarchist prophecies about right-ratchet politics closing avenues of dissent, of course. Most of the last few years were spent under a Tory government which set in train repressions that “liberal” Labour is failing to reverse.

The rollout of facial recognition cameras into public spaces began under them, Cooper merely looked the other way while this pound shop Minority Report rapidly escalates into a universal, constant fact of life. Mahmood will no doubt be similar.

The broader crackdown on protest, too, is a continuation with Priti Patel’s 2023 Protest Act having heavily restricted everything from locking on to slow walking, even with some of its more ludicrous measures on “minor disruption” being knocked down by the courts.

Liberty, which brought the successful legal challenge, has called on Labour to scrap the legislation and even Cooper herself said in Parliament in 2022 that the then-Bill: “fails on all counts … We have historic freedoms and rights to speak out, to gather and to protest against the things that governments or organisations, public or private, do that we disagree with. That goes for protesters with whom we strongly disagree.”

Yet Labour has shown no indication that it intends to repeal the Act and to the contrary, as we have seen over last year, is pressing on the judiciary to repress disruptive groups such as Just Stop Oil more heavily than ever, overseeing a series of stunningly long prison sentences.

Instead, in May of this year, we had a proposed “statutory right to protest” shoveled in with Labour’s own Crime and Policing Bill. Which as the Network for Police Monitoring pointed out, would offer little beyond the existing measures in the Human Rights Act, while gifting future governments a ready-made additional tool to define what is and isn’t “good” dissent.

It’s hard to imagine, with all this going on, how anybody could look on Labour in 2025 as any sort of bulwark against the right and far-right. In some ways it has even allowed the far-right to pose as defenders of our civil liberties, though once in power they will no doubt act similarly.

Starmer the human rights lawyer, having betrayed the hopes of those Labour Party loyalists who voted for his leadership, has followed it by betraying those who voted for him to hold off the far-right.

And while with years left to go until the next election it’s impossible to say for certain what Your Party or the Greens might achieve, it seems unlikely they will provide an alternative position to clw back any of the ability to dissent that has been attacked by the leading parties.

So, as ever, it’s left to the grassroots. Liberal NGOs such as Amnesty and Liberty will no doubt do what they can in the courts, but these are not institutions built for the working class or for any rebellious tendency. More damage has been done to the government’s attempts at a monopoly of protest by a few hundred defiant pensioners with homemade placards than by any number of obscure speeches in the House.

The reason they are so aggressively against direct action and disruptive protest is because it works. As we have seen from the far-right over the summer in their hotels protests and flag tantrums (which remain lightly policed in a showcase of what “two tier” really means) extra-parliamentary action forces attention, debate and often, attempts to head off worse via compromise or even legislation.

But as radicals who aren’t in line with the broad direction of ruling class travel, our path is steeply uphill.

This article first appeared in the Freedom supplement for the 2025 London Anarchist Bookfair