Freedom in 2021
‘We will not allow them to build a soft dictatorship around us, no matter how lethargic we have been over the past year.’
Many people are under the impression that the Government's new crime bill will stifle our right to protest, but in reality we have not been free nor have we had rights since the 23rd of March 2020, or rather, the beginning of lockdown.
People often go on about how freedom obsessed Americans are, but they forget that we are their mothers and fathers. No Briton anywhere should be able to bear for long the stifling and oppressive stink of being unfree; but we are unfree and people have borne it, requested it even.
This was never a bi-partisan issue and I will try to avoid any snide ‘I told you so’s’ on behalf of the section of conservatism that I most identify with. The fact is we should never have allowed Boris Johnson to get away with his lockdown without even so much as a vote; and yes, maybe I should have spoken more stringently against it but that time is past now.
The police have been useless prison wardens for some time now, but increasingly they have been emboldened to ignore crime and to crack down on the rights and freedoms of those they should protect. I once again will bring up Robert Peel's principles of policing, a massively important document showing what the police are and how they should operate (read more about policing in our March Print Issue).
The police are civilians like us, they are the public like we are. Their job may lend them more authority than the average person would ever enjoy; but they are not soldiers or tools of the state, they are an anti-crime measure. I will say it again, the police must be reformed, they must be made into what they once were. Instead, our already abolished right to protest is now seemingly more formally stripped away by new legislation, and this trend of anti-freedom will continue until all our precious freedoms and rights are gone before we have even realised.
The new bill allows the arrest or fines of those causing ‘public nuisance’, a euphemism for ‘doing anything the police don't like’. I’m sure the vagueness of the wording will also extend to people on private property if it is close enough to public land and the police are feeling particularly Cossack-like on that day.
If we will ever regain our freedoms, I cannot say; but I still hope that we have enough about us to resist and hopefully force our elected officials to understand that we will not allow them to build a soft dictatorship around us, no matter how lethargic we have been over the past year.
