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Posted by monbiot

https://www.monbiot.com/2025/07/10/protest-while-you-still-can/

https://www.monbiot.com/?p=7414

Without resistance, a combination of new laws and new technologies of control will rush us towards dystopia.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian  4^th July 2025

No one can be trusted with power. Any government will oppress its people if not constantly and inventively challenged. And the task becomes ever-more urgent as new technologies of surveillance and control are developed.

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 Yvette 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 wouldbe 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.

www.monbiot.com

https://www.monbiot.com/2025/07/10/protest-while-you-still-can/

https://www.monbiot.com/?p=7414

Posted by monbiot

https://www.monbiot.com/2025/07/08/the-grip-of-power/

https://www.monbiot.com/?p=7411

Cynical operators seek to divide rural and urban people. But what we want is fundamentally the same.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 28^th June 2025

Power hides by setting us against each other. This is never more true than in the countryside, where the impacts of an extreme concentration of ownership and control are blamed on those who have nothing to do with it. Rural people are endlessly instructed that they’re oppressed not by the lords of the land, but by vicious and ignorant townies – the “urban jackboot” as many participants in the Countryside March, organised by the Countryside Alliance used to call it – stamping on their traditions.

Near Bridport in Dorset right now, an entire village appears to be facing eviction, following the sale of the Bridehead Estate for about £30m. The official new owner, Bridehead Estate Ltd, is registered to the same address, with the same officers, as a company called Belport. The Telegraph reports that the estate “was bought by Belport, a private equity firm, on behalf of a wealthy client last autumn”, but no one knows who the client is. So far I’ve received no response to the questions I sent to Belport.

People in Littlebredy, a village of 32 homes, wholly owned by the estate, say they have been ordered to leave from January. At the beginning of this month, access to parts of the 800-hectare (2,000-acre) grounds, widely enjoyed by local people, was terminated, with red signs to this effect and padlocks on all the entrances. No one knows who is doing this to them. The sense of powerlessness is overwhelming.

One person has been evicted already, to make way for an estate office. When she complained about her treatment on social media, the first reply stated, without a shred of evidence: “You’re being evicted so that young fighting age male refugees, who are escaping war in France, can have somewhere safe to live, who, as far as our government is concerned, have priority over you … VOTE REFORM!” That’s how divide and rule works: never mind the anonymous plutocrat evicting her, the true culprits, somehow, are asylum seekers.

We are lectured by rightwing parties and the rightwing media about the need for “integration”. But that word is used only as a weapon against immigrants. It is not they who rip communities apart, tear people from their homes and shut us out of the land, causing social disintegration. It is the power of money.

But look, a spider! The cosmopolitan city, swarming with immigrants and trans people, is coming to get you! It will terminate the traditions country people love and impose its own culture instead. It is drummed into our heads that what rural people want is different to what the oppressive urbanites desire. But it’s not true.

Embarrassingly for the self-professed guardians of the countryside, some of the evidence comes from their own surveys. Future Countryside – which tells us it is “powered by the Countryside Alliance Foundation”, the charitable arm of the Countryside Alliance – commissioned polling in 2023. Its question about a wider right to roam in the countryside was phrased in a way that made it sound threatening: “To what extent do you agree that the public should have the ‘right to roam’ meaning that anyone can wander in the open countryside regardless of whether the land is privately or publicly owned?” Even so, there was almost no difference between the responses of urban and rural people: 55% of urban people and 54% of rural people agreed it was a good idea. Even more strikingly, when asked which political party “would do the most to prioritise/protect/promote the countryside?”, only 9% each of urban and rural people named the Conservatives, while 38% in both categories said the Green party.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, these answers failed to find their way into Future Countryside’s public presentation of the results. Instead, the only mention of a right to roam was a comment from an anonymous rural respondent: “They weren’t brought up in the countryside. They think they can wander across all the fields with the right to roam.” Links to both the raw polling data and the public presentation on the organisation’s website currently show a “404 error” when you try to open them.

Strangely, writing a year after these results were published, the chief executive of the Countryside Alliance, Tim Bonner, claimed that a wider right to roam is “completely contradictory to what the public actually wants”. With admirable chutzpah, he accused those calling for it of waging a “culture war in the countryside”.

When YouGov framed the question more objectively, for a poll commissioned by the Right to Roam campaign, it found that 68% of urban people and 68% of rural people supported it. It also discovered, in stark contrast to the claims of certain rural “guardians” who call it “the social glue that keeps rural communities together”, that opposition to hunting with dogs is strong everywhere: 78% of urban people and 74% of rural people are against it. As the access campaigner Jon Moses points out in an article for the Lead, “the issues over which we’re told we’re most divided are often the issues on which we actually most agree”.

That view is supported by some fascinating research published in the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties. It found that while in several other western countries there is a stark political divide between urban and rural people, this does not apply in Britain. “We do not find any evidence that rural Britons are more resentful, dissatisfied or ‘left behind’ compared to their urban counterparts.” On cultural issues, it found, “ruralites are often less – not more – authoritarian than urbanites … and are less likely to support an undemocratic leader”.

We are fundamentally the same people, despite the best efforts of the culture warriors to divide us. But we must be persuaded that other people don’t want what we want: that we are the outsiders, the interlopers, the weird minority, pushing against the social current.

In reality, the weird minority are the 1% who own half of all the land in England, and the subset of that group who hide their ownership behind front companies and opaque trusts. If the government’s proposed changes to the Land Registry go ahead, it may become easier to discover the true owners of places such as Bridehead, though I suspect we will still struggle.

On 5 July, the Right to Roam campaign will organise a peaceful trespass at Bridehead, to draw attention to the almost feudal powers blighting rural life. The real conflict is not town v country, but money and power v people. That holds, regardless of where you live. Never let powerful people tell you who you are.

www.monbiot.com

https://www.monbiot.com/2025/07/08/the-grip-of-power/

https://www.monbiot.com/?p=7411