If the Trump project implodes, it might take with it the extreme and far-right European parties to which it is umbilically connected. Like all such parties, the hard-right Reform UK poses as patriotic while grovelling to foreign interests, and this could be its undoing.
But we cannot bank on it. The UK government must do all it can to prevent the disaster that has befallen several other European nations. If it fails to meet people’s needs and keeps echoing far-right talking points, we could go the same way as Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary, Finland, Sweden and Austria.
As well as working more effectively to keep Reform out of office, the government should ensure that, if the worst happens and Nigel Farage and his Death Eaters win in 2029, the foundations of an authoritarian state have not already been laid for them. But here too Labour seems perversely determined to prepare the ground for its traditional opponents.
Here are three of the consistent features of authoritarian states: the extreme persecution of dissent, the use of parajudicial measures to shut down opposition movements, and the selective application of the law. All three are already widely deployed in the UK. Though they were introduced in their current form by the Tories, they have been sustained and defended by Keir Starmer’s party.
What this means is that if a hard- or far-right government starts doing what they always do – persecuting minorities and opponents, ripping into public services and the enabling state – and if good citizens take to the streets to defend the people and institutions under attack, the government will be able to round them up and throw them in prison, without the need for a single new law or statute. It will also be able to license blatant disregard for the law by its own supporters, without breaking existing patterns of policing. And Labour will be unable to say a word against any of it, because all this has been happening on its own watch.
Let’s examine these three elements, and how they are already embedded. Two groups in particular are now subject to the kind of legal sanctions and oppressive policing more familiar in countries like Russia and Belarus: environmental and pro-Palestine protesters. Using a combination of older legislation and remarkable new powers in the 2022 Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act and the 2023 Public Order Act, the police have been able to shut down any demonstration that they, the government or the media deem unwelcome.
The measures and penalties are extraordinary. People trying to prevent Earth systems collapse have been sentenced to six months in prison for walking down a street; or five years for discussing a protest on a Zoom call; or have been prosecuted for correctly reminding juries that they have a right to use their consciences; or for seeking to justify themselves in court. Hanging over all such peaceful dissenters is the possibility of 10 years in prison for the remarkably vague offence of “public nuisance”. That’s more than you’d get for most violent or sexual crimes.
These are among the most draconian anti-protest measures in any country with democratic features. They are also the most extreme measures in common use in the UK for the past 150 years. The longest sentence received by any of the suffragettes, who engaged in far spikier actions than today’s climate protesters, was three months.
Those protesting on behalf of Gaza are subject to all these oppressive laws, and then some. The police have used measures in the Serious Crime Act 2015, which were never intended for this purpose, to arrest campaigners against the genocide on suspicion of participating in an organised crime group. It’s preposterous and deeply sinister.
It’s not just that Starmer’s government has failed to repeal these grim instruments and applications: it has actively defended them. After her attempt to redefine even mild protest as “serious disruption” was thrown out by the Lords, the then Tory home secretary, Suella Braverman, did something unprecedented: she reintroduced the measure as a statutory instrument, bypassing parliamentary scrutiny. Liberty mounted a legal challenge, and the high court ruled Braverman’s action unlawful. The Tory government appealed. After the election, Labour was widely expected to drop the appeal. Instead it has continued the legal fight to uphold a disgraceful infringement of our rights and freedoms.
These laws are accompanied by a wide range of parajudicial measures, such as the injunctions taken out by public bodies and private corporations, which enable protesters to be punished twice for the same crime. This means they face potentially enormous extra penalties. Extreme bail conditions have also been imposed, which can restrict protesters’ movements, political freedoms and social lives for years on end.
Even worse is the complete abandonment of equality before the law. Whether or not you get prosecuted for protesting is now a function of who you are. If you are a climate protester, you can get away with nothing. If you are a farmer, you can get away with anything. Even when, earlier this month, farmers blocked the road with tractors where the prime minister was speaking, drowned his speech with their horns and forced him to flee, the police let them get on with it. Thames Valley police explained: “No arrests were made or necessary. The protest has reached its conclusion and the group are now dispersing from the area.” It is unimaginable that a climate protest of this kind would be allowed to reach this “conclusion”. It would have been immediately broken up, with mass arrests and long sentences.
Again, this selectivity is ready-made for the hard right. Farage has been appearing at farmers’ protests, using them to advance toxic conspiracy fictions about immigration, just as similar movements did so successfully in the Netherlands. For a century, farmers have been celebrated by the right and extreme right as the true soul of the nation, endlessly threatened by “cosmopolitans”, “globalists”, immigrants, environmental regulators and other “alien” forces. Farmers have a fundamental right to protest, as we all do. But the blatant double standards in the application of protest law – the real two-tier policing – help to pre-legitimise authoritarianism.
It’s not just that the Labour government should repeal the draconian anti-protest laws because this would create a fairer society today. It’s also because, in failing to do so, it primes the country for authoritarianism. Labour has helped normalise a far-right legal framework. What if a hard-right government sought to capitalise on that? It doesn’t take a leap of imagination to see what will happen if the two things come together.
