Culture, you say? Hand me that repressive legislation
Where did the contempt for dissent that Britain displayed on Saturday come from?
WHEN Lucy Frazer hears the word ‘culture’, she reaches for her big book of repressive legislation.
The British government deployed its Culture Secretary on Sunday morning to explain why 64 protestors had been arrested in London the day before.
A holiday had been declared so a crown could be put on the head of a halfwit with notions. A government minister had said the weekend would be a “chance to showcase our liberty”, but not for the 64.
“Tough calls” had to be made by London’s Metropolitan Police, Frazer told the BBC. And the call that was made was to confiscate words and detain anyone suspected of using them. On Saturday, certain word combinations were deemed off limits. Combinations like ‘Not My King’ and ‘Just Stop Oil’.
Bits of guilty cardboard were loaded onto lorries by diligent men in uniform and taken off for further analysis, police waded into crowds to confiscate dangerous scraps of material, the wrong words on a t-shirt often led to detention.
The charge, according to the Met, was ‘suspicion of conspiring to cause a public nuisance’, and the Culture Secretary was down for that.
Debates about what culture might be and what it might not be are usually enough to bore the balls off me. But the ability to disrupt with words, to communicate dissent on the public stage is surely culture. Culture should cause a public nuisance, especially if the message it is trying to communicate is that the public are in danger of exploitation and, ultimately, extinction. Britain’s culture secretary disagrees though. Frazer prefers golden carriages rolling unimpeded over quaint cobblestone, the filthy idle rich sat inside complaining about how bored they are. Disneyland with cops at the ready, a foodbank on every corner and a flood on the horizon.
“We were on the global stage,” Frazer remined her electorate, the one which had just voted in their millions to kick her party out of councils across England. The rich man’s script must be stuck to, so the new laws which the Tory government had fast-tracked, setting down a 12-month prison sentence for blocking a road for example, were given a day out along with the Sax-Coburg-Gotha clan.
Human rights group Liberty says the laws are on “attack on people’s ability to stand up to power”. But who better to use the powers judiciously than London’s grand old Metropolitan Police? The force that was found, a month ago, in a report commissioned by itself, to be institutionally homophobic, misogynistic and racist.
“The Met can now no longer presume that it has the permission of the people of London to police them,” wrote the report’s author Louise Casey. The Met presumes away though.
“Our tolerance for any disruption, whether through protest or otherwise, will be low,” the force warned ahead of Saturday’s £250 million royalty orgy. Read it again, and you can hear the words emerging from the orifice of a Robocop that has had Lucy Frazer’s face grafted onto it.
“We will deal robustly with anyone intent on undermining this celebration… You now have 15 seconds to comply… I am now authorised to use physical force… Thank you for your cooperation and good night.”
The head of the Republic campaign group Graham Smith was arrested early on Saturday and held for 16 hours. The “right to peaceful protest in the UK” no longer exists said Smith upon his release.
Patrick Thelwell, who was guilty of throwing eggs at the halfwit last November, says he was arrested on Saturday “on suspicion of carrying eggs”. When the police found that he was, this time, eggless they let him go, but first had to escort him through a mob of monarchists intent on lynching him.
Kush Naker, a doctor who specialises in infectious diseases, was among 20 people arrested while wearing ‘Just Stop Oil’ t-shirts. “I never thought in my life that I would be terrified that the police might arrest me for protesting peacefully in the UK. But that is now the state we are in,” said Naker.
Some see Saturday’s arrests as a promising start, but warn that the promise will only be fulfilled if the arrests become an everyday occurrence.
Striking an admirably egalitarian note, former Met detective Peter Bleksley insisted that if people can be arrested on suspicion of conspiring to cause a nuisance to the liege, then they should also be down for arrest on suspicion of conspiring to cause upset to anybody else, at any time.
“If the Met police want to regain public trust and confidence, then they need to consistent,” said Bleksley from what might have been a television studio but could also have been his basement, “what policing is good for the king is surely good for his subjects,” mangling the notion of a sentence in his taut no-nonsense jaw in an honourable attempt to rise to the august occasion before giving up and spitting the words out onto the studio/basement floor.
Where does this contempt for dissent come from though? What serves as the inspiration for this martialling of a nation into strictly regimented party-mode for the multi-millionaire in a looted headdress?
There’s a clue to be found in the social media baiting of a man who made the mistake of having his hands in his pockets as his new king levitated past him in Westminster Abbey. The man had also made the mistake of being brown in a space traditionally given over to displays of white supremacism and so was greedily pounced upon by hyenas like Charlie Lawson, the Coronation Street hardman who can’t get over the fact he only ever got to act the part of a British soldier.
Having people from the places we colonised in our midst is bad enough, ran the theme of the comments, but then they can’t even behave properly when they’re here, are too mean to appreciate our generosity. Scroungers, thieves, spongers.
Officialdom didn’t make much room for culture in the colonies. Dissent wasn’t just frowned upon, it was beaten out of people. Disruption to the declared order was smothered in barbed wire. Those deemed a public nuisance could be shot.
In response to England’s new king having the Celtic languages incorporated into his voodoo ceremony, the west Belfast community group Glór na Móna pointed out that the last piece of repressive legislation aimed at the Irish language was only repealed by Westminster last year.
“These are dangerous days, to say what you feel is to dig your own grave,” sang Sinéad O’Connor of England in Black Boys on Mopeds.
They’re not digging graves for demonstrators in London just yet, but then the colonies could still be on their roundabout way home.