The EconomistNovember 14th 2020 Britain 392 deniers congregate in Stop New Normal;
Piers Corbyn, its figurehead, is a climate-
change sceptic whose brother Jeremy is the
former Labour leader. The most rapid con-
spiracies abound in Collective Action
Against Bill Gates. And there are adherents
of qanon, a theory that the world is run by a
cabal of Satanist paedophiles, blending at
protests with the other strands.
The demographics of protest have
changed, too. Last year Boris Johnson de-
scribed xractivists as “nose-ringed...crus-
ties” living in “hemp-smelling bivouacs”.
But today’s protest movements have di-
verse followings, from construction work-
ers to civil servants. A protester is just as
likely to resemble Mr Johnson—well-edu-
cated, middle-aged and overweight—as an
anarchist student from central casting.
Regional tendencies shape protest in
different parts of the country. In Cornwall,
rural conservatism has rubbed off on the
area’s revolutionaries. Black Voices Corn-
wall, a group set up after the summer’s blm
protests, has abandoned its progenitor’s
socialism and doesn’t support police de-
funding. Devon and Cornwall’s assistant
chief constable, Jim Colwell, will be on the
assurance board that the organisation is
setting up.
The internet’s role in campaigning has
changed. Online petitions are out of fa-
vour, because politicians pay no attention.
Instead people huddle in densely populat-
ed chat channels on Telegram, an instant-
messaging platform, which is used for or-
ganising real-life protest. Patriotic Alterna-
tive, a nationalist group with around
15,000 members, now mostly works off-
line. “Forming ‘in real life’ communities is
much better than operating only online,”
says Laura Towler, its deputy leader. “The
relationships you form are more authentic
and long lasting.”
Digital communication encourages
proliferation. When a messaging group
gets too big to manage, it spawns new
groups. xrKettering was first part of xr
Northampton, but numbers swelled and it
seceded. That process of localisation en-
sures that there are battalions ready to re-
spond to a local incident, says Paul Mason,
a writer who tracks protest movements.
“It’s not like they have to assemble the net-
work from scratch; it’s already there.”
Despite the lockdown, the pandemic
has accelerated these trends. Michelle Mc-
Donald, a StandUpxorganiser in Brighton,
says that it motivated her to find out the
disturbing truths behind the new world or-
der. “We’re waking up to all the darkness
that’s going on... I feel like I’m living under
a mix of communism and the Taliban.”
The provincial protesters have not yet
changed the world. xr’s target of making
Britain carbon neutral by 2030 has had no
more uptake than blm’s call to defund the
police. Yet both have, arguably, shifted the
waypeoplethinkabouttheclimateand
about Britain’s culpability in the slave
trade. The anti-lockdown protests may,
similarly,havecontributedtothefinding
ofa recentresearchstudy,thata quarterof
Britonsthinkcovid-19wasmanufactured
ina Wuhanlaboratoryandaneighththink
it isa plottovaccinatehumanity.
Whetherornottheseprotestschange
policy,theychangepeople’slives.Those
involvednowbelong to vastsocialnet-
works,formedby,andrelianton,protest.
Forsome,thatispartoftheappeal.“Ifeel
quiteonmyownwithmyneighbourslo-
cally,whodon’tseetheagendaforwhatit
is,”saysDominicGraville,a Stroudprotes-
terwhoseactingworkdriedupduringthe
pandemic.“It’sa waytoformnewbonds
andconnections:we’restrongertogether.”
Thecampaigntorollouta covid-19vaccine
islikelytobindthemtighter. 7I
n september 2016, Theresa May ap-
proved a plan allowing a state-owned
Chinese company to take a minority stake
in a project to build Hinkley Point nuclear
power station, but her government was un-
comfortable with the decision. It carried
out a review of its power to control foreign
investments from a national-security
standpoint, and found it wanting.
On November 11th Boris Johnson’s gov-
ernment introduced legislation stemming
from that review process to Parliament.The bill would require companies to tell
the government about any planned tran-
sactions within 17 areas of the economy, fo-
cused on technology, including categories
as broad as “computing hardware”, “artifi-
cial intelligence” and “data infrastructure”.
The government will also have the power to
unwind any transaction completed within
the last five years if it deems that transac-
tion to be a matter of “national security”.
Chinese investment is the principal
concern. Britain’s new rules look very simi-
lar to America’s Foreign Investment Risk
Review Modernisation Act (firrma),
passed in 2018. Both rely on the application
of the rather loose term, “national securi-
ty”, and have sweeping remits over broad
categories of technologies. Chinese in-
bound investment to the United States has
plunged in the two years since firrmawas
passed. Australia, France and Germany all
have similar laws.
Although Alok Sharma, the business
secretary, says that the new legislation will
ensure that Britain remains attractive to
foreign capital, problems loom. The big-
gest is an open question over the extent to
which the law would give the government
control over any economic activity involv-
ing the flow of data, which underpins most
of the 17 categories targeted.
It is unclear whether deals like Ctrip’s
£1.4bn purchase in 2016 of Skyscanner, a
flight-booking service based in Edinburgh,
would be caught. James Palmer of Herbert
Smith Freehills, a London law firm thinks
that they would. The proposed purchase of
a stake in Nanopore, a genetic-sequencing
company based in Oxford, by Tencent, a
Chinese messaging and gaming app, is now
in question.
If the government insists on reviewing
all foreign transactions involving data
flows, that would discourage firms from
basing themselves in Britain. Why would a
tech startup subject its future, and any po-
tential sale, to the national-security deter-
minations of the British government when
it could just as easily set up shop in freer ju-
risdictions in Ireland or the Netherlands?
The American government has defined na-
tional security so broadly that both a New
York Timesstory on spying and Joe Biden’s
criticisms of immigration policy fall into
it. If Britain were to follow the same path it
would bode ill for foreign investment.
The government has set up an Invest-
ment Security Unit which will be the first
port of call for notifications when the bill
becomes law. Corporate lawyers are in the
business of reducing risk, and so will not-
ify it when there is any doubt. At present,
there is plenty of it. Foreign control of vital
technologies is a serious issue, with genu-
ine national-security risks. But the govern-
ment must be sure that the damage it does
the tech sector in dealing with them does
not outweigh the benefits. 7Britain’s government is increasing its
control over foreign investmentForeign-investment rulesFor your
protection