ACTIVISTS and trade unionists must resist the cops inside our heads if we are ever to defeat the Tories’ attacks on our hard-won democratic rights, a meeting at The World Transformed (TWT) festival heard today.

Holly Turner, a nurse and activist with the NHS Workers Say No campaign, made the call on a panel focused on how the left should push back against the government’s anti-strike and anti-protest laws.

“A lot of the anti-trade union laws that we have been internalised,” she told the audience at the left-wing festival running alongside the Labour Party conference in Liverpool.

She said that the Royal College of Nursing worried about only allowing up to six people on the picket at the time, and that people from other unions who visited the picket in solidarity were reportedly told: “No, you’re not getting in a photo. You’re standing over there on the side of the road.”

“We’re policing ourselves,” she said, “which is a ridiculous thing to be doing.

“What I’d rather hear the unions say is: ‘We’re going to have as many people as we want on our picket and if the police want to make an issue of that, that’s up to them.’”

Co-panelist, War on Want director Asad Rehman agreed.

“There were people who said what the suffragettes did was not respectable,” he said.

“Winning rights isn’t simply about the state accepting that we have rights.

“It’s our duty as civil society to ensure that we hold the state accountable for our rights.”