Mere months ago, the Government suffered one of its worst parliamentary defeats in recent years when some of the most draconian measures in its anti-protest Policing Act were roundly rejected. Parliamentarians, civil society and the public came together to ensure that hard-line measures to crack down on protest were thrown out of the Act for good.
But now, with the ink barely dry on that piece of legislation, the Government is attempting to push through those very measures again in a new Public Order Bill.
This new Bill is a truly staggering attack on our right to protest. It contains new banning orders, gives the police new protest-specific stop and search powers, and creates a whole host of new offences that will have a chilling effect on anyone standing up for a cause they believe in. So let me run you through it.
Perhaps the most Orwellian measure contained in this Bill is the introduction of so-called ‘Serious Disruption Prevention Orders.’ These truly sinister banning orders would ban a person from attending a protest for up to two years, simply for participating in protests in the past.
Not only this – but they can subject those affected to 24/7 GPS monitoring, allowing unprecedented surveillance of ordinary people and their communities simply for disagreeing with the Government.
People do not need to have been convicted of a crime to be subject to an order. They just need to have dared to exercise the right to protest: to have attended rallies against Brexit; marched against our country going to war; or held their children’s hands as they went on climate strike.
Even the police – that’s right, the very people who would be charged with carrying them out – know that these orders are both unethical and unworkable. The Police and Fire Services inspections, when consulted about similar plans, said that they ‘would neither be compatible with human rights legislation nor create an effective deterrent’. And yet the Government is determined to force them through.
The Bill also contains a terrifying expansion of the stop and search powers, and massively increases the ways in which a person risks being fined or even imprisoned simply for attending a protest. From linking arms to locking your bike – simple, everyday acts fall within the remit of these new powers. And the appalling racial disproportionality of stop and search means that people from ethnic minorities, already at the sharp end of existing police powers, face even greater risk of being dragged into the criminal justice system.
It's not only protesters themselves who risk being criminalised by this Bill, either. The new offence of ‘locking on’ means anyone merely observing, or providing support to, a direct action, could face criminal action – so a passer-by giving water to someone who has chained themselves to a building could now fall foul of the law. This Bill represents a blatant attack on political community – on the vital networks of people involved in keeping protest movements alive.
In my lifetime I have been on more demonstrations than I can count. The protesters I have stood alongside include young children and grandmothers, seasoned activists and first-timers, nurses, doctors, teachers, and care workers. But this dangerous Bill could see any one of us banned from standing up for what we believe in, monitored by the police, and criminalised for taking part in a protest.
These are desperate measures from a Government determined to avoid accountability at any cost – and the cost to the rest of us is huge. Let’s be clear: our democracy is at stake. Anyone who values our right to freedom of expression and our ability to speak truth to power must do everything they can to oppose this legislation. Protest is not a gift from the state, it is our fundamental right – and we must not let it go quietly.
