Adding even more irony to the already

4 min readMar 15, 2021

Adding even more irony to the already unbelievable picture above, all this comes on the eve of a new crime bill. Let me tell you a few of the things it criminalizes. “Serious annoyance.” “Economic harm.” “Activism.” In other words, boycotts. Peaceful protests — like vigils. Simply advocating something. All this is now going to be a criminal offence — punishable by up to ten years in prison.
Britain is now a country criminalising the most basic forms of dissent. Boycotts cause “economic damage” — start one, and you might find yourself in prison. Say something that someone in power doesn’t like, that’s “seriously annoying” — and you might find yourself on trial for your future. Be an “activist” — and you’re now a criminal. What on earth?
All this is happening because the British government wants to essentially get rid of groups like Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion. They are painted as terrorists and extremists. Of course, they are no such thing. They aren’t killing or beating or intimidating anyone. The most they’re guilty of is annoying stunts — oh wait, that brings us right back to the criminalisation of “serious annoyance.”
It’s just as damning what’s not on the radar. Genuine harassment, intimidation, brutality, violence. These aren’t included in the new crime bill. Nobody much cares about the very real harm being done to women online, who are sent rape and death threats as a matter of daily life. The British government is choosing instead to focus on an imaginary, illusory threat. Dissent.
These are effectively fascist powers. In most societies where institutions have such powers, they belong to “secret polices.” The power to monitor people for the thought crimes of being “annoying,” or worse, “activists.” The power to not just curtail basic freedoms like privacy and association — but to abrogate them, to make them not exist in the first place. These outsized powers are not remotely normal in a liberal democracy. The powers to basically intimidate anyone the government doesn’t like, and string them up as a “criminal” — they are what secret polices in authoritarian states have, and use, to keep dissent crushed, stifled, and suffocated.
Dissent from what, though? Well, largely dissent from the idea of a nationalist, supremacist society. The government routinely scapegoats activists of all kinds, from Black Lives Matter, to Extinction Rebellion, because of course their entire purpose is to create a more free and equal society. What is being cracked down on here is any deviation from the vision of Britain that Brexit created — or resurrected: a land of the pure, ascendant, triumphant over the world, the Nietzschean ubermen of empire. In Britain, any kind of cultural change — for more equality for Black people and other minorities to environmental progress — is seen as such a threat, it’s being made a crime.
What do you call a society like that — where even being on the side of progress, equality, justice is now a crime?

Adding even more irony to the already

Written by safuj kalope