Thread by @docrussjackson

Read this by @GeorgeMonbiot. Every word.

This is where we are.

Don't let everything our ancestors fought for be taken away from us by a handful of Libertarian billionaires, press barons, hedge-funders, & damaged privately educated right-wing ideologues.

theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

The Pegasus spyware turns us into informants against ourselves. No one subject to this spying can now plan, however peacefully and democratically, to replace a government without those plans being known in advance and in all likelihood thwarted.

https://twitter.com/docrussjackson/status/1419948909070270468

The new surveillance tools complement a formidable array of modern weapons: Dark ads on social media; thinktanks using dark money to turn outrageous ideas that favour the ruling class into apparent common sense; voter suppression; the stuffing of the courts;

the long march through the institutions, shutting down opposition in the civic sphere; cleverly prosecuted culture wars: these are the ever more sophisticated tools of autocratic power in nominal democracies.

For the past 35 years, our political freedoms have been eroded by a series of draconian acts of parliament, imposed by both Conservative and Labour governments: the Public Order Act 1986, the Trade Union & Labour Relations Act 1992, the Criminal Justice & Public Order Act 1994..

the Terrorism Act 2000, Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003, the Serious Organised Crime & Police Act 2005, Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning & Trade Union Administration Act 2014, the Trade Union Act 2016, the Covert Human Intelligence Sources Act 2021, to name a few.

But none has gone as far as the police, crime, sentencing and courts bill that has now passed unamended through the House of Commons. It grants the police powers to shut down protests on grounds defined so vaguely that they could apply to *any* public expression of dissent.

When & how do we recover these lost political liberties? We have little time in which to move. If we cannot secure a change of govt at the next election, & if the succeeding govt is not prepared to return power to the people, there may not be another chance for a very long time.