 Hello, and welcome back to People's Dispatch. Today, we're joined by longtime activist Asad Raman, who is also currently the executive director of War and Want, an organization that fights for an end to poverty and injustice. Asad, like thousands of other people across the UK, has been on the streets amid this moment of complete political chaos and crisis in the country, but specifically against the very regressive bills that the conservatives in parliament are trying to pass. So he's with us today to explain what's happening in this moment and give us a little background on these bills and what they mean for rights for people in the country. Partygate is happening. There is this questioning happening in parliament, lots of controversy with the Tories. But at the same time, there's also this parallel process of trying to pass these regressive bills. Can you reflect a little bit on the political situation right now in the UK? What is this bourgeois debacle? How does this have an impact on the lives of people? Is this related to the bills? Give us a little background on the situation right now. So we have, of course, and are still in the midst of the corona pandemic. We have one of the highest death tolls relative in the world. Over 170,000 people have lost their lives over the last couple of years. We've got a huge cost of living crisis, crisis of poverty and inequality. We have over 4 and 1 half million people relying on food banks in this country. Many people who are in work poverty, so they are working but not making enough to either heat their homes or feed their families. We have seen inflation increasing, energy prices doubling. The economic situation for working people and particularly the most vulnerable in our society is looking very, very bleak. And yet in the midst of this, we have the Prime Minister potentially at risk of having to resign. And this is because of a series of rules that the government brought in at the height of the pandemic, which were restricting the rights of people to meet with other people outside of their households. It was very, very strict, even in fact during May of 2020, the government was reiterating this message that during the summer months, people shouldn't be socializing outside. And yet bit by bit, despite the government insisting that there had been no breaches of these rules by the government itself or from Downing Street, the residents and the political office of the Prime Minister, we have seen leak after leak basically saying there were parties taking place, parties in the garden, parties in the basement of Downing Street, alcohol being served, snacks, et cetera. And a lot of people are rightly angry that they couldn't be with their loved ones when people were losing their lives. They couldn't see their families who were in care homes. They couldn't be, even attend funerals when people lost loved ones in their family because of the quite rigorous and strict rules that were in place. And yet the government seemed to be breaching them. So this idea of one rule for ordinary people and rules that the rich and powerful can just simply break has angered so many people and we're in the midst now of an inquiry and in the next week or so, we will see the results of that inquiry and whether the Prime Minister has been lying to Parliament and to the British public and therefore whether he will survive. So there's a lots of machinations going on inside the Conservative Party and within Parliament as well, whether this will be one lie too many for the Prime Minister. And we have to remember our Prime Minister has a long history of making incendiary remarks, whether those were racist remarks according to black people, picking in his with watermelon smiles, being caught out lying in his previous roles, but like much of the rich always falling upwards from one job to a bigger job and that never being a criteria. And in the midst of all of this, of course, the government seems to be going all out for an assault on fundamental rights of people in this country to be able to organize, to be able to mobilize, to be able to protest. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to believe that that's the panorama we're in right now. And so I was hoping, you could give us a little bit more information on some of the most contentious bills that Parliament is proposing right now. We know the policing bill has been, has brought people onto the streets, the House of Lords struck down certain parts of it. Can you explain a little bit about this bill and explain why is it so, why does it threaten so much people's rights in the UK and what would it mean for progressive movements, for people's movements going forward if it were passed? Yeah, so I mean, actually there's a series of bills that are being going through Parliament at this time. So there is this very controversial police and crimes bill. It's actually full title is the police crime sentencing the courts bill. It's a huge package of measures, very, very draconian. And I'll speak about that in the moment. We have a nationality and borders bill going through Parliament. We've just, we have attempts by the government to limit judicial reviews. So this is the right of people to take the government to court when people feel that their rights have been ignored or overturned through by legislation. We have just voted through, Parliament has just voted through a new voter ID bill, which will make it incumbent on people to show voter IDs before they can vote. We have very, very little instance of voter fraud in the UK, but we have about four and a half million people who don't have a photo ID with them. Overwhelmingly, of course, working class people, black and in the black community. And this is seen as a whole scale attempt at basically gerrymandering who can and who won't be able to vote. We also have a threat to rollback the Human Rights Act which is our piece of legislation which governs and guarantees our rights here in the UK and also the government threatening to make illegal the right to boycott. And of course, this is for two reasons. One, to try and attack the right and it's part of the continuing onslaught on those who advocate for the rights of the Palestinian people. They want to make the call for BDS illegal to take away the right of local authorities and institutions to adopt boycott divestments or sanctions proposals. And of course, it won't be just affecting issues around Palestine. It will also be hugely impactful on movements working around climate and climate justice and trying to take action against the fossil fuel industry. But just talking about the police crime and sentencing and courts bill. It's a fundamentally a huge bill which really their goal is to restrict our right as citizens to be able to hold the government to crown and fundamentally our right to protest. And what's happened is there's been the bill itself the existing bill that was put forward by the government gave the police incredible new powers like basically about when, how, where and even how many people are allowed to protest. I mean, it's and breaching that causing so-called serious annoyance has huge custodial sentence up to 10 years. There is a fundamental attack on the right of gypsy and traveller communities in their way of living. It's making it a basically a criminal offence for you to reside in a vehicle. And if you cause distress and these terms are so vague. So basically allows the right just to say, well, that traveller side is causing me distress. And of course, we know that disproportionate and racist police in disproportionately affects both gypsy, Roma, traveller and of course the black communities massive new expansion of suspicionless stop and search powers. These were powers that the police used to have and enact on a daily basis. So when I was growing up and part of the black movement, they were our fight. They were what sparked the uprisings in 1981 and 84 which was just literally the police stopping a search in every young black person and every person of colour. We are seeing legislation and clauses that will basically allow the police to take our personal data from agencies. So your political affiliations, your religious belief, your health, they will be able to do that. They'll be able to make individual profiles of you. And we know we can already see from what the government has done on terms of the gang matrix. It has this so-called predictive using of data to have predictive policing and overwhelmingly something like 72% of the people on this matrix are black. And yet only 27% of those people involved in gangs and involved in violence are black. So we can already see that this will be disproportionately affecting the black community and will be a massive increase in powers. But what it's also doing is really challenging our right because what it's going to bring in is this idea of nuisance and disturbance. And basically limit our right to even make noise. I mean, it's just incredible. The police will be able to determine if we call serious nuisance to either a organisation, I put that in basically means a company or an individual, an individual even walking down the street may say that that protest is causing me a nuisance. The police will then have powers to be able to shut it down. And even if we as a protester don't know that the police have imposed those conditions on us, we will still be liable. In addition, I mean, literally, it seemed like the Home Secretary had been sitting watching her television screen, looking at protests. And this is of course on the back of the Black Lives Matter and the climate protests that have taken place. And much of this legislation is about preventing those protests from ever taking place. They want to make if you target statues, an imprisonable offence of up to 10 years, because of course they want to do very, very little about the fact that, about what these statues represent, but tackling the so-called heritage of Britain, the history of Britain through statues of slave owners like Edward Colson is going to be made a criminal offence. And this is again, because the juries are finding people not guilty when it comes to court. They wanted to put in new legislation, which would make even the idea of lock-on, i.e. two people joining, they might be even joining their hands, it's so vague, let alone the more sort of tactic of lock-ons that have been used in terms of climate movement, that to be imprisonable. I mean, it's literally lock, stock and barrel. There will be a blanket ban around protests around parliament. So no longer will we be able to protest the home of so-called democracy. So it is probably the most draconian attack on our right to protest. It will affect everybody from workers and trade unions having the right to pick it, to climate, to anti-racist. And of course, the history, as we know of all of our countries, and particularly here in the UK, is no right to never being given to us. We've snatched them from the powerful through protest, through organising. This would make it illegal for the anti-racist movement, for the lesbian and gay movement. Climate movement would have made it illegal for the suffragettes, for trade unionists. I mean, literally every single movement that's ever changed, anything within our history would be liable to, would fall foul of these pieces of legislation. So it's a very, very draconian piece of legislation. And it sits alongside this other piece of legislation, which is called the Nationality and Borders Bill, which is part of the ongoing war on so-called migrants and refugees. And we, again, see this happening all across Europe. This narrative of walls and fences of Western countries wanted to basically roll back from their legal and international obligations of the Refugee Act. They want to talk about pushing back boats in the channel. They wanted to make it a criminal offence and this may have made it a criminal offence if you assist people in coming to the UK. So this is not just about so-called people smuggles. It might be a refugee who's steering the boat from France to the UK would be liable to that. They wanted to make it that those people, border officers who may commit a crime, including that leads to the loss of life if somebody would have impunity if they were doing that to protect our borders. So this is a whole narrative. But alongside it, the UK government also wants to put in a new clause which would strip, allow the government to strip our citizenship without even telling us. And we saw this beginning in the war on terror and where we've seen the UK government basically saying, those people with either dual nationalities or where their parents or grandparents were from another country. Even if you were born in this country, you have no relationship, then the UK is able to strip your citizenship. And as we know, that's a fundamental power that if you allow the state to have that power to strip away your citizenship and push you into another country, it needs literally draconian. And as we know with all of these things, once they're imposed, they never repeal, they just become more and more pernicious. The state grants more and more power. And as we know, we're literally crossing the Rubicon in terms of even the pretense about liberal democracy and liberal rights. And I think many of us recognize that this is going to get much, much worse as these multiple crises happen around the world, as our own economic system is unable, as the bankrupt system that we have is unable to realize the needs of people and we will see more and more protests. They already want to be able to clamp down on that. I mean, it's hard to believe that that's that set of, just the specific targeting of every single kind of protest section. I mean, unsurprisingly, there's been a lot of outrage from progressive sections across the board. As you mentioned, this affects not only climate movement, trade union, everyone's been, it seems on the streets to reject this bill rightfully. So can you just finalize by telling us, what are people's movements doing in the UK in response to these bills, and what is the way forward to fight these measures and what do you see as kind of the struggle for the next couple of months? So there has been a very, very powerful campaign against the police bill and increasingly trying to tie the police bill also with the borders and nationality, but with the borders bill as well. And just this last weekend, we had huge protests taking place up and down the country. The House of Lords was voting on some of these amendments and threw a lot of pressure over, I think, recent opinion polls show that over two thirds of people in the UK are concerned about these attack on rights. Over 800,000 people signed a petition that was delivered and that lobbying meant that in the House of Lords, some of these amendments, new amendments that the UK government had introduced were repealed. Now, the problem is, of course, that the government has a very significant majority in the House of Commons. So we'll now come back to the House of Commons. There will be a bit of a ping-pong between our two houses, the unelected House of Lords, which is great irony that the unelected House of Lords is becoming our bastion to defend our rights and the elected House of Commons. Then it will come to vote and whether there will be sufficient votes to take down some of the more egregious element of the bill is yet to be seen. I mean, a lot of, of course, the government's mind and energy is about protecting and the Prime Minister. They've called it Operation Save Big Dog, which means basically the operation to save the Prime Minister. So that means that the government may not have put as the same amount of energy and behind this bill. So we have yet to see what happens when it's tabled against in the House of Commons. It will happen potentially in the coming weeks, as even as early as February. But more importantly, and it's, of course, mobilized a huge amount of people from NGOs, to civil society groups, to movements, to trade unions. The real question has got to be is what happens when most of these laws become into place? And as we know that the parliamentary arithmetic means that we are not going to be able to vote down all of these attacks. There will be a substantial amount of these bills will get through. We may strike down some of the more egregious elements of it, but there's no doubt that there will be quite a lot that attacks still continues to undermine our rights. The next stage will be, how do we as ordinary citizens and the people and movements build our collective power to be able to challenge these laws? Whether that's through the courts, whether that's on the streets and having been involved in a number of campaigns around police bills. And we've seen government's attempt to introduce draconian legislation before. And it's took the power of movements on the streets to really move the dial, to make those laws impossible to implement and make governments change them. And because they feel there's such a massive backlash from these pieces of legislation. So the real challenge, I think, is not just what's going to happen in parliament, but more importantly, what's happening out on the streets and what's happening in our movement building and whether our movements are going to be strong enough, focused enough to ensure that, you know, we protect all parts of our movements when it comes under attack from these draconian legislation. Yes, I mean, the streets continue to be the strongest response to these attacks across the world. And I know that we'll be following at People's Dispatch, all of these developments. I encourage people to check out waronwant.org to follow the amazing work that's being done by Assad and all of his colleagues and, you know, people on the ground, communities that are resisting. Of course, this constitutes not only attack on the rights of the people of the UK, but I think it really, as you mentioned, sets a dangerous precedent of what we're looking towards in the coming period. So I just want to thank you so much, Assad, for talking us through this complicated moment in the UK and we'll surely be following along. And thank you, Zoe, and thank you to People's Dispatchers. I think you rightly report from all around the world. This is not just something that's happening in isolation in the United States or just happening in isolation in the UK. We see the same attacks, whether it's Modi in India against the Indian farmers. We've seen it on the streets, of course, in terms of on Palestine. We've seen repressors legislation in Colombia and Brazil, et cetera. We're seeing a global attack by the elites to roll back our rights and our right as ordinary people to be able to challenge these institutional and embedded powers of injustice. But as we know, people power is the most important power that we have. And so great your work and great for continuing to shine a spotlight and solidarity to you and everybody at People's Dispatch. Thanks so much again, and thanks for joining us.