Boycott Apartheid Bus, London, UK, 1989. Flickr/ R Barraez D'Lucca. Some rights reserved.During the Conservative Party’s annual conference in October 2015, the party announced proposals to stop local councils from supporting “politically motivated boycotts and divestment campaigns”. Specifically, the Tories warned of “growing concern” about councils aiming to disinvest local authority pension funds from companies that produce weapons or are complicit in the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The press release[i] that followed branded those who support such boycotts “hard-left militants”, claiming that they undermine “international security” and hold back measures necessary to “tackle Islamic extremism”.
In substance, the proposals mirror restrictions imposed by Thatcher in the late-eighties, which aimed to constrain the power of councils to boycott South African apartheid. Prior to this, over 100 local authorities joined the movement to boycott South African goods and several of these extended their policy to pension fund investment. Public boycotts were a central factor in ending South African apartheid, just as they were a key tactic for the US Civil Rights movement, and even for those fighting for abolition of British slave trade in the late 1700s.
Today, many humanitarian groups, including UN agencies, have rightly described Israel’s practices in the occupied Palestian territories as “racial segregation and apartheid”. Alongside this, UK-made weapons are consistently being sold to, and used by, many of the world’s worst human rights abusing regimes. Just as Thatcher’s opposition to economic sanctions on South Africa rendered the UK complicit in apartheid for many years, the criminalisation of modern boycott campaigns could hold back social progress, and deepen the UK’s complicity in war and repression around the world.
