Usually, it’s in the interests of opinion writers — or people like me, who’d be described better as opinionated writers — to be right. That is basically the whole reason for these pieces to exist; to observe, analyse, and argue with the confidence that you’ve grasped something true and are offering readers a clearer way to see the world.
Yet recently, I’ve started to hope that I am wrong — fundamentally, monumentally, embarrassingly wrong in my prediction, written elsewhere, that Britain is slowly becoming a neocommunal country, a process characterised by “the slow and inexorable intensification of ethnic identification and political factionalism, the result of ethnic hostilities being transplanted to Britain.”
I pray I am wrong because this path runs through such dark and foreboding shadows. There will be — as there always has been — hope for the future and joy in the present. I still believe, unabashedly, that it is the most marvellous country in the world, and that I know not a better little spot for death; but neocommunal Britain is not going to be a comfortable place to live, nor a happy one.
This weekend, thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators are preparing to gather in London in what could become one of the most direct challenges to the UK’s anti-terror laws in recent memory. At the heart of this mobilisation is Palestine Action — the activist network recently proscribed as a terrorist organisation under the Terrorism Act 2000.
Despite the serious legal consequences, including up to 14 years in prison for expressing support for a banned group, organisers and supporters remain undeterred. Since July 5, over 200 individuals have been arrested under the Act. Now, campaigners intend to escalate by openly and collectively defying the ban.
A briefing document shared by the civil liberties group Defend Our Juries, and obtained by The Telegraph, outlines the plan in striking terms. It concedes the personal risks of participation but argues that the state may be unable — or unwilling — to respond if faced with mass civil disobedience on such a scale.
“Even assuming [the state] had the physical capacity to arrest so many people on the same day,” the document states, “the political fallout… would be incalculable.” The briefing goes further, suggesting that overwhelming the criminal justice system could create the pressure needed to reverse the ban entirely.
The planned demonstration is a calculated stress test of the government’s ability, and willingness, to enforce the law in the face of widespread opposition. With one of Palestine Action’s co-founders now cleared to challenge the legality of the ban in court, campaigners sense an opening.
This is what neocommunal politics looks like. A neocommunal country’s politics are less concerned with the common good than with ethnic loyalty and demographic influence. When loyalty to ethnic or ideological factions outweighs loyalty to anything else, political discourse becomes less about finding consensus and more about securing power for your own group.
Politics is therefore no longer a contest of ideas or a debate over the future of the nation; it is a struggle for dominance between competing interests. The old politics of debate and dialogue seem increasingly naïve; politics will increasingly play out through confrontation, rather than persuasion.
And this applies just as much to the rolling protests around Britain’s migrant hotels as it does to the weekend mobilisations of Palestine Action. When the great Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew said that in ethnically mixed societies “all political life devolves to ethnic loyalties,” few people appreciate the significance of the word all. Lee did not mean just that but that it becomes the basis for all politics, but that it applies to all ethnicities. Both the hotel riots and the defiance of Palestine Action tap into the same underlying motivation: the mobilisation of a community around shared identity, and the belief that the stakes of the battle transcend national law or order. People have learnt that direct action works, and our political culture will retard accordingly.
When people lose faith in the system’s ability to represent their interests, they will begin to rely more on their communities
The true impact of this change will be difficult to fully grasp until we witness it unfolding in real time — by which time, it might be too late. I wrote recently of the dark prospect that “civic-minded vigilantism” might inadvertently accelerate the process by which public institutions lose their legitimacy. We now see a direct challenge to the government’s declaration of Palestine Action as a terrorist group and protestors tackling what they suspected was an delivery rider working illegally at the Britannia hotel in Canary Wharf.
When people lose faith in the system’s ability to represent their interests, they will begin to rely more on their communities — and when whole communities start to question the legitimacy of the state, we may begin to see just how vulnerable a nation can become.
I still hope I’m wrong.
