OPINION FEATURE Is Britain becoming a Fascist State? By Emma Crossan
Our country is beginning to look more and more like a fascist state. We’ve seen a rise in the government silencing free speech and arresting peaceful protestors. This is all coming from the far right who were the loudest defenders of free speech – but only for them. Ever since Donald Trump was re-elected, it seems like people are becoming more and more comfortable being openly hateful and bigoted: to the point where it’s a controversial opinion to simply say “genocide is bad.”
While Elon Musk can perform Nazi salutes on live television with no consequence, Palestine Action were labelled a terrorist organisation for throwing paint on a plane. While far right thugs can start a riot fuelled by racism, harassing Muslim women and children in their homes in the name of “protecting their women”, elderly people are arrested for holding a sign saying, “I support Palestine Action.” And naturally, the defenders of free speech celebrate every time someone from the left is punished for exercising free speech. It’s almost as though they don’t want free speech – they want dictatorship.
The right to protest is a basic human right in the UK. However, as an activist I’ve often been made to feel threatened and intimidated by the police at protests, even though I’ve never broken any laws and have never been to a protest that isn’t peaceful. I’ve met activists who have been arrested for holding signs in public spaces and who have had threats of arrests despite no laws being broken. I met one woman at a Vigil for Palestinian Healthcare Workers who told me that the police showed up at her home. Why? Because she was wearing a t-shirt with the slogan “Genocide in Palestine, Time to Take Action.”
The BBC reported that 890 people were arrested at a rally opposing the ban on Palestine Action, with many of the arrestees being elderly people. This is nowhere the same number of arrests we see at anti-immigration protests, with Al Jazeera reporting that “dozens” of people were arrested at a recent far right protest in London, which turned violent – unlike the Palestine Action protest, who just held signs. It’s clear that the government’s priority is not to keep people safe from violence at protests – it’s to silence anyone who calls out their complicity.
The government are not only turning a blind eye to bigotry and hate speech in the streets, but they’re also actively contributing to it. Not only is free speech being silenced, but marginalized groups are also losing their human rights. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court announced that the Equality Act had been updated, meaning that the term “sex” would only refer to biological gender. This came with a law being put in place preventing trans and non-gender conforming people from using the bathroom they feel safe in. This is not only a breach of human rights, but also blatant erasure coming directly from our government. It didn’t take long after this for America to erase any references to bisexuality from the Stonewall National Monument site. How did that poem go again? “First they came for the communists.” That’s all starting to look a little too familiar now.
We live in a country where hatred and bigotry are becoming normalised, while compassion and solidarity is punished. Our government care more about profiting from genocide than they do about human rights. They pander to the people they know will support them by taking away human rights of marginalized communities and silencing anyone who dares to speak out. And if we continue to stay silent and allow this to happen, it’s only going to keep getting worse, until we’re living in a full blown fascist country.