It’s time people stand up in defence of democracy, decency and humanity

It’s become a cliché to talk of “climate change becoming real”, or “coming home” but here it is. Here are your flash floods, your landslides and sandbags, your power cuts and transport system collapses.

Here it is. Right now, not in some imagined future, not in some far-off land. It’s your home that’s being flooded now, it’s your river banks overflowing.

For those in the developed north, our dependency on these power systems only becomes revealed when they are taken away, however briefly, as our entire world depends on a grid electricity network, from your cup of coffee to your hot shower to your (now essential) mobile phone charge.

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How precarious we are, and how disempowered, how unfit for the coming change the storms reveal. If the very poorest among us knew already what power insecurity and fuel poverty look like, the rest of us are finding out.

For most, power outages are only a few hours or a few days at most, but they do tend to send us into existential dread akin to when shops close at New Year and people are moved to panic buy as the idea of not being able to consume on an hourly basis sends them into a tailspin and a stockpile.

Consider then being bombed in Gaza, with water and electricity removed not by an act of nature but as an act of state punishment.

As the river banks overflow and Red Warnings flash across Scotland, as people hunker down for safety in extreme conditions, we need our consciousness to overflow too and recognise the new world we are in.

Finding solidarity and humanity in times of crisis is one of the few consolations of such dark times.

To do this, we need urgently to push back against the virulent racism, the casual backing of genocidal acts, the rapid escalation of violence and the instant repression of human rights and democracy we are seeing across the West.

The ability to defend the Palestinian people – as well as express disgust at antisemitism – the need to defend free speech and the ability to speak out against the Israeli state, as well as acts of terrorism, is absolutely critical.

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The attacks on democracy that the Israeli assault has provoked in the UK and elsewhere are chronic, but come on the back of a litany of authoritarian measures the Conservatives have pushed through parliament in the past two years, often aimed at repressing protest against the war on nature which capital is waging.

Michael Gove’s (below) bill banning British public bodies from boycotting Israel is jaw-dropping. The brutally misnamed “Communities Secretary” aims to push through the legislation in the King’s Speech next month.

It is designed to stop councils and other public bodies conducting boycotts, divestment and sanctions campaigns against Israel.

The reason for this latest spate of authoritarianism is that the tactics of boycotts, divestment and sanctions work. They bring economic pressure to bear and highlight and shame the issues at hand. They give one aspect of agency to ordinary people when many of us feel completely helpless.

Gove's hyper-partisan tactics have another motive though, which is to embarrass split and humiliate the Labour Party.

When the bill had its second reading in July, it passed easily with the support of Labour. Starmer’s re-positioning on the Israel-Palestine crisis has left him so isolated, so far to the right of mainstream Britain, and now in an untenable situation, he is being outflanked by members of the Conservative Party.

People like the Conservative Crispin Blunt said: “The effect of this bill on community relations will in reality be utterly toxic.

“It is completely irrational to continue with this bill now.”

Another Conservative MP called the decision to press ahead with it “fucking madness”.

But in the febrile world of Westminster – as the Tories stare at the endgame of 13 years of their disgraceful and disastrous misrule – policy decisions with long-term and deep consequences for civil rights are sacrificed on the alter of opportunism and used as ammunition in the ongoing culture wars. Nothing else matters.

Such enforced consensus, such unprecedented repression of any views that need “censored” and shoe-horned into a one-dimensional worldview is grotesque. The limits of the acceptable have narrowed and closed.

Last week, the Social Democratic co-leader in Germany, Saskia Esken called off a meeting with the American senator Bernie Sanders – who himself lost many members of his family in the Holocaust – because his views are considered too “extreme”.

Sir Gerald Kaufman, whose 2009 speech to the House of Commons aired again on timelines this week would be unthinkable in today’s landscape. The harsh reality is that his denunciation of the Israeli state by this Jewish MP would get him expelled from the Labour Party today and cancelled across British society.

SHADOW-BANNING on platforms such as Instagram are reported as people who speak out against atrocities are censored by tech giants.

The Frankfurt Book Fair has been denounced for “shutting down” Palestinian voices.

Palestinian-born novelist Adania Shibli was due to be awarded the 2023 LiBeraturpreis, an annual prize given to women writers from Africa, Asia, Latin America or the Arab world.

The prize has been withdrawn and the event cancelled with the organisers at first claiming that the decision was made as a “joint decision” with the author. It was nothing of the sort.

The action is now being protested by hundreds of writers, but it is testimony to the collapse of standards in the West, which reveres its own cultures of freedom and literary free speech, only to see them tested and broken with little appeal.

The rigour of our much-vaunted “Western freedom” is being exposed and found wanting. Our freedoms are weak.

But the sense of despair isn’t inevitable.

As I write, there is a call for civil disobedience and strikes around the world in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

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People are resigning from the Labour Party in protest and rejecting the repressive legislation being imposed.

We live in a world of violence and the call for peace, for humanity and for justice is a radical if a basic one. In this sense, everything has been reduced to the barest minimum.

This is about decency, humanity and survival. If you’re not up for defending this then we’re done here.

If your home is at risk – if your life is being disrupted and your security is being radically undermined – it is time to rise up against the forces that profit from war and profit from chaos, fear and terror.

Here it is. Right now.