22.08.2024
Fight ideas with ideas
Labour has vowed to crack down on ‘hateful beliefs’ associated with the far right and extreme misogyny. But what about anti-Zionism, asks Eddie Ford, which we are told equals anti-Semitism?
Following the rightwing riots in a string of cities and towns, with some calling for them to be officially designated as ‘terrorist’ incidents, it is hardly surprising that the natural response of the Labour government is to clamp down further on freedom of speech. Home secretary Yvette Cooper has vowed to crack down on people “pushing harmful and hateful beliefs”, including “extreme misogyny”, commissioning a “rapid review” of legislation that will essentially ramp up the Prevent strategy to stop people from becoming terrorist sympathisers or ‘extremists’.
Telling us the last government’s counter-extremism strategy was nine years out of date, Cooper wants officials to assess “the rise of Islamist and far-right extremism” alongside other “ideological trends” that have gained traction, with the intention of addressing “gaps in the current system” that leave the country exposed to harmful activity, which promotes violence or “undermines democracy” - or beliefs that fall under even broader categories like having a “fixation on violence”. The home secretary particularly wants to locate the causes that lead young people to become ‘radicalised’ amidst the proliferation of “dangerous material” online, where you can encounter just about every idea imaginable. In this way, Yvette Cooper claims the government will deliver on its manifesto promise of preventing people from being drawn towards hateful ideologies and supposedly unBritish values.
As for universities, according to monitoring data published in June, the number of students flagged up under the programme has gone up by 50% in two years - with 210 Prevent cases in 2022-23 compared to 139 in 2020-21 - with “mixed, unclear or unstable” ideologies showing the biggest increase. Indeed, there has been a growing moral panic about the rise of social media ‘influencers’, such as Andrew Tate - something that may have pushed the government to think again and now consider misogyny as a form of extremism.
Racism
The first thing to say is that to the defender of the status quo, all radicalism is by definition ‘extremism’ - ’twas ever thus. For communists, the fundamental task is bringing about socialist revolution, which means as a necessity delegitimising the status quo as far as possible. Hence we reject the right of the state to classify political outlooks as ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’, ‘extremist’ or ‘non-extremist’, let alone guilty of having a ‘fixation’ on violence. Name a state that has not deployed ‘extremist’ violence at some point in defence of its own class interests. However, communists are certainly ‘extremists’ when it comes to democracy, favouring maximal freedom of speech and association - rather than letting the dead hand of the bureaucratic state or corporate media decide what is beyond the pale.
Secondly, the latest proposals also have to be considered in the light of the ongoing Gaza protests - not just the riots that broke out in Southport, London, Hartlepool, Manchester, Rotherham, Belfast, etc. What Cooper is really talking about is referring more people to the intelligence services on the basis of racism. But, of course, after the ‘anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism’ smear campaign that was highly effective and still ongoing, anti-Zionism itself is now classified as a form of racism. After all, a previous Tory home secretary, Suella Braverman, described the Gaza demonstrations as “hate marches” and, totally inverting reality, madly described the Metropolitan police as “biased” towards Palestinians and the left in general, as she agitated for a ban. Thus her comments on X about the “sick, inflammatory and, in some cases, clearly criminal chants, placards and paraphernalia openly on display” and, in the meantime, “week by week, the streets of London are being polluted by hate, violence, and anti-Semitism”, where “members of the public are being mobbed and intimidated”, while “Jewish people in particular feel threatened”.
Under the current circumstances of Israel’s war against the inhabitants of Gaza, plus the ever-present danger of escalation into a wider regional war with attacks on south Lebanon and Iran, it is not too difficult to imagine the home secretary introducing measures against anti-war demonstrations, under the pretext of moving against “harmful and hateful beliefs”. Even more so when you remember the Prevent guidance was amended last year to include socialism, communism, anti-fascism - not to mention anti-abortion - in a list of potential signs of ideologies leading to terrorism.1 In the section on the left, it states that socialism and communism are “united by a set of grievance narratives which underline their cause”, implying sinister motivations. The threat to freedom of expression from such an approach is all too apparent.
Going into the land of make believe, we are meant to think that the cure for violence against women and girls is to clamp down on “extreme misogyny” - whatever that looks like. What is the difference between straightforward misogyny, or sexism, and “extreme” misogyny - how do you define it? Putting it mildly, we should be wary of all such legislation, which can easily be turned against us.
We know this from history - the classic example being the rightly lauded Battle of Cable Street in October 1936, which showed that there could be effective forcible resistance to the efforts to intimidate east London Jews from Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. But just a bit more than a month later the Public Order Act was introduced - in particular its notorious section 5, aimed at “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour with intent to provoke a breach of the peace or whereby a breach of the peace is likely to be occasioned”. The wearing of political uniforms was outlawed and police permission was needed to organise large meetings and demonstrations.
Though directed against the Mosleyites, the act was used extensively against the 1984-85 Miners’ Great Strike, disputes with New Age Travellers, and protests during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. You may want a clampdown on the far right and Islamophobic racists organising genuine hate marches, but ultimately it will be the left that gets done. We will get prosecuted for being racist because we go out onto the streets of Britain protesting against the apartheid state of Israel and Britain’s complicity with its crimes.
Our rights
If you think this is exaggerated, there was an instructive case in Berlin a few weeks ago.2 A court convicted a pro-Palestinian activist for leading a chant of the slogan, ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, at a rally in the German capital four days after the October 7 attacks on Israel - the first trial in Germany centring on the use of that particular phrase. Ava Moayeri, a 22-year-old German-Iranian national apparently from a communist background, was ordered to pay a €600 fine, the court rejecting her argument that she meant only to express support for “peace and justice” in the Middle East.
The presiding judge said she “could not comprehend” the logic of previous German court rulings saying the phrase was “ambiguous”, as it was clear to her that it “denied the right of the state of Israel to exist” and had to be evaluated in the context of “the biggest massacre of Jews since the Shoah - that is the elephant in the room”. The judge also argued that the slogan was particularly harmful in Germany, which considers support for Israel to be a matter of Staatsräson (a ‘reason of state’), at the core of its national identity due to its responsibility for the holocaust.
So there you are in the UK, taking part in protests against the genocide of the Gazan people and possible ethnic cleansing of the entire Palestinian people. Yes, Zionist Israel is an expansionist apartheid state that has no right to exist morally or politically in its current form, just as we on the left contended that apartheid South Africa had no right to exist. At the time, the right of the Tory Party defended apartheid by arguing that if you got rid of white rule in South Africa, what you would get is the African National Congress, which was pro-Soviet. But, following the German example, will protesters in the UK now be prosecuted for chanting ‘From the river to the sea’ or saying that Israel has no right to exist as an exclusivist, racist, apartheid state?
Even fascists
Equally, we in the CPGB have always been opposed to state bans on fascist organisations like Britain First and National Action. Of course, we find them utterly vile. But such legislation can easily be directed against the left and the working class movement, so by defending the right even of fascists to free speech, we are not indulging in a liberal sense of fair play - we are defending ourselves.
Communists are against imprisoning people for their political views, no matter how abhorrent. Only if they go around physically attacking other people on the basis of some twisted, anti-human ideology, should they be found guilty of assault, or murder in the case of the fascist, Thomas Mair, who murdered the Labour MP, Jo Cox. Or possibly attempted murder for those in Rotherham who took an active part in trying to burn down the Holiday Inn Express hotel housing asylum-seekers. Even then, the guiding principle should always be rehabilitation and where necessary treatment for mental health issues.
Fascist and reactionary ideas in general are best combated in the open - not by being driven underground by the state, where they will inevitably resurface, possibly in a more pernicious form. Especially in a context where the left has such a dismal record on freedom of speech, complicit for promoting a narrative that certain ideas simply need to be suppressed before they gain a hold over the sheep-like masses that need to be protected by an enlightened central committee. We shall never forget the Socialist Workers Party once telling us that only duly accredited students and specialist academics should have access to Hitler’s Mein Kampf due to its corrupting influence.
We need to be aware that the threat to free speech does not come just from the right, from the likes of Suella Braverman and Liz Truss. It also comes from the likes of Yvette Cooper, from the German SDP government and their coalition partners, the Greens.