The First Lockdown: A Year On

It’s been a year since the institution of the first lockdown in Britain, since the pandemic beset and quaked our lives across the world. The Tories are desperate to blot out the public health calamity they presided over, the hardship, turmoil and loss of that year, as a temporary unsteadiness against an unprecedented foe, now redeemed by the distribution of the proper artillery of the vaccine. Johnson’s grandstanding in the wake of this riptide of human tragedy is unsurprising precisely for its shocking callousness, boasting that ‘greed’ and ‘capitalism’ have been responsible for the success of the vaccine, despite an unprecedented scale of global human cooperation driven by research in public institutions like Oxford University, and distribution through even attenuated local public sector infrastructure such as GPs and social care sector networks, resulting in the rapid vaccination of the population.

They are clamouring to restore business as usual, to repair faith in a decaying system that throughout austerity and the pandemic, with roots in a long history of plunder, has been oiled by the blood and misery of working people. Primed to deflect from the dislocations of Brexit and capitalize on the resentment of their voter base against Brussels as was so key to their electoral victory, the halting vaccine distribution of the EU is framed as proof of the distinction of one-nation neo-liberalism against the bloated bureaucracy of such institutions. Points are scored, a more facile common enemy once again seeking to foil Britain’s glory and force us into victimhood resurrected, the horrors of the very war they pronounced effaced in some trumpeted final triumph. The charade of the Blitz Spirit wears on, suffering our stoic patriotic duty, our lot in life thus set, no better conditions or real sick pay even when you’re exalted to the status of hero and martyred through lack of PPE. Poorer countries in the Global South are shut out from access to the vaccine by the sacrosanct, monstrous regimes of private property. And so the wounds remain, any mourning again thwarted, any loss merely a temporary setback in the darkness before a bright new dawn.

When feminist activists came together at a vigil to mourn Sarah Everard only a couple of weeks ago, condemning institutional and state violence against women, they were attacked and besieged by the very perpetrators of the violence they protested. There was no space to grieve, to weep together, to feel anger. Many of those present will have borne witness to the burial of loved ones over disembodied Zoom streams, will have attended funerals bereft of even the comfort of a touch or embrace, will have mourned friends murdered by the brutality of service cuts and benefit assessments. The state of emergency has become the norm, as many had warned and feared. Organizations like Sisters Uncut intervened to connect this to a broader clamp down on the right to protest and the creeping authoritarianism of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which would criminalise Traveller communities as trespassers as much as render any protestor deemed an ‘annoyance’ liable to arrest or prosecution. The specific clause on imprisonment of up to 10 years for defacing statues is a draconian assault on social movements reckoning with the legacies of colonialism such as Black Lives Matter, signalling further a dark spiral into nationalist authoritarianism. The police have long colluded and lobbied for ever more nebulous and over-reaching powers to arm themselves for crackdowns of discontent and manage social crises at the behest of the state — this bill is no exception.

The political nous, organizational experience and institutional memory of Sisters Uncut was instrumental in rallying a consistent push back against the police repression, manifesting in a series of daily protests to maximise pressure until the commons vote. Though this vote in favour of the bill passed the second reading given the Conservative’s overbearing electoral majority, its advance through the parliamentary machinery has been delayed, testifying to the power of disruptive protest which has already been so hindered by coronavirus powers. With Priti Patel’s announcements that the asylum system will be tightened even further — a terrifying prospect given that the norm is already the cruelty of detention, decrepit barracks without basics of dignity such as healthy food, and enforced destitution through no recourse to public funds — we are at a chilling juncture, and resistance is imperative on all of us.

This is, of course, the context that has been eclipsed in the media wrangling and punditry around the protests in Bristol. Labour MPs have raced to encourage people to report activists to the police to aid investigations into the disorder, as much as Tories and the right-wing press have peddled out the well-worn apparitions of mobs intent on destruction and harm to the police, anarchy unleashed, a small minority marring the rights to peaceful assembly for everyone else. Of course, as some of the more progressive media voices have gestured towards, this is exactly what is in contest: that is, if you criminalise peaceful protest then people will resort to more violent means to raise their voice when it is otherwise silenced. The sinister implications of the Policing Bill should be the focal point, and in the tradition of civil disobedience the rights of even liberal democratic society have been safeguarded by the moral imperative to break unjust laws and reset authoritarian imbalances of power through popular pressure. All true, as far as it goes, but I think insufficient.

The dichotomy between the determination of Sisters Uncut to not sell out militant protesters and the liberal sensibilities of the figureheads of Reclaim These Streets refusing to support arrested protesters and initially claiming Cressida Dick, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, should not resign as women leaders are needed in these institutions, is telling here. The lesson from history is that we should not entertain the very partition of protesters into good and bad according to tactical choices, as such framings are manufactured by the press and state due to their vested interest in disunifying and demonizing the movement and restricting the boundaries of effective protest.

Ultimately, the litmus test for social change has never been appeasing the sensitivities of politicians in hope of backdoor policy compromises, but the organized, popular power we can bring to bear against the dominant political and economic system. Its expression will be messy because that is the nature of struggle: because dissent erupts viscerally from a collective grief and outrage at the inequalities, injustices and exploitation scarring peoples’ lives, because the riot itself is only a realization of the violence of denying people democratic and civil rights, the violence of dispossessing people from housing and work, the violence of racist police brutality. It is a release of the accumulated tensions and injuries of the system smouldering in each of us, the desire for freedom flaring out and shattering the shackles of drudgery and tyranny.

One cannot talk of riots without talking of why Cressida Dick was promoted to commissioner after supervising the operation that killed Jean de Menezes and still to this day denying any wrongdoing. One cannot talk of riots without talking of why domestic abuse is so rampantly and disproportionately committed by those serving in the police force, why so many have died in police custody without any accountability. One cannot talk of riots without talking of why countless hundreds of thousands are now dead after the bludgeonings of austerity and the pandemic as a direct consequence of NHS cuts, benefit sanctions, insecure work, homelessness, inequality. That is violence, the structural violence overlooked, adjusted to, as normal. The flames on the streets are funeral pyres.

Official channels to change are closing down once more, as many young people have been rebuffed again and again at the voting booth and Labour fades into ‘no opposition for opposition’s sake’ obsolescence, missing all chances to challenge the Government where it mattered. This dynamic will be kindling for more confrontations of the kind occurring in Bristol, and certainly while insurrectionary activity is not a sustainable political strategy in itself and must be undergirded by deep-rooted organizing for workplace and community power, it will be incumbent on all of us to choose which side of history we will stand on, to realize agitation and upheaval is the necessary precursor to change.

For decades we have endured the structural vandalization of our livelihoods, with our protest culture remarkably enfeebled and docile compared to even other European countries, the gradual disintegration into authoritarianism traceable through everything from the Hostile Environment, to Counter-terrorism Law, to the Trade Union Act, eroding even basic democratic rights. We stare down the barrel of a gun whilst the Tories sound the victory clarion over COVID, beckoning a return to ‘normal’, entreating us to forget a year of grinding, unnecessary misery and death severed from each other, the bleak poverty and human desperation seething beneath the ‘normal’, its dismaying drift towards a strong-arming state. It is our responsibility to mourn, to fight — to dream of and organize toward something more.