Protecting the right to dissent (By Richard Crawford)
John Stuart Mill, who spent part of his childhood in Newington Green, believed that the state had a duty to help people prosper and grow in whatever way they wished to do so, so long as they did not interfere with the rights of others to do the same. It was not the job of the state to bully the people into conformity with any given ideology, for instance by establishing laws that prevented free expression of viewpoints different from those of the government of the day. It has come as a shock, therefore, to see the police arresting innocent people simply because they happened to disagree with the idea of a monarchy.
The arrest of a group of peaceful protestors by the Metropolitan Police on 6th May under the new ‘Public Order Act’ because they were in possession of a few pieces of string sounds absurd, but it happened, and those arrested were kept in police cells for 16 hours before being released without charge. Not since the notorious Sus Law of the 1980’s which led to the race riots in Brixton and elsewhere, has a piece of legislation that placed so much power in the hands of police to control the right to protest. This law is a direct attempt to stifle dissent.
Banksy, the foremost protest artist of his generation, has given graphic form to the use of police searches to target certain sections of the population. My favourite is in the underpass that leads up to the Barbican Centre in the City of London.
It depicts two police officers searching a painting of a young black male in the style of Jean-Michel Basquiat, a New York artist. The police officers have taken the image as the real thing because they only see what they want to see: a young black male. In a neat reversal of the power relations in this image, Banksy portrayed a little girl searching a soldier on a wall in Bethlehem. The vision of an innocent girl disarming a violent soldier makes a powerful point about the way that states around the world use force to impose their will upon the people.
Banksy’s works have never been more relevant to our lives as political citizens. There is a mural painted on the side wall of a building in Stoke Newington Church Street that depicts the Royal Family on the balcony of Buckingham Palace as a group of clowns. There is an obvious connection between this mural and the arrest of the peaceful protestors at the Coronation ceremony on 6th May. Both express Republican sentiments.
Not everybody will agree with Banksy’s view of the world, but everyone should fight to protect his right to say it in public.
Richard Crawford.
This blog is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. It was made by New Unity and Richard Crawford. Find out more: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
