THIS WEEK we saw demonstrations up and down the country to coincide with the biggest strike day since 2011. Most demos were dominated by the largest union out on strike, the National Education Union, but the TUC had called a day of action for the entire trade union movement in opposition to the government’s new anti-strike laws, the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill.

As trade union leaders and labour law experts such as Lord John Hendy KC and Professor Keith Ewing have explained in detail in the Morning Star, this Bill, which this week passed its third reading in Parliament, is extraordinarily authoritarian. By giving virtually unlimited power to the secretary of state to dictate what “minimum service levels” mean in a relevant strike-affected sector, they allow the government to ban effective strike action whenever it wishes: the “right to strike” becomes meaningless, a point which has prompted comparisons with Mussolini’s legislation permitting strikes so long as production was not disrupted.

The penalties for failing to comply are extreme: an employer can name which individuals will be required to cross their own picket lines on strike days and work; if they refuse they can be summarily sacked. This is, as Lord Hendy says, the first right to forcibly requisition workers — RMT leader Mick Lynch has used the term “conscript” — in Britain since the second world war. 

As for that worker’s union, it must take “reasonable steps” to ensure those named members do break its strike and, if found not to have done that, the strike will be declared unlawful, all workers continuing it will lose all protection from unfair dismissal and the union will be liable to injunctions, claims for damages and potential sequestration of assets.

This is draconian, dystopian stuff. Crazy authoritarianism from an unhinged government on its last legs? Unfortunately, this strike legislation is entirely in keeping with the direction of travel in British politics.

In terms of labour law alone, it clearly follows the 2016 Act, which imposed high participation thresholds on ballots in order to prevent strikes: since unions have now shown they can overcome these, the government is taking the next step with the same aim, to stop workers striking whether they have voted to do so or not.

But this government’s attacks on civil rights are not confined to labour law alone. We have had a succession of repressive laws rushed through Parliament in recent years. 

The Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act of 2021, better known as the Spycops Act, gives undercover state agents to commit a crime — any crime — if authorised to do so by a wide range of state agencies (these include the Department of Health and the Gambling Commission) on very vague grounds such as the interests of “national security” or “economic wellbeing”.

It exists to place state agents above the law and is especially disturbing given the revelations about undercover police officers’ sexual and psychological abuse of surveilled women involved in entirely legal political activism. It was passed in parallel with an Overseas Operations Act designed to stop British troops being held accountable for war crimes.

On domestic policing it can be hard to keep up with the legislation awarding our police forces — whose reputation for fairness, upholding justice and commitment to principles of equality and democracy has taken a battering over recent years — additional powers to use and abuse.

The Police, Crime, Sentencing & Courts Act gives officers enormous discretion to decide when a protest constitutes a crime, and provides for lengthy prison sentences on vague bases like having caused a “serious nuisance”. The Nationality & Borders Act reduced protections for refugees and undermined Britain’s international treaty commitments by creating a two-tier processing system for asylum-seekers. The National Security Bill quickly followed, with even Tory peers expressing unease at its potential to suppress independent journalism. Now the Home Office is chasing a Public Order Bill that will allow police to shut down protests before “disruption” begins and to ban named individuals from attending at all.

Nor can these restrictions on protest rights be taken independently of the restrictions on voting rights also pursued by this government. The quest to impose voter ID is an answer to a non-existent problem: nobody, from any side, has queried the results of any recent British election on the grounds of vote fraud. It is a policy borrowed from the United States, where the Republican right has long fixated on vote suppression tactics that will primarily affect particular communities deemed more likely to vote Democrat, especially black communities. In Britain the policy is presumably intended to suppress poorer and less settled — perhaps mainly younger — voters, with young people in particular far less likely to vote Conservative than older ones.

This might seem to amount to a Conservative war on democratic rights, one aimed partly at the Labour Party. But Labour are not notably resistant to these developments.

The party has said it will repeal the latest anti-strike legislation — though its leaders have wobbled even on that, with a commitment at TUC quickly followed by Rachel Reeves saying committing to do so would be “jumping the gun”. 

Labour’s attitude to authoritarian legislation from the Spycops Act onwards has been ambivalent, with abstentions as well as votes against; on the Police, Crime, Sentencing & Courts Act it was bounced into opposition only by the mass women’s protests outside Westminster following the Met police officer Wayne Couzens’s murder of Sarah Everard. 

It has shied away from direct condemnation of Tory attacks on refugees as a human rights issue, preferring to say schemes like the Rwanda deportations are poor value for money and that current rules on Channel crossings don’t adequately target people-smugglers.

It has not spoken up for environmental activists, the immediate targets of both the Police, Crime, Sentencing & Courts Act and the Public Order Bill: rather it has called for swifter injunctions and quicker arrests. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Labour’s differences with the Tories are on the detail — are sometimes no more than parliamentary posturing in fact — and not on the overall trend.

That impression is strengthened when we look at the Labour Party’s approach to the other key field in which are rights are under threat, the right to freedom of expression.

For the editor of an anti-Establishment newspaper like the Morning Star, it has long been clear that control of the bulk of British media by a handful of wealthy individuals helps to shape a national news narrative in the interests of those individuals and their class. There was talk, some years back, of the internet and the rise of social media ending the grip of the media magnates on the news: that online everyone could have a platform and the news would be democratised. 

Conversely, Establishment media hit back with the idea that online people were overly exposed to “fake news” which had not been properly fact checked or might be entirely made up. There was clearly an element of truth to this, though newspapers and broadcasters that sold us the incubator babies of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction or Jeremy Corbyn the Czech communist spy were perhaps not the best to sit in judgement on reliable and accurate reportage.

In any case, the early dreams of a democratic internet have dissipated. Concentration of ownership of online communication platforms is even narrower than for print media, and a handful of gigantic, globe-spanning and US-based corporations have total dominance. In Latin America, Facebook and Twitter have been accused of blatant political manipulation: Facebook’s closure of former Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa’s account, with its million-strong following, being a favour to the regime that reversed his policies and exiled him; Twitter accused of permitting the creation of thousands of fake accounts to support the 2019 coup in Bolivia, and of shutting down hundreds of thousands of pro-government accounts in Venezuela to create the impression that a polarised country was in fact united against its government.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine nearly a year ago spurred a massive acceleration of an online censorship process which was already underway. Unchecked corporate power was combined with the war on “fake news” to take offline or hide from search engines thousands of videos or pages which promoted or were alleged to promote the interests of the Russian state. Much of what disappeared was no doubt Russian propaganda, but as the Morning Star columnist Solomon Hughes has pointed out, you do not encourage balance by banning “enemy” propaganda — all you do is clear the field for the uninterrupted propaganda of your own state. The field for alternative readings of world events from those of the British state and the Nato alliance of which it forms part has dramatically shrunk in the last 12 months.

The Labour Party is not responsible for this trend. However, it is at the forefront of similar demands. It was Labour that attacked the Boris Johnson government over claims — based on very thin evidence — that the vote to Leave the EU in 2016 was influenced by Russian online propaganda, and called for stricter internet policing to prevent such propaganda getting through. Labour has consistently supported tougher state and corporate regulation of the internet.

Similarly, Labour’s leader Sir Keir Starmer has closed down debate within his own party.

That applies to the war, where early on MPs who had signed a Stop the War Coalition statement condemning the Russian invasion but also the expansion of Nato eastward which had provoked it were ordered to withdraw their names or face the removal of the Labour whip. Labour MPs were prominent at anti-war demonstrations through the cold war and beyond, against the Iraq war in 2003, against the Libya war in 2010, and on Stop the War platforms following the US defeat in Afghanistan in 2021; but no longer. As Andrew Murray observed at last month’s Stop the War trade union conference, it was the first such conference not to be addressed by a single Labour MP (though it was addressed by Jeremy Corbyn, who has had the whip removed). This is a sign that the political space for alternative opinions at Westminster is being deliberately narrowed, and by order of the leader of the opposition.

Within the Labour Party itself an analogous process has taken place. After Corbyn had the whip withdrawn a mere seven months after ceasing to lead Labour, discussion on his status as a Labour MP was banned at Labour branch and CLP meetings. A steady stream of suspensions and expulsions of left-wing members has continued since, many for retrospective “offences”, such as Sheffield trades council leader Martin Mayer’s expulsion for having spoken at a meeting of Labour Against the Witch Hunt in 2018, at which time it was not an organisation prohibited by the Labour Party (that prohibition dates from 2021). 

The details of such expulsions show that Labour is employing people to trawl through the online histories of its members in order to selectively exclude members its leadership doesn’t like, a deeply authoritarian practice and an alarming one if a similar attitude to natural justice and individuals’ rights were to be carried into government. Labour has also been accused even by mainstream journalists like Michael Crick of effectively rigging selection processes to further turn Parliament into an Establishment echo chamber and disbar critical or independent voices.

All this suggests a cross-party consensus that democratic rights and free speech are to be curtailed. But why? The answer surely lies in the waves of protest and revolt that have rocked Britain in the past decade, and in the successive scandals that have undermined state authority. 

The police, after the Hillsborough and spycops scandals, hardly command the respect they once did. Government has never regained the trust that it would not simply lie to the British people that it lost over the war in Iraq. The bankers’ crash exploded the reputation of the City of London as a source of the nation’s prosperity. Parliament following the expenses scandal has a reputation as a seedy den of grasping reprobates. Even the monarchy has lost prestige through the behaviour of Prince Andrew and more recently the exposés of Prince Harry.

Combine all that with the continued erosion of people’s living standards that has occurred since 2008. Politicians are degrading the services we rely on and presiding over an economic model that is making us poorer: that at least is the public view, as evidenced by popular support for the strikes. Faith in the overall direction of the British state and its politicians has vanished. That is what created the vote to leave the EU in 2016, not Russian propaganda. And that is what created the political revolt that was Corbynism: a movement hundreds of thousands strong, that attracted millions of extra Labour votes, on the basis of fundamentally changing the economic structure of this country and turning our backs on the economic policies of the last half century at least.

The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci talked famously of the ruling class relying in varying degrees on a blend of coercion and consent to maintain capitalist rule. It is abundantly clear that the British state has lost a great deal in the way of consent: people are far more sceptical of its claims to represent the democratic will of the people than they once were, and are opting against “expert” advice for supposedly unthinkable political solutions. 

The natural response is to up the degree of coercion. Britain’s economic model cannot provide continuing rises in living standards any more, or public services to the level people have come to expect. 

That makes regaining popular support for that model a tall order. But our Parliament and political system exist to serve that capitalist model, not us: it is democracy, not capitalism, that they are willing to jettison. That is why this is the end of the line for bourgeois democracy in Britain: the democratic and anti-capitalist struggles are merging into one.