Selfish, reckless, stupid?

This is Piers Morgan’s response to the anti-lockdown protests, part of a somewhat predictable reaction to the anti-lockdown protests from the centrist media. There is no attempt to get beneath the surface of what is going on, a blindness to many people’s experiences of power and authourity.

Before I go on I wish to make a few things clear from a personal standpoint:

1: On a personal level I accept the lockdown measures

2: I never advocate violent protests

3: I think *some* people went to the anti-lockdown protests (and the BLM protests which I am also going to cover in this blog) with violent intent. But this doesn’t mean we should dismiss everyone who protested as selfish, reckless and stupid (as much of the media did about lockdown and extinction rebellion protests) or attempt to dismiss everyone as Marxists, rioters and looters (as people in the media on both sides of the Atlantic did with the BLM protests).

What is ‘advantage blindness’?

During the BLM protests I lost count of the number of times I saw white people make some variation on the claim ‘If you’ve done nothing wrong then you’ve got no reason to fear the police’. I’d wager that everyone who made this claim has the advantage of never being profiled by the police, of never being assumed to be a threat because of the colour of their skin or the way they dressed, of never being man-handled or assaulted by the police. This makes them blind to the advantage they have. They are then keen to look for any evidence that their worldview is fundamentally right, that authority is generally a necessary power used for good. These people thought revelations that George Floyd had prior criminal convictions provided some kind of ‘gotcha’ moment, some kind of confirmation that this made his death justified. I also have criminal convictions, if someone murders me because I’m suspected of using a forged note then I hope you’d all still give a shit about the fact I was murdered by the people charged with protecting society?

When things like George Floyd’s murder happen they lay bare some basic truths: Our current structures of capitalism, power and authourity all enable the people who have too much to not have to care, think about or respond to the people who have little or nothing.

Is suggesting that the current levels of structural inequality are unsustainable even a controversial point? Klaus Schwab, executive chairman of the world economic forum had this to say “free-market fundamentalism has eroded worker rights and economic security, triggered a deregulatory race to the bottom and ruinous tax competition, and enabled the emergence of massive new global monopolies”. This quote proves that not everyone who thinks the current form of capitalism is broken is a violent revolutionary.

In the same way many people wanted to discredit all involved in the BLM protests as dangerous Marxist revolutionaries or rioters and looters, many people want to dismiss all anti lockdown protestors as ‘crack-pot, 5G conspiracy theorists’. I’ve seen comments online from advantage blind people saying they should be ‘culled’ and that ‘we should develop a vaccine that prevents people from being a moron’. According to Jon Ronson conspiracy theories are most prevalent among people with the least power in countries where governments and institutions behave the most conspiratorially. In our country government contracts are being handed out, with no fair or competitive process, to the companies linked to an array of the ruling party’s donors, friends and relatives. Many of these companies have failed to deliver. Consultants for Serco (a firm for which Health minister Edward Argar was a senior executive) are paid £7,000 a day to design a failing track and trace system. Meanwhile a campaign by a professional footballer, and the goodwill of charities and community groups, had to shame the government in to acting to meet the most basic needs of children and families facing disadvantage.

So how can we turn around and justifiably lay claim to someone facing disadvantage that our government don’t conspire and make decisions which punish them in order to make their friends, families and networks even richer? Especially as the Prime Minister himself said during a questions and answers session at the Tory party conference that the pandemic was a massive opportunity to ‘short-circuit’ the things the government wanted to achieve, such as reducing support for the unemployed, adding “And it will be a tax-cutting agenda as well. I can’t pre-empt anything the Chancellor says or does, but that is where we want to go.”

“OK”, many people might say, “I’m not trying to say the country is fair in terms of economic distribution. But all that stuff about the government trying to remove people’s rights and freedoms, that’s just stupid”. How dissimilar is this from the wealthy white guy who lives in the stockbroker belt saying that those who’ve done nothing wrong don’t have to fear the police? How many of the people saying this have been forcibly detailed with no sense of when they will be free again? Do they understand what it is like to be sectioned under the mental health act? Or subject to an IPP (Imprisonment for Public Protection) sentence? I’m guessing pretty much none of the people who have said this have had all their rights and freedoms taken away from them by people in power. I’m guessing that most people who say this have had some form of agency and autonomy in their lives. Me personally, I might be thinking ‘grow-up’ every time a Talk Radio host who still has the ability to work and earn in a pretty low risk environment, to be with their immediate family in a safe and supportive environment, to enjoy green space in their garden and all the latest digital technology to stay in touch with friends and family from outside of their household starts to complains about ‘losing their freedoms’ because they have to wear a mask for 20 minutes whilst they do their supermarket shop. The increase in state powers won’t be used disproportionally against Dan Wooton and Julia Hartley-Brewer. The coronavirus laws aren’t going to make them any more vulnerable. But when it comes to people who’ve had all of these things stripped forcibly away (or never had them in some cases) for an undetermined amount of time? Then I’m more inclined to listen to why the state being given even more powers is such a scary prospect to them. When it comes to people being trapped in a household where violence and abuse takes place, when it comes to people who have had their support network taken away from them, when it comes to people who might be subject to a DNAR (Do Not Attempt to Resuscitate) notice being issued, in all these instances I think it’s selfish, reckless and stupid not to listen to them when they tell us about how they have lost their rights. I’m much more inclined to talk about how we can work together as a community, in a safe way which respects social distancing, to restore some of those rights.

The great democratic reset?

To undergo all of this at a time when we are one year in to an 80 seat majority government is even more disempowering. Having to wait for four years to have any form of say in how power and authourity respond to you is an unacceptable position at any time, but even more so in a time when the structural inequalities in our society have been laid bare. As clear as it is that we need an economic reset to achieve a fairer and more sustainable future, it is also clear we need a democratic reset which allows for individuals and communities to have a much greater choice over how they live their lives.

The top down approaches in response to this pandemic have exposed how just how little control people have over the resources which have been ostensibly allocated to benefit them. This is especially true for people who are on the wrong end of the digital divide. For a long time we have had a problem with a much greater proportion of public and philanthropic money going to those who already have too much or enough ahead of those who have little or nothing. Now we have the even greater disparity of it costing money in equipment and data in order to participate in any kind of local democratic forums.

If you wish to join a discussion about protests, rights and democracy during the pandemic please get in touch with The Elephants Trail community reporting team. Maybe you or someone you know have an interesting story or perspective which needs to be heard in this debate and put to local policymakers and community leaders for a discussion about how we respond? Maybe you have ideas about how we can bring about a democratic reset in Greater Manchester?

If you have a story about how communities have stepped up to respond to people’s needs and preferences where the state and statutory services have been unwilling or unable to then we would also like to hear from you.

You can contact me on Matt.Kidd@creativeinclusion.org if you’d like to join this discussion and a member of our community reporting team will be in touch about your preferred way to contribute.