XR protesters blocked streets in 2019

• ARTICLES and correspondence in your pages have been focusing on the current trend towards totalitarianism within contemporary society on account of political and economic circumstances.

Although all modern governments exercise a wide range of responsibilities, there remain highly significant differences between the objections and techniques of those states we call democratic and those which are avowedly totalitarian.

Democracy and totalitarianism are systems from polar points on the spectrum of political alternatives. At the same time there is a wide range of governmental forms between the two which do not fit neatly into the category.

In the United Kingdom, as is the case within the broad spectrum of western democracies, the executive administration of the state, a remote organ of government, exercises complete authority over rank and file, a political monopoly concealed beneath a façade of carefully calculated parliamentary institutions. The vast bulk of the population is impotent and incarcerated.

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill now going through parliament will curb the right of protest, with freedom of assembly and speech curtailed as a consequence.

In my old age I am forced to observe as an impotent spectator on the sidelines this slide towards a form of totalitarianism that while not the most pernicious is, nonetheless, a gradual erosion of the liberties we have taken for granted in a liberal democracy, though ever an illusion.

CN KYLE
Hornsey Road, N7