🇬🇧 In Britain we speak our minds – even if we’re jailed for it
Once again, protestors across the UK are being arrested en masse for political protest. Their right to do is profoundly British – and must be protected
(This article was originally published in GQ’s ‘What’s so Great about Britain?’ special issue.)
I presume I was asked to write this because I could do the bit of the script where some worthy protester says that we have this wonderful liberal tradition – you know, the Chartists and the suffragettes and civil rights people – some very British onward march of progress where everyone gets treated in an ever nicer way. Well, I am writing this in a prison cell after getting a five-year sentence for doing a 20-minute talk on Zoom, asking people to engage in peaceful civil disobedience, because it just so happens that the country is going to hell unless there is a massive reduction in carbon emissions – all that. This is the longest sentence ever given to someone doing (or even talking about) nonviolent action, so you will forgive me for not thinking that Britain is that great on progress.
What is actually great about Britain is that there have always been enough people around who believe that 2+2=4, and not 5, regardless of what happens if you say so. What George Orwell went on about. We have a feeling for genius – meaning people can get to say what they think, and don’t care if our rulers get a bit enthusiastic and bang us up.
For example, the British Institute and Faculty of Actuaries recently did a climate report. They have worked out that 4 billion people might die from malnutrition and other unimaginably bad things at 3 degrees Celsius of warming, which is coming around about the time our teenagers hit 40. If it’s true, then it’s true. We don’t, at least most of us don’t, do the whole ideology routine of saying what the political parties want us to say, whether on the left or the right.
We’re fine with keeping calm, but we’re not OK with carrying on.
Given that I have just said something very upsetting, maybe I should say another good thing about Britain. It is that, on a good day, we can accept reality, band together, and get on with it. The war and all that. We don’t know if we’re still up to it, but I am willing to bet that we are. Once it sinks in what a total shitshow our elites and their corporate friends have created for us, we know what to do. The rich will have to pay up and dig up their lawns to grow spuds. And we will all have to pitch in and make the best of it, like we have had to do a good few times in our history. We are not going to get self-pitying and blaming.
So when I get out of prison, I’m not going to get all bitter. I’m not going to do the whole violence thing of running around with a mask on, throwing things. No, I’m a democrat. I believe in the basic decency of ordinary British people. I will go round the country and help communities to come together, get organised, put up their own candidates in elections – and get rid of those idiots who tell us to keep calm and carry on. We’re fine with keeping calm, but we’re not OK with carrying on. The best thing about this country is we’re a pretty boring, conservative lot most of the time, but every century or so we rise up and give the ruling class a good going over. Just to remind them we’re not serfs and we don’t take kindly to the idea of 4 billion people dying so that rich people’s quarterly returns can look rosy.
There you are, I’m calling “a spade a spade”, as my mother used to put it. If what is written here doesn’t get past the editor, the sky most definitely will not fall in – not yet anyway. I say what I want, and what I want to say is what is true. Because that’s the sort of person I am. It’s a British thing.
Roger was released from jail on licence shortly before GQ went to press — read more here.
Adam Curtis
This article is a shortened account of the arguments presented in Roger’s new book, “Grasping the Enormity of the Moment”, on the responsibilities of the new British political party..
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