Thread by @GeorgeMonbiot

It's happening in front of our eyes: the stifling of democracy in the UK, with even more dictator's powers being slipped into the Police Bill. Yet the entire Establishment looks the other way. We must fight this as if our lives depend on it. They might.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

Parliament should be in uproar. The press should be in uproar. Yet you could hear a pin drop. There have been roughly as many stories in the UK press about Nestlé’s Quality Street chocolates as there have been about this massive attack on democratic rights.

Opposition is left to a few peers in the House of Lords, Liberty, alternative news sites and protesters coming together under the #KillTheBill banner. There’s a demonstration in London this afternoon:

https://twitter.com/killthebill_1/status/1465624446690078725

Please also remember: this is an omnibus bill, which contains other extremely repressive measures, including the legislative cleansing of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities. Everything I warned about here is in the bill:
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

Put it all together, alongside the monstrous provisions in the Nationality and Borders Bill, the Elections Bill, and the forthcoming amendments to the Judicial Review and Courts Bill, and it begins to look horribly like history being repeated.

Yet I doubt 1% of people fully understand what we are facing. It's the prospect of state in which a continued semblance of democracy - elections we cannot win, debates in Parliament full of sound and fury, signifying nothing - creates a veil for authoritarianism.

I fear that by the time we wake up, it'll be too late. We'll find ourselves in a political straitjacket: unable to protest; unable, for the disenfranchised 2 million, to vote; unable to mount legal challenges; unable to support each other without facing criminal charges.

I look at all this, and I think "Huxley was right". We don't get beaten into submission, we get seduced into submission. We're distracted by bread and circuses, the tittletattle in the media, the comforting lies about who we are and where we stand. And suddenly we're in a cage.

The one good thing about all this is that it exposes the utter, stinking hypocrisy of the "freedom warriors": @JuliaHB1, @toadmeister, @LozzaFox, @SteveBakerHW, @NadineDorries, @OliverDowden etc, who either say nothing about this huge truncation of our liberties, or cheer it on.

Anyone who believed they were campaigning for our freedoms, rather than just theirs, that they were doing anything other than shutting down opposition to their extremist ideology, should by now be disabused of this notion.

Perhaps the most chilling aspect of this saga is the total silence of the BBC. The greatest reversal of democracy in the UK for at least 70 years (and probably much longer) is happening here and now, and the BBC completely fails to cover it.

I say "for at least 70 years", because my limited knowledge of UK history breaks down beyond that. Can anyone do better? When was the last time a government's legislative proposal sought to take back more powers from the people than the democratic rollback in this massive bill?

About those chocolates. A full search of media coverage over the past fortnight returned 48 results for "Quality Street" and 51 for "Police, Crime, Sentencing". But this covers the whole bill. As far as I can tell, there have been fewer than 10 mentions of the protest amendments.

Also protests in Oxford today, and doubtless other cities. Please link to your local protests in the thread under this tweet.