Not all protests are made equal
line of tractors, colour of picture altered.
This week saw thousands in London demanding the government go-back on their announcement to make certain farms liable for inheritance tax.
This protest was regarded kindly by the media and politicians - the likes of Ed Davey, Jeremy Clarkson and Nigel Farage joining the march. Media outlets were generally supportive and did not portray the protesters as causing a public nuisance. The police did not flinch as large tractors attempted to bombard the barricades. It is easy to see that the reaction of the press, politicians and police was very different to how they responded to many other demonstrations.
Other protesters have faced harsh treatment, even if their methods are docile. In September of this year, activists Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland were handed sentences of two years and twenty monthsrespectively. The pair were convicted of the heinous crime of throwing soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. – the painting itself remained unharmed.
Protest is a right, and all peoples should be able to demand better of their government. The problem here is that the legal system is not serious nor consistent with its responses to protesters, protest is accepted if it fits the dominant narrative. It is protests that threaten the prevailing ideology that are vigorously policed. Even protests that fall far from the realms of direct action are criminalised if they do not play ball with the government’s agenda: Extinction Rebellions 2018 ‘Rebellion Day’ saw 70 arrests made due to blocked traffic.
The lack of police reaction to the farmers protests seen in the last few weeks demonstrate that criminalisation is a political choice rather than a reflection of a level of threat.
Criminalisation and policing have little to do with morality or bad behaviour, it never has. It is to do with maintaining a power structure, this is why we see police picking and choosing which protests are met with a heavy hand.
Our attitudes towards policing must change. The unequal reaction to protests over the last few years debunks the idea that the police patrol protests to keep us safe or. Rather, when it comes to protest, they act as an ideology enforcer. We can spot a pattern of punishment being used to enforce an agenda, rather than address societal harm. The ‘Go Home Vans’ we saw under Cameron, maintaining the hostile environment. The Police, Crime Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, curbing the liberties of protesters. The recent Bibby Stockholm barge, dehumanising and encaging people who came to our country vulnerable – carceral systems do not ‘keep us safe’ as their primary aim. Rather, they use criminalisation as a tool to punish those outside of the realms of accepted morality. Communities keep us safe; care keeps us safe. Cages do not keep us safe.
The current system encourages the public to turn their back on people radically and passionately demanding a better world. It sees it as better to throw them in prison rather than meet them and try to hear their demands. These systems are archaic, divisive and dehumanising – we must do better than this.
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Meg Thomas is an organiser and writer from the North of England. She is the founder of The Compassion Project, a grassroots group providing education on abolition and support to incarcerated peoples. You can find more of her writing on her Substack ‘Light in the darkness’