The use of British state power against political expression is dangerously imbalanced.
Last week, Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, known by his stage name Mo Chara, was charged under section 13 of the Terrorism Act for the alleged display of a Hezbollah flag during a Kneecap concert in London last November. The band denies the offence, and has stated that they believe the British state is undertaking a campaign of “political policing”. To this end, they have a point.
The term “two-tier policing” is familiar to anyone monitoring far-right propaganda in this country. As the line goes, people of colour and those on the left act with impunity on British streets, whilst the far right (or ‘white people’) are victimised by the state for its views on immigration. As Nigel Farage, the nominal moderate of the British far right, put it on Twitter on April 8th, “if white people behave badly, they’re imprisoned” while the government “panders to the extremist Muslim vote that exists in our inner cities”.
Yet the very opposite is true. In Britain today, what seems perfectly acceptable is to pledge support for regimes of state terror, or (more frequently) to call for expulsion of migrants and violence against the most disempowered people in society. Just last weekend, the commencement of the Great British Strike across the UK saw National Front-style rallies in many of our tattered town-centres. Yet few arrests were made for the gestures and messages delivered by those in the crowds, the threats made to black and brown people by those in attendance, or even displays of blatant antisemitism.
Farage himself was quoted in PMQs on April 30th stating that migration of people from “cultures alien to our own” justified the declaration of a “national emergency”. Vile language like this is merely the furnishing on a sinister set of opinions shared in public by Farage’s colleagues and ideological fellow-travellers, with an actual influence on the policy of the state—and with impunity. For the most part, fascists must ‘go the extra mile’ and encourage arson on a hotel or assault police to face prosecution.
At the same time, antifascists, climate activists, and pro-Palestinian campaigners are routinely brutalised by police and squashed by the courts. Pre-emptive raids on people’s homes are a regular occurrence for direct-action groups and left-wing activists. And this is for an obvious reasons. Left-wing activists target the state and moneyed interests. There is nothing truly radical, by comparison, that violent fascists do; their primary attack is on the weak and the marginalised. The state may consider upholding public order as its duty, but perhaps leftists simply threaten it more?
The prosecution of Kneecap is another important example exposing the political character of policing and justice in this country, and how the conversation is largely dominated by the political right. As abolitionists, our response to this reality of two-tier policing cannot be a call for more more people from the far right to be locked up for their political expression, however vile. Instead, the long term solution must involve deep social change and an end to racism itself. In the short term, we must stand in solidarity with those, like Kneecap, who face potential imprisonment for expression that contradicts the approach of our government.
