Palestine Action isn't a danger to British democracy – but this repressive government is
The UK government is run by a former human rights lawyer. Its home secretary, Yvette Cooper, has expressed her admiration for the Suffragettes in parliament. Yet such credentials do nothing to defend us from attacks on our fundamental rights. With a huge majority, no formal constitutional checks and a ruthless, scarcely accountable governing machine, this administration is abusing its power to an even greater extent than its Conservative predecessors.
Though there is tough competition, Cooper's proscription of the protest group Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act 2000 is probably the most illiberal thing any home secretary has done in 30 years. If Palestine Action's legal challenge to the order fails, you could receive 14 years in jail as a terrorist merely for expressing support. It's a massive threat to the right to protest and to free speech.
In 2001, as the act came into force, I warned that it could be used to ban nonviolent protest groups and imprison those who support them. Supporters of Tony Blair's government told me I was talking rubbish: its purpose was to keep us safe from people who wanted to kill and maim us. At the time, Cooper was a junior minister. She must have known what the act could do. Now she vindicates the warning.
Like the drafting of the Tory anti-protest laws, this application of the act appears to be a response to lobbyists. The junktanks of Tufton Street, in concert with the billionaire media, have called for ever-more extreme measures for protesters demonstrating against the genocide in Gaza. The government seems to have been sharing the contact details of police and crown prosecutors with the Israeli embassy: there appears to be deep entanglement between domestic law enforcement and the interests of a foreign state.
In response to lobbying, the UK has become arguably the most repressive of all nominal democracies. Both in legislation and application, it looks more like a repressive autocracy. You can see this not only in the extreme sentences for peaceful protest but also in the extraordinary double standards deployed – a classic sign of the authoritarian mindset: 'for my friends everything, for my enemies the law'. While climate protesters are arrested for setting foot in the road, even when a group of farmers in tractors blocked the road where Keir Starmer was giving a speech, forcing him to flee, not only were no arrests made but, as far as I can discover, no minister said a word about it.
Far from repealing the draconian anti-protest laws imposed by the Tories, Labour is augmenting them with a clause (section 124) slipped into the current crime and policing bill. Scarcely noticed by either legislators or the public, it greatly increases police powers to stifle protest. The police will be able to ban demonstrations close to a place of worship that they decide could be intimidating to worshippers. As almost every urban area contains a place of worship, this empowers the police, using only their own discretion, to shut down any expression of dissent.
Palestine Action is not a danger to democracy. But Cooper is. I have no doubt that, were they active today, the home secretary would proscribe as a terrorist organisation the Suffragettes she claims to honour.
One of the causes of the global democratic recession is the escalating inequality of arms between governments and their people. At the time of the French Revolution, governments feared the people, as the distance between pikes and pitchforks was not so great. But as states developed ever-more sophisticated weapons, their powers could no longer be matched by those they sought to crush. In combination with facial recognition technology, now being widely deployed in the UK among many other nations, autonomous weapons systems, for both military and civil use, would greatly increase the distance between state and citizen power. This is the future we appear to be rushing towards, with scarcely any democratic debate.
All over the world, autonomous weapons systems are in development, largely for use in warfare. Ukraine and Russia are in the midst of a robot arms race, accelerating at shocking speed. In Gaza, Israel has automated its target selection, with horrifying results.
As security sources explained to +972 magazine in April 2024, Israel's Lavender AI program had marked about 37,000 Palestinians as suspected 'Hamas militants', selecting them as potential targets for assassination. A further program, with the sinister name of Where's Daddy?, was tracking them to their homes so that they could be bombed at night, often killing not only their families but many other people in the same block. 'Once you go automatic,' one of the sources told the journal, 'target generation goes crazy.' Almost everyone in Gaza had been given a Lavender rating of between 1 and 100. As soon as the number in the AI system was high enough, the name would be added to the kill list. That would be treated as a military order, even though the operators knew that at least 10% of the targets were misidentified.
Anyone who imagines that such systems would not be embraced by governments for use against their citizens is deceiving themselves. As autonomous target selection aligns with the autonomous delivery of munitions, which could range from teargas to rubber bullets to metal bullets, governments will acquire terrifying new powers to contain dissent. Real robocops are likely to have propellers, not legs.
As the Stop Killer Robots campaign points out, such machines dehumanise us: we become a set of data points, to be interpreted by an algorithm. Once an autonomous weapons system has been programmed, oppressive regimes can absolve themselves of responsibility for what it does. AI reinforces prejudice and discrimination: the way it develops ensures that Black and brown people and other minorities targeted by the police will be disproportionately selected.
Once such systems are in place, they will be very hard to dismantle. When you create a market you create a lobby, and the lobby will insist on retaining and expanding its investments. Autonomous weapons systems, for both military and civilian use, should be prohibited under international law before they progress any further.
Technologies of control are ramping up while democratic rights are ramping down. We drift towards extreme political repression, driven by the demands of capital and foreign states, accelerated by automation. This is why we must protest – now, while we still can.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
On Tuesday 16 September, join George Monbiot, Mikaela Loach and other special guests discussing the forces driving climate denialism, live at the Barbican in London and livestreamed globally. Book tickets here or at Guardian.Live
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