The situation is serious, regarding the draconian legislation brought in on the pretext of fighting the pandemic, your basic rights are being eradicated. One individual can now decide who should be sent to a mental health institution, thereby stripped of all their rights, and forced take medication, at the whim of one individual, possible not fully trained in these matters. Difficult individuals, awkward people as seen by the state and its minions, prisoners that are a nuisance to the system, individuals that question authority, all can fall foul of this new legislation. We must ask ourselves, is this authoritarian step necessary to control this pandemic, or is it just another weapon in the state's toolkit for total control of the population, should the public get really angry as this mess drags on, and the aftermath is rampant unemployment, endemic poverty and a society that is knee deep in deprivation. This was nodded through by a bunch of wealthy political ballerinas that are well protected from the devastating ravishes of the aftermath that will follow on from this collapse of the existing system, that is sure to follow this pandemic.
Prison-state UK comes into law: coronavirus.
The Coronavirus Act 2020 in the UK is now in force for the
next two years. It is a totalitarian coup by a right-wing government
which has already shown it’s utter contempt for the judiciary, for
parliament and for the people. Many of the provisions of this Act are
already experienced by those on the margins of society, by dissidents,
those in the prison and criminal justice system, the poor, and ethnic
groups consistently disposed of by the police and the system, through
poverty, imprisonment and death. Now the grand experiment is whether the
kind of control infrastructure and total suspension of rights already
administered to particular groups can be rolled out to the entire
population.
The most manipulable provisions come, as ever, under the Mental
Health sections. Always a good catch-all since dissidence, illegality
and criticism of the existent is already considered by the system to be
tantamount to mental illness, people can now be hospitalised and
medicated on the say-so of a single approved clinician. This power of
one also decides the fate of those awaiting trial, convicted persons (we
wonder whether that refers to anyone with a criminal record regardless
of their current status) and those currently serving prison time: the
Act allows a single person to sign off on a transfer from a prison to
mental hospital. To the cynical, it might imply that unruly prison
populations or undesirables (either currently or historically) are now
living under the threat of being summarily detained or if already
detained, then transferred and sedated with a no-questions-asked
decision by a single clinician.
Under coronavirus, the criteria that elects someone to the status of a
person approved to implement these laws is considerably relaxed. Under
the emergency laws, a person applying to volunteer as a health worker or
social worker can be approved by a single senior administrator who
believes the person is “fit, proper and suitably experienced”. Moreover,
this administrator can approve a group of people who have organised
themselves as such, presumably concerned ‘citizens groups’, without
assessing each individual within that group. While the public health
sections appear not to allow forced medical treatment, although it does
allow for forced screening and assessment including the taking by force
of biological samples from your body, the mental health provisions do allow people to be medicated by force, again to be decided by a single officer.
Dissidents and undesirables will also fall foul of the sections
dealing with Potentially Infectious Persons (PIP), again this
designation to be the whim of a single official. As they roll out their
totalitarian nightmare under the guise of coronavirus, all civil
liberties are suspended. They do not expect this strange compliance to
last. It cannot last. In the UK, there is barely any social welfare for
people being rolled out and a huge swathe of the population, already
broken by a decade of Tory rule, are hungry now. There have already been
riots.
There are infectious diseases and there are infectious ideas: it is
the latter that they are most keen to contain. For either, just read
‘Potentially Infectious Person’! The new Act allows for arrest and
detention, new search and entry laws, and retention of an potentially
infectious person’s things. Detention has a time limit but can be
extended… and extended… and extended with no legal rights. Restrictions
on a potentially infectious person’s movement, place of residence,
activities and social contact, previously reserved for those leaving
prison but still on licence, could now be rolled out for anyone with
potentially infectious ideas under the guise of public health concerns.
We are witnessing the building of a new wall where borders can be and
are closed at a moment’s notice. Countries are being sealed off
overnight. This is how the horror happens. One day you enjoy “free
movement”, the next it is punishable by the law, if not death. The same
status that refugees and undocumented people fleeing wars and shot at
the borders have, blamed and vilified for the problems of the capitalist
society.
The new laws surrounding the registration of death and disposal of
bodies are some of the darkest pieces of this legislation. In essence,
there is no longer a need for an inquest, no investigation into
suspicious deaths, there is no safeguard surrounding the recording of a
cause of death which can simply be written by a temporarily registered
medical practitioner (not the doctor attending the death), no medical
certificate is required for cremation or burial and the disposal of
remains and the place of disposal is taken out of the hands of relatives
and given to national or local authorities regardless of the wishes of
the deceased or relatives. How easy it would be to disappear us under
such conditions.
Totalitarianism is born under the pretence of necessity, of
protection, of security. This moment is no different. Whatever the truth
of the deadliness of this virus, the world created by this new
legislation, the willingness of the people to accept it and the
potential abuses written into it, are sobering. It reveals if not the
plan then the opportunism of the totalitarian project which underlies
the techno-industrial civilisation: immediate suspension of elections
and referendums, no right of assembly or protest (which lockdown
conditions have already illegalised), the implementation of the virtual
and cashless surveillance society, the army on the streets as a matter
of course, a police state whereby every move is monitored, absolute and
unmitigated powers of detention (which must be experienced in
isolation) and subjection of the individual to medical intervention,
complete and punitive control of the movement, activity and association
of individuals and groups, and a dismantling of safeguards over causes
of death, recourse to an inquest and disposal of bodies. As scared and
confused as people are by this pandemic, we must remember that the
measures introduced by dictatorships to control populations often seem
reasonable or even laudable at the time and are born of an irresistible
logic that is embraced by the good citizen, whether that is the logic of
communism, nationalism, protectionism or the logic of infection.
We must also remember that throughout history people fought back
against the false logic of their social and political reality. They also
risked being detained, medicated, tortured, and killed. The states of
emergency being rolled out by our national governments are in danger of
becoming the new normal if we do not fight back. We are always facing
death, both physical and metaphysical. This is an extraordinary moment
in which we may find we have more comrades than we know as the system’s
collapse reveals not only people’s crippling dependence on it, but also
the forms of our potential liberation as critical masses experience new
ways of being, new priorities and desires, that will not be met by a
post-pandemic return to business as usual and also will not tolerate
this state of emergency for long. As ever, our task is to find our
leverage in this situation, to find our opportunities to engage
according to our own anarchic principles, to organise against and
despite of the tightening of control, to expose it for what it is and to
break out of our isolation and the state of fear that is the real
virus.
Visit ann arky's home at
https://radicalglasgow.me.uk
