I experienced the curtailment of the right to protest personally, and I realised that the attitude towards protest in the UK this year has been indicative of a government that wanted to control more than infection.
‘Go home now or you’ll be arrested!’ an aggressive policeman shouted in my face. He barked orders and questions at me. I had attended an anti-lockdown protest in London on 28 November in my capacity as a journalist and press photographer, and witnessed the police using excessive force. I had just been photographing an arrest on a fairly empty stretch of pavement on Oxford Street, a long way behind the protest which had moved on. I showed the police officer my press pass. He wasn’t satisfied and demanded my ‘password’ to check it was real. His intimidating manner flummoxed me and instead of asking what I had done which was unlawful (nothing), I set about retrieving my personal password to my press association. If he didn’t believe me he should have just called the number on the back of the press card; it was unorthodox and inappropriate to ask for my personal password. I can’t believe I even started looking, but fear clouds your judgement.
After a couple of minutes with the ‘bad cop’ a relatively ‘good cop’ took over and was satisfied by my press pass. I had not done anything unlawful after all. After being subjected to several rounds of Kafka-esque questioning, the four police officers who had surrounded me moved on.
Shockingly, another press photographer I spoke to was shoved twice by the police. One time, his camera was grabbed by a police officer who pushed it in his face to move him on.
Allowing press photographers and journalists to do their work is essential to a free press and democracy. The attitude towards us was obstructive and intimidating. Unfortunately, what we experienced was typical of the force and intimidation which was turned on the protestors that day.
There seemed to be a deliberate strategy of making lots of arrests in order to create a politicised media story. Hundreds of police officers picked off protestors from the edges and back of the protest, like sharks feeding off a shoal of fish, and put them in vans which were lining the streets. The peaceful protest saw violence later in the day, which I’d suggest was at least partially caused by the brute and excessive policing.
On the same day there were crowds of people at Borough Market and Chelsea Farmers’ Market, to give just two London examples. Two weeks later there were crowds of people on Oxford Street Christmas shopping. Why are some crowds tolerated, but peaceful political marches and protests clamped down on hard? Does the virus behave differently in different types of crowds? Of course not. We have to conclude that the government and the Met Police seemed to be more concerned about political contagion than viral contagion.
Georgio Agamben, the Italian philosopher, has written about the reduction of life to biopolitics. To simply reduce the theory, he says that the man who is ‘accursed’ can be set apart from normal society, and must live a ‘bare life’ – life reduced to the barest form.
In the worst examples, the ‘accursed’ are put in concentration camps, where a state of exception becomes the rule, and normal laws and morals are forgotten. Guantanamo is a modern example. The ‘bare life’ of the prisoners was such that the only protest left to them, hunger strike, was also dominated by the brutal policy of the wardens, and they were force fed and anally rehydrated as a form of torture. The prisoner’s geopolitical border of the body was destroyed by the captor. This is a disturbing example of a government taking away rights and creating fear.
The UK government has said many times that healthy people can still be infectious, therefore we can all be the ‘accursed’ to a degree. (This is despite numerous studies showing that asymptomatic transmission is not a serious risk,10 and Dr Fauci proclaiming in 2020 on US television that ‘an epidemic is not driven by asymptomatic carriers’.) Has much of the world been turned, without our understanding or noticing, into a ‘state of exception’? The camp can also be metaphorical. We don’t need to be relocated, we can be locked down at home too. Home is clearly not a concentration camp, there are no barbed wires or machine-gun towers, and I do not want to stretch this metaphor into melodrama, but nonetheless it is a confinement. For those in cramped and inadequate homes, the confinement is more serious. We were presumed infectious rather than healthy, our geopolitical borders were determined to be unreliable, thus our normal rights were restricted, and for some self-isolation felt like a form of torture.
Beyond the metaphorical, China forced 800,000 people into quarantine, and its use of stadiums as mass isolation areas was chillingly reminiscent of concentration camps. In Israel, the publication Haaretz described ultra-Orthodox Jews who do not follow the state’s rules as ‘Covid insurgents’ and ‘terrorists’11 in starkly obvious biopolitical language. In a particularly hyperbolic description, ‘maskless individuals’ are accused of setting off ‘epidemiological time bombs’.
We should be alert to similar, albeit less extreme, moves in Europe. The Times headline ‘Hunt for mystery person who tested positive for Brazilian Covid-19 variant then vanished’12 evoked a slightly aggressive image of a hunt for a person carrying a new Covid variant, as though a bio-terrorist was dangerously on the loose with a weapon. Four states in Germany announced plans to create detention centres for those who violate lockdown measures, using specially built facilities, a refugee camp and a juvenile detention centre guarded by police. Public health mutated into crime and punishment, all made possible by emergency laws. Some people will believe that if you break the rules you should accept the consequences, tough. But we must remember that these rule-breakers were healthy, not necessarily infectious, people.
The PCR test used to determine ‘infectiousness’ is not actually a good indication of infectiousness, believe
