Radio: I Discuss the Coronation, the Tories’ Suppression of Peaceful Protest and Criminalization of Refugees, Plus the Latest on Guantánamo, With Chris Cook on Gorilla Radio

Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

For many years, I’ve been honored to be regularly invited to discuss my ongoing work on Guantánamo, as well as many other political concerns of mine, on Gorilla Radio, run by Chris Cook in Victoria, Canada, which is “dedicated to social justice, the environment, community, and providing a forum for people and issues not covered in the corporate media.”

Chris’s latest show is here (or here as an MP3), and our interview took place in the second half of the hour-long program, after an interview with whistleblowing activist Ashley Gjøvik, following the publication of her article “Whistleblowers Are the Conscience of Society, Yet Suffer Gravely For Trying to Hold the Rich and Powerful Accountable For Their Sins,” published by Covert Action Magazine.

I’ve also embedded the show below:

The trigger for Chris’s interview with me was the Coronation, last Saturday, of King Charles III, which I covered in a post as part of my ongoing photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, and also recorded a song about, entitled, “You’re Not My King,” also embedded below:

After an initial discussion about how much support there is — or isn’t — in the UK for the Royal Family, with recent polling demonstrating how little support there is for the monarchy amongst younger people, we proceeded to talk about the policing of the Coronation, and the zero tolerance for dissent that was shown by the police, who arrested the CEO and other members of the anti-monarchy group Republic, despite the group having liaised with them extensively beforehand, and having been assured that peaceful protests would be allowed to proceed, and who also arrested environmental protestors for nothing more than wearing a ‘Just Stop Oil’ T-shirt.

I explained how I wasn’t surprised by the police’s tactics, because the British state has a long history of suppressing any and all protests against the monarchy, as was repeatedly demonstrated during the long reign of Charles’ predecessor, Queen Elizabeth II.

However, as we also discussed, what is particularly alarming this time around is that the Tory government, under the vile home secretary Suella Braverman, has just passed legislation — the new Public Order Act — that empowers the police to suppress any kind of peaceful protest that can be construed as even mildly “disruptive,” which was used in the days before the Coronation to arrest Just Stop Oil protestors marching slowly in the road by the Houses of Parliament.

In our interview, I may have indulged in a hope that the police would recognize that, despite their newly-granted powers, arresting everyone who engages in even mildly disruptive peaceful protest will cross a line that senior police are often wary of, because of its potential to erode their notion of the importance of “policing by consent,” and that they might also reflect on the new law’s dangerous implications for the state slipping into a policy of unacceptable authoritarianism. However, as Just Stop Oil supporters have continued to be arrested for slow marching this week, I’m now left both fearful, and shaking with rage, that, as George Monbiot explained in an article for the Guardian yesterday, “The new offences [the Public Order Act] creates have been designed to allow the police to shut down every form of effective protest.”

This would be alarming enough if these mildly disruptive protestors were representing some kind of unpopular fringe activity. However, as Monbiot also explained, “These are the state-of-emergency laws you would expect in the aftermath of a coup. But there is no public order emergency, just an emergency of another kind, that the protesters targeted by this legislation are trying to stop: the collapse of Earth systems. We are being compelled by law to accept the destruction of the living world.”

In my interview with Chris, after suggesting that the protest ban, if fully enacted, will end up backfiring, as climate activists will have to get creative, and to dream up new methods of disrupting the homicidal “business as usual” of 21st century capitalism, I was also concerned to explain how it is not just on protest that the Tory government is crossing a line, redefining protest as a criminal activity.

In policies that are the very worst I have ever experienced in my 60 years in the UK, and which take my rage over anti-protest laws to an even more chilling place, the government — again under Suella Braverman, but with the full support of the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak — is also pushing ahead with plans to criminalize refugees, undermining Britain’s obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention.

Under the Illegal Migration Bill, which is currently making its way through Parliament, almost everyone who seeks asylum in the UK will be locked up — on prison ships, in former barracks, and in whatever other empty buildings can be pressed into service as prisons — where they will be held, for years, as the government then attempts to send them all back to their home countries.

The purpose of the Bill, as the government explains, is to “change the law so that those who arrive in the UK illegally will not be able to stay here and will instead be detained and then promptly removed, either to their home country or a safe third country” — the latter option involving them being exiled to Rwanda — and it is, to be blunt, the single most cruel and inhuman piece of legislation submitted in my lifetime, not just because of its contempt for refugees, fleeing intolerable conditions in their home countries, but because of its effective criminalization of all refugees.

Although allegedly aimed at stopping the perilous Channel crossings undertaken in small boats by asylum seekers, it is fundamentally a blanket ban on refugees, because almost no safe routes exist whereby those seeking asylum can get to the UK, and, in the meantime, the correct route for dealing with asylum seekers — processing their asylum claims — remains deliberately frozen by the government, which is, disgracefully, sitting on a backlog of over 166,000 claims.

Towards the end of the show, Chris and I discussed the current situation regarding the prison at Guantánamo Bay — the progress made in approving for release men previously held indefinitely without charge or trial, but the failure to actually release them, in large part because US law prohibits their repatriation, and third countries must be found that are prepared to offer them new homes.

We also discussed the coordinated monthly global vigils for Guantánamo’s closure that I’ve recently initiated, the establishment of an All-Party Parliamentary Group for the closure of Guantánamo, and nascent efforts to also engage politicians in the EU in efforts to resettle some the men in need of new homes, as well as the latest stage of the Close Guantánamo campaign’s ongoing photo initiative highlighting how long Guantánamo has been open — 7,800 days on May 20.

We ended by speaking about the ongoing plight of Julian Assange, and Chris closed the show by playing The Four Fathers’ anti-Brexit anthem, “I Want My Country Back (From The People Who Wanted Their Country Back),” embedded below.

It was a pleasure to talk to Chris, as always, and I hope you’ll have time to listen to the show, and that you’ll share it if you find it informative.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.