Sacred Cow

 

In the UK we tend to take for granted that we live in a democracy that holds freedom of speech and association as sacred. We also have a tendency to point the finger at other countries whose like freedoms are curtailed and trammelled by oppressive regimes and where the repression of that freedom of speech and association is more overtly applied, either at home or from abroad. Smug judgementalism is usually the de facto stance on such things - '...how can you possibly compare...?' Indeed. This approach is invariably successful as 90% of the press/media in this country are complicit in what is after all, a mass delusion.

Here a subtler  and altogether more sly approach to such matters is taken. Again, I would say that the coercion used here is more Brave New World than 1984, with the establishment depending largely on the bread & circuses of the capitalist/consumerist equilibrium to ensure the status quo. Yesterday's Observer carried a short op-ed piece, buried deep enough to pass you by. This in itself is not the paper's deliberate obfuscation of news - the piece in question refers to events that happened, after all, half-a-century ago: the currency of the news in question being the eventual quashing of the politically motivated and establishment-enabled conviction and imprisonment of trade-unionists engaged in lawful protest.

The government's Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, currently undergoing its Parliamentary journey towards enactment, should it remain insufficiently opposed, will severely damage our rights as human beings to legitimately assemble and protest against actions being taken against us by rogue politicians and their associates seeking to line their pockets at our expense, under cover of 'law and order'. Generations have stood and fought - died - to get even a say in the politics of this land; and the current cabal of privileged, aspiring and corrupt cronies that masquerade as a government want to set that progress back one hundred and fifty years, to the time when flogging those beneath one was both legal and acceptable.

We really have no moral high ground from which to preach at those nations who still practice the more overt forms of oppression, and the problem is ours to own - we must resist this Bill and continue to exercise our right to assembly and protest: anything less is dereliction of moral duty and basically stabbing ourselves in the back. Peterloo was a lesson to future generations: unfortunately that sorry part of our history is barely touched upon in schools. Like Black History, Working-Class History is marginalized and subsumed by the 'glories' of our Imperial and Colonial past; hidden behind the colonnaded edifice of class, privilege and power.