Natasha Walter: Labour’s workaday repression of protest doesn’t alarm us. But it should

I hate lazy parallels with the 1930s, but one echo does keep running through my mind just now. In 1933, my grandfather was imprisoned for three years for “high treason", for being a member of a proscribed organisation. The first nine months of his imprisonment was pre-trial – on remand, as we would call it now. The organisation that had been outlawed in that year was the Communist party, and he was living in Germany. 

This is not the start of the Third Reich in Britain, for sure: not even close. But when I look at the young people who are being held for long periods – up to 20 months – on remand right now, and when I see that this Friday four protesters face being sentenced as if there had been a “terrorism connection” to their crimes during a break-in at the Elbit Systems weapons factory in Bristol, I realise a little more clearly how it is that even when the right to dissent is being directly threatened, most people can shrug it off, and so the slide to further repression is eased.

For those who are not turning away, this case has particular weight. The four individuals have been convicted of criminal damage and grievous bodily harm, which can potentially carry long sentences. But the prosecution has submitted that the offences have a “terrorist connection”, which means that the defendants would have no chance of early release and face the possibility of long-term surveillance. The jury in the trial was not asked to deliberate on this terrorist connection, so it is something that – for the first time in British legal history – the judge will decide alone. And the judge in question, Mr Justice Jeremy Johnson, has already lost the trust of many observers. 

In the trials of those individuals and others, Johnson has ruled that the defendants could not give evidence on their motivations, including their reasons for joining Palestine Action, their beliefs about Elbit's supply of weapons to Israel for use in the war in Gaza, or their views about the actions of Israel in Gaza and its legality. He even referred one of the defendants’ lawyers, Rajiv Menon, for contempt of court because Menon had reminded the jury that they could acquit the defendants based on their own consciences. 

As usual, a number of people will turn up outside the court who have become thorns in the police’s side. We’ve seen them before, those often elderly people with their handwritten signs and fold-out chairs, their unbowed determination to turn up in all weathers and despite all threats of arrest. 

Right now, I think we should all be saluting their determination. Indeed, the question keeps nagging away at me: why aren’t more people alarmed by this extreme erosion of the right to protest and what it means for our country?

A few weeks previously I had been talking with an eminent lawyer who has been involved in many cases involving protesters. “What’s going on here right now is shocking,” he said. “It is making the UK an outlier in Europe. Other countries are looking at us and wondering how on earth this is happening when we don’t even have a far-right government.”

“When we don’t even have a far-right government.” I think that this is key to why more people aren’t protesting about these developments, and why so many people who are otherwise politically engaged are shrugging off this assault on people’s liberties. If a far-right government with a Trumpian narrative of a grand assault on dissent was putting in place the kind of measures we have recently seen, there would be an outcry from all sides. But because our government is not shouting about it, and is not even putting it into an ideological frame, the shift has simply become part of the political weather for most people. 

Indeed, it’s telling that so often this government doesn’t actively own these repressive developments, but portrays itself as simply compelled to carry them out. When Labour took power, many who voted for them expected them to repeal the anti-protest legislation that had been put in place by the Conservatives, but instead they kept it and built on it. When questioned, David Lammy, the deputy prime minister, said it would take up “so much parliamentary time” to undo it. It was notable that when Yvette Cooper, as home secretary, banned Palestine Action, she referred darkly to things she couldn’t disclose about the group, about shadowy “advice and intelligence” and “assessments”. 

And many other developments to silence protesters have taken place in an even more shadowy way, with no scrutiny by members of parliament or the public. Mr Justice Johnson’s refusal to allow Palestine Action defendants to bring evidence on the context and motivation for their actions has been preceded by other judges in climate protest trials who refused to allow defendants to discuss the climate emergency and its effects, or even about fuel poverty and home insulation. 

The recent revealing report by the Centre for Climate Crime and Climate Justice at Queen Mary, University of London (I am an honorary professor at the centre, though had nothing to do with this report), showed that this direction of travel by judges means that many protesters are therefore locked up not because of their original protest, but because of behaviour that is deemed in contempt of court, including refusing to keep quiet in the courtroom. Many others have been imprisoned for breaching injunctions granted to private companies stopping protests around oil terminals or other buildings. This kind of repression carried out by courts is often too complicated and bureaucratic to campaign on. It’s hard to explain quickly on an Instagram reel; it’s hard to get excited about. 

But as a result of these complicated, bureaucratic moves we are seeing more and more people locked up for longer and longer periods, and more and more people dissuaded from protesting at all. And if our next government is a far-right one, with the groundwork for greater authoritarianism already dug, with so many precedents already set, many more dissenters will be locked up. 

When my grandfather was imprisoned in Germany for attending Communist party meetings, most people shrugged off that first wave of repression – it was just the Communists and the oddballs who were getting locked up. To repeat, I don’t think this is our 1933, but the road we are walking down now is ever more shadowed. As Trudi Warner – who has been arrested several times already for protesting in the service of the right to dissent, and who will be outside the court on Friday – said to me this week: “I get that a lot of people don’t actually care about the climate or Palestine, so they aren’t getting upset right now. But when you are trying to speak up for something you care more about, and find you can’t, you will wish you had stood with us.”

Natasha Walter is an author and the founder of Women for Refugee Women. Her new book, Feminism for a World on Fire (Virago) was published in May