Without serious pressure, our putative PM is unlikely to overturn any of his predecessor’s ridiculous terror accusations, expansions of surveillance, or internet restrictions

~ Rob Ray ~

It’s hard to overstate how much of a gruelling slog towards normalised repression and surveillance the last two years under Keir Starmer have been. Even when comparing his tenure to that of the Tories, some of his government’s policies have been so knee-jerk authoritarian that Priti Patel might have been wary of trying them on.

Most prominent and egregious of these has been the banning of Palestine Action. The use of proscription to designate property damage as terrorism, beyond its farcical recent outcomes (where a “political” broken window is terror, but a window broken during a race riot is not) has horrific implications for the future of free dissent in Britain. If it can be used by a Labour government to repress Palestine solidarity there is nothing stopping “trying to influence government policy” being used as a weapon to turn against solidarity with anyone.

Starmer, ever one to lean on the “at least we’re better than Reform” defence while handing them this autocrat’s wet dream of a gift, has extended into practice a slate of anti-terror legal concepts both Labour and the Tories had previously set up, and did so with the clear purpose of clobbering left-wing activism while leaving much more overtly violent right-wing projects untouched.

It doesn’t take a genius to see what possibilities this opens up for the future, particularly should a far-right Reform government gain power. Any incoming Labour leader who held any respect for historic civil liberties would toss it in the bin. But Burnham won’t. Politically it’s a non-starter. Not because he’s equally as hateful towards left extra-parliamentary activism as Starmer became, but because the press would eviscerate him. The albatross of propaganda (with State complicity) equating Palestine solidarity with anti-Semitism and apologetics for Islamic fundamentalism is too heavy for a technocratic Prime Minister to throw off.

Not that Burnham would particularly want to. He’s no bucker of political trends, having utterly failed to gainsay the broader Labour policy of complicity with Israel’s campaign of mass murder. You can look in vain for him naming it as what it is. And strategically, while proscription is an open wound against Labour’s claims to comparative moral superiority (at least for the left), it is also his best argument against the right’s thunderous lying about two-tier justice. Being both a weathervane politician and better at understanding that weather than Starmer, he’ll clock the utility in maintaining a crackdown, even if doing so promotes, in practice, a further degeneration of human rights.

In a similar vein, it’s hard to see him making any effort to roll back or slow down Westminster’s execrable expansions of public surveillance, particularly linking Britain’s extraordinarily large system of public CCTV to facial recognition databases. His history points quite the other way, in fact, as he happily took on the job of bringing forward Blair’s ill-fated ID Card project, and tried it again as mayor of Manchester. Manchester itself has hosted repeated Met “test” sessions for the technology without a peep of complaint. Again it’s not hard to see why – in the centrist mindset, it’s vastly preferable to be told off by lefties for being socially illiberal than by the right-wing press for being soft on crime.

Online, meanwhile, we have dual attempts by the Starmer government – which will stay in place under Burnham – to force the public to show ID on every website (both a personal security nightmare and a huge boost for VPN providers) and ban social media for young people, always on the grounds of “think of the children.” Which, for outsider kids denied access to the online communities which helped them, must sound darkly ironic. And again, a scenario just waiting for Reform to exploit it. If and when the likes of Orban or Meloni takes power in Britain, they will have much to thank Sir Keir for.

There’s a reason all these measures have been taken without a single apparent thought given to the possibility of (worse) misuse. The broader political threat of such laws and technologies being weaponised for repressive purposes doesn’t feature in the technocratic mindset at all. For this most recent incarnation of “centrism”, all those warnings both real and classically fictional are irrelevant: the government can’t be wrong, it’s elected! The only legitimate action is that of ticking a ballot every five years. To be suspicious of this attitude’s long-term impacts on the body politic would require a memory of political history and understanding of philosophy greater than that of a goldfish. Centrism complains a great deal about the brain-rotting of younger generations, but the absolute lack of deeper thought on these topics by its own political class is truly striking.

Ultimately the likely lack of action on any of these topics has two core drivers. First, Burnham is Starmer, and Starmer is Burnham. Bar a handful of differences on how to shuffle deckchairs, and in presentational style, they cleave to the same idea that Sensible, Mature Government involves listening to the civil servants, not upsetting the media, and doing whatever the markets indicate. And in that basic calculation we find that the civil service loves the idea of a society-wide Panopticon, the media is itching for a reason to decry Labour as weak on crime, and the markets couldn’t care less about liberty as long as profit extraction remains uninterrupted.

Thus our battle will continue. Not against Burnham himself, per se, but against the systemic fortress which has been built to prevent a real, genuine conversation about our failing civil liberties. It is a battle against the far-right’s fatuous whining about how hard done by they are when the law actually gets a rare application to their own people, and its bizarre talk of “two tier justice”. Against the civil service top brass who use that whining to pretend they’re justified in attacking social justice campaigns. Against the mindset of “if you’ve done nothing wrong” from blockheads who think freedoms arrive like toys in a cereal box rather than being fought for, generation on generation.

Every anarchist knows there’s not really any such thing as “rights.” Laws exist only for as long as a State chooses to follow them. But the lists of civil liberties and how governments approach them do reflect the balance of what’s considered normal and acceptable. In the 2000s, shutting down a major motorway was so normal it was barely worth a mention in the paper. The activists of Trident Ploughshares were not sent down for terrorism in 1996 when they smashed up a Hawk fighter jet destined for use by the Indonesian military. In fact, given the freedom to explain themselves, they were acquitted by a jury that clearly found the moral case for their actions normal. Great efforts have been made by the State and media to reduce the scope of what “normal” is, to constrict and throttle any activity that disrupts business.

“Normal” can be changed. But Burnham isn’t the man to do it of his own volition. He will only sniff the wind, and if it’s blowing our way, then he may act. The task is to make him.

Image: European Commission on Flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0