Do you remember when Boris Johnson promised us freedom?
He promised that we would take back control...
well yeah he's delivering that freedom,
he's delivering that taking back control,
for the billionaires for the corporations.
But for us a whole series of new protest bills to prevent us
from exercising our freedom from exercising our civil rights
to challenge those corporations and billionaires.
He takes freedom from one group and gives it to another.
Worldwide now protests is being suppressed,
governments which claim to be democracies
are behaving more like dictatorships.
We're seeing this all over the place all over the so-called free world
of these rich nations be it the US be it Australia be it Canada
we are seeing a clamp down on people power on protest.
And it's because actually they're not really democrats
they're Democrats In Name Only DINOS short for dinosaurs.
We tend to forget how hard our ancestors had to fight
for the freedoms that we take for granted
how hard people had to fight just to get the vote
how hard they had to fight for the right to protest
for any of the civil rights which we just accept as are a lot in life.
And in doing so we forget how hard we have to fight
to maintain them and preserve them.
Government's view of democracy is you're allowed to vote once every five years and we then decide
for that entire five years the course of the nation whether it was in the manifesto whether
it's not in the manifesto we presume that you have consented to everything that we're going
to do because we got 43 percent of the vote and you didn't that is the thinnest narrowest most
impoverished vision of democracy you could have for democracy to be a real proposition it has to
be a living thing which operates every day where people make their views known where people try
to change political outcomes on a daily basis and that requires above all else protest you take away
the right to protest you take away the meaning from democracy the government is absolutely
determined to drive through every possible measure it can to ban protests in this country it tried
it first of all with the police bill managed to get quite a lot of extremely draconian new laws
through but the house of lords blocked some of the worst ones so what's it gone and done introduced a
new bill public order bill to drive through the laws which were blocked by the house of lords
going to forbid people from locking on going to massively enhance the police right to stop and
search people it's going to set up injunctions so you basically have a name protester
who's simply not allowed to protest anymore on pain of imprisonment this is proper police
state stuff we're talking about the kind of things that dictatorships do to suppress protest
the kind of things that governments who are afraid of the people do we know that protests work and we
know they work because governments are trying to ban them governments wouldn't bother if they
weren't effective and we see again and again how protests become the leverage the bar that
you insert into the political system to open up political space which wasn't there before
what were you trying to achieve yesterday and did you achieve your objective i'm on
your program talking about the most critical issue facing humanity so i'd call that success and once
people get talking about an issue and often they start talking because of the protest then suddenly
democratic space begins to open up which did not previously exist protest is absolutely essential
for creating the space for political change without protest you do not get substantial change
they say that when we protest we're wreaking havoc we're disrupting people's lives and the
truth is that effective protest is disruptive civil disobedience has always been disruptive
when it has been effective because if people don't notice it's not going to get any traction
at all and we've seen this with the anti-apartheid protest we saw it with the civil rights protests
we saw it with the suffragettes all of which we now look back to and said yes you know they were
completely right to do what they did but at the time they were reviled in exactly the same terms
as protesters today trying to protect life on earth are being reviled and when people look
back to this age if there are any people left to look back if we've actually protected our
life support systems they'll know who was on the side of right and who was on the side of wrong
and they'll see governments like ours as being the villains of the peace and the people who put
their liberty on the line sitting in the street trying to defend our life support systems as the
heroes and i just appeal to people to try to see the bigger picture here if you think a bit of
protest is disruptive what about the collapse of planetary systems which is what we're looking at
at the moment earth systems reaching their tipping points and if they pass those tipping points the
planet effectively becomes uninhabitable that's more than a little inconvenient it's not just
that governments claim to be able to make all the decisions governing our lives for four or five
years without any reference to the people they can even govern beyond the grave by setting things up
so that their world view prevails even when the government has changed the supreme court justices
is a classic example of that you can appoint these people who carry on in office for 20 30 40 years
after your government has fallen and been replaced and who still are implementing the policies
that you like so you donald trump can appoint these justices who are going to do really
horrible things including destroying roe vs wade long after you are out of office it's just such a
gross truncation of democracy it's so obviously wrong and it has to change how do these supreme
court justices there in office for the rest of their lives reflect the will of the people
plainly they do not and what they're doing is imposing on women in the united states
the destruction of a basic right which is the right to reproductive freedom they're imposing
that without any democratic mandate the position of anyone on the left is going to be permanent
disappointment not just disappointment in the tory party or the republican party but often also
in the parties which claim to oppose them the democrats the labour party where we're just
constantly seeing these mealy-mouthed responses to some of the greatest crises that we've ever faced
including the greatest predicament of all which is our environmental crisis where they just will
not stand up for the people they're too beholden to the billionaire press they're too beholden to
big money now one person's freedom is another person's captivity if boris johnson's talking
about the billionaires and the corporations which surprise surprise yeah he is that means making us
less free for those corporations and billionaires to be free from democratic control and oversight
we have to be put back in our boxes we have to have our freedom to protest removed and by
suppressing us and by liberating them particularly the fossil fuel companies boris johnson is helping
to drive us towards environmental catastrophe to reclaim our power we need to reclaim our media
it's no good relying on the billionaire press to express what we the people and the rest of life
and earth requires to get through this century that's why we urgently need alternative media
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