CORONAVIRUS AND THE SLIDE TO AUTHORITARIANISM – rs21 Scotland discussion 7th October 2020

This meeting was triggered by Nesrine Malik’s recent article in The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/03/the-myth-of-the-free-speech-crisis where he
argued that debates about freedom and liberty have become degraded, colonised by the right, with
the left vacating this space.

The real rolling back of civil liberties

The coronavirus act is the biggest attack on civil liberties in a generation, the poor and
vulnerable are already feeling the impact. The act was passed in a single day in March, MPs
of all parties knew how dangerous it was with MPs calling for it to be scratched from the
statute books as soon as possible.

Parliament was being asked to embed emergency powers that have already caused injustices.
One of the act’s most outrageous powers is to give police the right to detain any one of us
they deem “potentially infectious”. This is completely unjustified, and so broad it invites
misuse. Even the Crown Prosecution Service was so concerned about the misuse of this power that
in May it launched a monthly review of every single charge. The reviews published so far have
concluded that every single charge under this part of the act has been unlawful.

A joint investigation by Liberty and the Guardian revealed that, under the lockdown regulations –
which are separate to the Coronavirus Act – people of colour were 54% more likely to be fined than
white people.

Other restrictions which may on the surface seem reasonable, for example around mass
gatherings - effectively ban protest. And while banning protest in a pandemic might seem
“safe” for some, it doesn’t feel like that for a Black Lives Matter protester whose safety is
often the last concern of the state. The home secretary responded to Black Lives Matter by
claiming the protests were illegal.

Liberty has always supported proportionate action to tackle this pandemic. But the powers within
the Coronavirus Act can never be justified. As public health experts have been telling us again and
again for the past six months, criminalisation and watering down rights are not solutions to a public
health crisis – people need support and information to be able to stay safe and take care of one
another.

As for democratic process, this act has done untold damage. Its very existence normalises the
concentration of extraordinary power in the hands of the government and the police.

New bill on MI5 etc.

MI5 has long had a policy of allowing its officers and informants to participate in criminal
activity if the offences involved are proportionate to the evidence gained. We’ve seen what
that means for trade unionists fighting for the right to work or against aggressive employers.
The blacklisting campaign has uncovered vast amounts of shocking material relating to
practices that were deemed at the time to be proportionate.
As a result, ministers want to put the policy on the statute books for the first time, - human
rights groups say there is too much ambiguity in the bill because it does not explicitly rule out
serious crimes, such as murder, torture or sexual violence – the very crimes the government
want to rehabilitate.

Opposition

Critics of the government point to the 1989 murder of Pat Finucane, a Belfast lawyer who
was shot 14 times by loyalists at his family home in front of his wife and children, in an
attack found to have involved British state collusion. It eventually led to an apology in 2012
from the then prime minister, David Cameron.

Sir Keir wanted his party to abstain on the security bill. Jon Trickett said the bill “seeks to
give legal cover to illegal undercover actions”. But by and large Labour and the TUC are
tailing the Tories.

In the absence of any opposition the right is trying to fill the vacuum. Opposition to the
Coronavirus Act 2020 has come mainly from the right – inside and outside of parliament.

Conspiracy theories and protests

Conspiracy theories are usually based on the assumption that they explain everything that is
happening in the world. The alleged ‘Jewish-Bolshevik world conspiracy’ of the Rothschilds
and Communists worked like this. Today ‘Islam’ is said to be pushing for world
domination. In reality, all companies have a basic desire to expand, because otherwise they
will perish.

It is these issues which make conspiracy theories compatible with alt-right and fascist
ideas. The harshness, brutality and lack of any moderation in historical fascism make it easy
to overlook the fact that fascism never produced a comprehensive and coherent theory of
society. Racial theories – obscure and frequently refuted by science – myths about the state
and ethnic groups and their associated antisemitism – all these can best be understood as
attempts to develop such a theory. Fascism is based on a hodgepodge of obscure and half-
true platitudes and prejudices, as compiled in Hitler’s book Mein Kampf. Such theories
gained wide circulation amid the deep social crisis of the 1920s.

Today in Germany, the radical right has recognised how compatible the conspiracy theories
expressed on demos against social distancing are with their view of the world. An author of
the Identitarian Movement writes that conspiracy theories are ‘a healthy, materially
verifiable assessment of the state of the world.’

Catholic church and more recently the Church of England paedophilia scandals have
inflamed paedophilia conspiracy theories, with QAnon /Save the Children protests finding
space on the streets in the US.

The McMartin saga, which began in 1983 with accusations made by one boy’s mother, came
to encompass fantastical claims about a massive pedophile ring lurking beneath a preschool
in Manhattan Beach, California.
Hundreds, maybe thousands, of otherwise normal, relatively well-adjusted Americans truly
believed that a massive ring of occultist paedophiles was operating right under everyone’s
noses.

Pizzagate was concocted during the 2016 presidential campaign and alleged that prominent
figures in the Democratic Party were running a child sex ring in tunnels beneath the Comet
Ping Pong pizzeria in a residential Washington, DC, neighbourhood.

Conspiracies centring on the vulnerability of children are neither new nor distinctly
American. Wild claims of Jews killing Christian children and using their blood in rituals—the
“blood libel”—date back to at least the 12th century and have popped up every so often since
then, and long before that Christians were suspected of performing similar rites. “Hurting
children is one of the worst things you can say someone is doing. It’s an easy way to
demonize your enemy,”

The continuities between the McMartin case and Pizzagate suggest a broader explanation for
pedophile conspiracies: They aren’t the residue of malfunctions in our media culture. They’re
an outgrowth of the normal workings of reactionary politics.

Author Richard Beck, in We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s, locates the
roots of the McMartin conspiracy theory in the social progress of the previous decade—
particularly in the gains won by women. “In the ’80s you had a strong, vicious anti-feminist
backlash that helped conspiracies take hold,” Beck tells me. “In the ’70s, middle- and upper-
middle-class women had started to enter the full-time workforce instead of being
homemakers.”

Thanks in part to expanding reproductive freedom, career horizons had widened sufficiently
by the end of the 1970s for women to become, in Goldin’s words, “active participants who
bargain somewhat effectively in the household and the labor market.” They were now
forming their identities outside the context of the family and household.

The patriarchal family was under siege, as conservatives saw it, and day-care centres had
become the physical representation of the social forces bedevilling them. “You had this
Reagan-driven conservative resurgence,” Beck says, “and day care was seen as at least
suspicious, if not an actively maligned force of feminism.”

Day care held a prominent place in right-wing demonology. As far back as the 1960s,
conservatives were warning darkly that child care “was a communist plot to destroy the
traditional family,” as sociologist Jill Quadagno writes in The Color of Welfare.

In a 2017 paper on Pizzagate and pedophile conspiracies, psychology professor Jim Kline,
now at Northern Marianas College, argues that conspiracy theories “are born during times of
turmoil and uncertainty.”

Polarisation of discussions on lockdowns

It's unfortunate that discussion of lockdowns has been so prejudiced by denialism,

conspiracy theories and hyperbole about lockdown "fascism".
Polarising the conversation along those lines leaves us with "pro" or "anti" lockdown
positions. That's irrespective of any honest, rigorous discussion of the trade-offs of
lockdown, the opportunity-costs in terms of health policy, the mental health difficulties, the
drastic curtailments of life that they entail, the context that makes lockdowns necessary, the
policies that accompany lockdowns, and the danger of temporary forms of authoritarianism
segueing into something more durable and dangerous. Getting stuck on this discussion
leaves us unable to critically analyse Covid statism.

Before we can even get to that necessary discussion, therefore, we have to clear the decks
of all canards. The first thing to dispense with is the ludicrous invocation of "fascism". In no
case has fascism established itself by temporarily shutting down the hospitality sector,
paying people a wage to stay at home, and limiting household-to-household interaction for
a couple of months.

New Zealand hasn't gone fascist. Indeed, the actually-existing-fascists today are often to be
found marching against lockdown, alongside the anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists. Far-
right leaders have either vacillated (Trump, Modi, Duterte) or been outright hostile to
lockdown (Bolsonaro). For some reason, the pandemic was not the opportunity for them
that the 9/11 attacks were for the neoconservative right. It's worth asking why this is.
Suffice to say, the logic of biopolitics, securing the health of the population, is in conflict
with the logic of fascism and its commitment to vigorous social-Darwinism, racist violence
and the enlivening encounter with death.

If you think about it, the idea that enforced social distancing amid a pandemic doesn't slow
the virus's spread is not just wrong but counterintuitive. After all, this virus is mostly spread
by airborne particles in person-to-person interactions. The major vectors for its spread are
'super-spreader' events, which can take place wherever large numbers of people are
gathered in close proximity in a confined space: mass gatherings, the hospitality sector,
workplaces, and public transit. Closing down these vectors and limiting physical interactions
is an obvious way to stop the spread of the disease when the R number is around 3-4, and
the number of infections risks overwhelming health systems. And the evidence is quite clear
that this is exactly what did happen.

If we discount all the ideological clutter, does that leave us with a "pro" lockdown position?
Are we compelled to support Covid statism? I don't think so. I think we should treat
manifestations of authoritarianism - even where they are necessary evils, even where we
have to insist on them to save lives, even where we have no illusions in the inherent
goodness and decency of the 'ordinary person' - as evidence of failure. What do I mean by
that? Well, lockdown was very effective in Wuhan, but it's necessity might have been
reduced if local authorities hadn't concealed the evidence of the virus until it was too late.
Lockdowns worked well in European states, but they usually followed interims of several
weeks in which no preparations were made, there was no effort to develop a proper testing
infrastructure, and no attempt to reanimate pandemic preparedness or build emergency
resiliency into the healthcare system. To the contrary, the same politicians who delayed the
implementation of lockdown also tended to be slightly dismissive or derisive of such efforts
abroad.
Consider the situation in the UK now. The British government is likely to be forced into a
second lockdown. But why? Why is so much of the country already under lockdown? Why
are students being locked down on campus? Because the government wasted the time it
bought with the first lockdown, then ignored its own scientific advisors to practically abolish
social distancing and aggressively reopen the most dangerous disease vectors well in
advance of having developed a proper testing and tracing system. And now it's rolling out a
series of punitive fines for people who don't adhere to social distancing, or self-isolate when
they have symptoms of Covid-19. They claim that this is because of a small minority ruining
it for the majority who adhere to the rules. It might have been true back in April that the
majority adhered to the rules: but that's exactly why the government didn't need large
fines. It's definitely not the case now. Why? One reason is that serial fuck-ups, the
Cummings debacle, the contradictory messaging, and the official drive to force people back
to work, have systematically lowered people's vigilance over the last few months. Another is
that the withdrawal of economic support means there's little incentive for a precarious
worker or a small business owner to self-isolate. Hence the resort to fines.

If we end up having a cycle of lockdowns with increasingly authoritarian policing to

administer them, we can't simply and unconditionally support such measures. We know
who will suffer from that. If we're not naive libertarians, we cannot be Covid statists either.
Even if a specific lockdown is unavoidable at this very moment, the Left needs to be looking
for ways out of that cycle.

What kind of response do we need?

The left needs a narrative. The pandemic will lead to restraints on liberty – but these need
to be proportionate and should involve measures that are effective. The government has
mishandled virtually every response to the pandemic - poor PPE, catastrophic policy
towards care homes, test and trace debacle. These failures have been combined with more
authoritarian responses to compensate for them. Finger pointing has encouraged snooping
which was the opposite of the collective solidarity that existed at the outset of the
pandemic.

The evidence shows that while hand washing is advisory, transmission is most likely through
airborne particles and the key vectors for transmission are closed environments like
cramped living quarters and workplaces with no adequate ventilation.

The workplace is crucial. But there’s been limited action in the UK against workplace safety.
Employers are increasingly turning now towards using measures that are putting workers in
harm’s way. In the US – rash of unofficial and official strikes. With growing restrictions on
the right to protest in the streets, the workplace becomes the key area for protest and
defending workers health, welfare and lives.

How do we resist?
Not protesting and obeying the draconian measures isn’t an option. However, simply
organising mass illegal actions isn’t feasible either. We need to articulate what kind of
lockdown we need that keeps working class communities safe with adequate funding to
ensure workers don’t suffer unduly. We should defend our civil liberties from a government
that sees the opportunity to use the pandemic to ram through a raft of regressive measures.
We have to work out how we can resist effectively in the new pandemic climate.

-essential work should shut down but those workers should be on full pay. If non-essential work
closes down then it could allow home schooling and it is easy to provide lap tops and online
resources. Local narratives could feed into national narratives. Where people are at work is where
there is the opportunity to organise especially for health and safety reps.