Last Saturday morning, it felt strange setting out to take part in the republican protest in London while knowing that its organiser had already been arrested. A queasy mixture of mild shock, anxiety and defiance sat in my stomach all the way to Trafalgar Square. Demonstrators in longstanding authoritarian countries must be used to such sensations, but as someone who since the 80s has done most of their protesting in Britain, this sense that peaceful street politics was no longer necessarily tolerated by the authorities was new and unsettling.
When I got to the square, it was reassuring to see that there was still a demonstration, but less so to realise that it was smaller than expected – a few hundred people – and that much of it was squashed into a narrow space between the National Gallery and a huge temporary wall, running almost right across the square, which appeared to have been built that morning specifically to make the protest as invisible as possible. Police ringed the demonstrators, while a constant stream of coronation-goers squeezed past. The usual atmosphere of the square on protest days, as one of Britain’s freest public spaces, was almost completely absent. Instead, the possibility of a crowd crush, more arrests or a confrontation never seemed far away.
The protest also had an unusually muted, tentative quality. Not many people were holding placards. There were chants, but they quickly died away. Many of the demonstrators stood silently. Perhaps just being there was enough for them – or maybe they were scared of seeming “disruptive”. Either way, the protest lacked much of a sense of release: the usual emotional reward for expressing your politics in the street. After an hour or two, some of the demonstrators quietly slipped away.
Is this the future of protest in Britain? The arrests of dozens of republican demonstrators last Saturday have rightly received a lot of attention. But the more subtle and wider consequences of the government’s anti-protest legislation, and of the growing repressiveness of the Home Office and the police, on Britain’s often underestimated culture of public dissent are being discussed much less.
Intimidating official letters, ominous briefings to the media, showy police mobilisations and the cordoning-off of more and more public space are all being used to make protest a perilous – or at least perilous-feeling – fringe activity, rather than an accepted, everyday part of political life. Already, some people are probably being put off from taking part: none of the republicans I know were at Saturday’s demo. A cause supported by between a fifth and a third of the population, according to this year’s polls on republicanism – about the same number as support the Conservatives – ends up as a thin, nervous crowd that most journalists and viewers never see.
The previous status of protest in our politics should not be romanticised. For some Britons, such as striking trade unionists and people from ethnic minorities, the policing of demonstrations has long been threatening and sometimes brutal. But for many people, marches and demonstrations used to have a festive, slightly anarchic aspect – a sense that ordinary restrictions on public behaviour had been temporarily suspended. During the famous London march against the poll tax in 1990, despite the intention of many participants very obviously being to destabilise the Thatcher government, I saw police looking on indulgently as students slapped anti-Maggie stickers all over phone boxes and bus stops.
It’s harder to imagine such behaviour being tolerated now, when wearing a Just Stop Oil T-shirt can be enough to get you arrested. One early warning about the diminishing tolerance for protest was the widespread introduction in the late 90s of “kettling”, the cordoning-off, and effective detention, of large groups of demonstrators by police. The possibility of being held like this for several hours, often into a cold evening, without having committed any offence, made going on demonstrations more of a risk. But if you were kettled, at least you were still visibly participating in protest. Nowadays, dissident Britons may spend the day of their long-planned demo herded behind a hoarding, or in a police station.
Many Conservative politicians and journalists, despite their sensitivity about threats to free speech in other contexts, claim that the new police powers do not diminish the right to protest. I wonder if they will still say that if there is a Labour government. Keir Starmer says he would refine rather than repeal the Public Order Act. The last time Labour returned to power, Tory Britain rallied its defeated forces with a series of huge “countryside marches” in London, called partly to oppose Tony Blair’s plan to ban hunting. It’s not inconceivable that Conservatives who want to demonstrate against the policies of a Prime Minister Starmer – against, say, the building of lots of wind turbines in the Tory shires – will find their ability to do so unexpectedly curtailed.
But the clampdown is much more than a party matter. Britons who want to protest about less obviously political issues, such as where the country’s desperately needed new housing gets built, may also be affected. In Britain, anti-protest legislation officially described as a precaution against extremists usually ends up being applied more widely.
The coronation was probably always going to be an over-policed event, with so much invested in it by so many establishment institutions. Yet the damage done to our supposedly diverse and irreverent political culture by the dawn arrests and the othering of those who did protest will linger. Even if the police and many politicians decide that, this time, officers went too far; and even if some of the anti-protest legislation is eventually repealed – perhaps because interpreting and enforcing it takes up too much police time – it could be years before going on a demo feels relatively risk-free again. That may act as a deterrent, or as a provocation.
Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist
