Britain’s latest descent into authoritarianism

Britain’s latest descent into authoritarianism fits a depressingly familiar pattern. This is how it tends to work: a subversive group is identified by political elites and presented as a danger to the nation, often being additionally labelled as allies or dupes of hostile foreign enemies. An air of national emergency is contrived, with exaggerated, distorted, or simply invented evidence used to justify claims of an imminent threat. The ensuing repressive measures are supposedly to defend the security of both individual citizens and the nation alike.

This is what was really going on when Rishi Sunak spoke of “mob rule” and warned of the “forces here at home trying to tear us apart” during his sinister prime ministerial address last Friday. It should be seen, too, as the rationale behind proposals by rightwing former Labour MP John Woodcock – appointed by the Tories as a peer, Lord Walney, and advisor on political violence after he endorsed Boris Johnson in the last election – to ban politicians from engaging with movements protesting against mass slaughter in Gaza or the climate emergency.

The government knows there tend to be fewer arrests at demonstrations against Israel’s onslaught than at last year’s Glastonbury music festival. This is despite an array of anti-protest laws so draconian they have been condemned by the United Nations’ human rights chief. But these manoeuvres aren’t about a genuine fear of actual threats. Rather, they are simply an expression of a basic human truth: the powerful do not like being pressured by movements with political goals they disapprove of, and will use both scaremongering and the machinery of the state to try to defeat them.

It is interesting that the term “McCarthyism” is now used as a pejorative label today by both left and right to describe the suppression of their own political beliefs. This confirms my feeling that very few rightwing commentators would, if pressed, openly praise the actual McCarthyism of the mid-20th century – a moral panic over the infiltration of American public life by communists. Yet they do the very same thing with the Gaza protesters of today, who face being deplatformed, demonised, targeted by law, and fired for their ceasefire demands.

What is forgotten in all this is the purpose McCarthyism served. Few really believed communist infiltration was a menace to the US, but they saw an opportunity to stigmatise progressive politics and hobble trade unions, which had begun to assert themselves with unprecedented strike campaigns either side of the second world war. Much to the relief of wealthier Americans, the “red scare” worked and the political left and organised labour never recovered.

Workers’ movements in the UK have long suffered assaults driven by the same motives. When Woodcock today proposes protest organisers should pay the cost of policing their demonstration, he summons the ghost of Taff Vale, a legal judgment in 1901, which for a time made unions liable for the costs of taking industrial action. In Britain’s only general strike, a quarter of a century later, both Labour and the Tories warned of a revolutionary conspiracy, and its defeat led to punitive anti-union laws. In the aftermath, the former prime minister Arthur Balfour bragged: “The General Strike has taught the working class more in four days than years of talking could have done.”

In the 1980s, the Tories were only so keen to smash the miners because their strength was feared – they had, after all, toppled their previous government a decade earlier. While Margaret Thatcher had privately declared the miners were the “enemy within” – compared to Argentina’s junta who were the “enemy without” – she had even planned to publicly describe the Labour party as such, only taking a different tack in the wake of the 1984 Brighton bomb. Four decades after the miners’ strike began, it is notable how the defeated workers now enjoy popular sympathy, as recent documentaries underline, when they were so successfully cast as a dangerous extreme enemy.

The authoritarian underbelly of self-proclaimed democracies is often hidden, but it’s there nonetheless. That undercover police officers infiltrated environmental groups with fake identities for years, even having protracted relationships with female activists under false pretences, seems more reminiscent of a Stasi state than a liberal democracy. But it did happen here, and it was able to happen because such groups were cast as extreme menaces for whom democratic norms could be easily discarded.

There also exists a terrifying double standard in how protest is treated. Note how there was no moral panic about “mob rule” when far-right activists opportunistically hijacked the leave cause and harassed opponents outside the Houses of Parliament, with targets ranging from yours truly to former Tory MP Anna Soubry. Other extremists marched with a huge noose and gallows – claiming it was what then-prime minister Theresa May “deserved” – while self-avowed supporters of Boris Johnson alternated between chants pledging their loyalty to him and threats to hang their opponents. As Labour MP Jess Phillips aptly puts it, the difference today is that “some of the people who are upset with us at the moment have brown faces”.

She is quite right. Tory MPs Suella Braverman and Lee Anderson have depicted the protests – and the large Muslim presence on these marches – as evidence of the rise of Islamic extremism. This just shows how Islamophobic much of the Tory party has become, but that also fuses with a basic political fact: to the chagrin of their opponents, the protests against Israel’s onslaught represent the vast majority of public opinion, and politicians resent being pressured by a powerful movement with goals they object to. They fear, too, being scrutinised for their own complicity. Yet we’ve seen how history judges McCarthyism. What on earth will its verdict be on societies that scrutinised those who opposed the mass slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent people, rather than those complicit in such a crime?

• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist