UK police to get new powers to shut down protests
before disruption begins
Plans aimed at preventing tactics such as ‘slow
marching’ are part of Rishi Sunak’s public order crackdown
Rowena
Mason, Aamna Mohdin and Emine Sinmaz
Sun 15 Jan
2023 22.30 GMT
Police are
to be given powers to shut down protests before any disruption begins under
Rishi Sunak’s plans for a public order crackdown, which aim to prevent tactics
such as “slow marching”.
Sparking
outrage from civil liberties campaigners, the government said it would be
laying an amendment to the public order bill to toughen its crackdown on
“guerilla” tactics used mainly by environmental protesters.
It is
intended to deal with protest groups’ changing tactics, such as slowing traffic
to a crawling pace by carrying out walking protests through big cities.
Just Stop
Oil protesters have used walking protests to draw attention to the climate
emergency after the government introduced laws to stop other forms of pop-up
demonstrations.
Sunak said
the proposals would be tabled through an amendment to the public order bill,
which will be debated in the House of Lords this week. The change would broaden
and clarify the legal definition of “serious disruption” and allow police to
consider protests by the same group on different days or in different places as
part of the same wider action.
No 10 said
it would mean that police “will not need to wait for disruption to take place
and can shut protests down before chaos erupts”. The amendment will now be
debated in the House of Lords, where it is likely to face a battle, and its
passage will depend on whether it attracts the support of Labour and
crossbenchers.
Civil
liberty campaigners and protest groups last night said they fear the
government’s overly draconian approach.
Shami
Chakrabarti, the Labour peer and former director of Liberty, who is challenging
some elements of the bill in the House of Lords, said the government’s attempt
to get even more powers was “very troubling”.
“The
definition of what counts as serious disruption is key to this bill because it
is used as a justification for a whole range of new offences, stop and search
powers and banning orders. If you set the bar too low, you are really giving
the police a blank cheque to shut down dissent before it has even happened,”
she said.
Patsy
Stevenson, who was arrested at the vigil on Clapham Common for murdered
Londoner Sarah Everard, said the bill was “outrageous”.
She added:
“I think this bill is going to cause so much damage. This bill is basically
like the government saying: ‘We will do whatever we want, regardless of how the
public feel about it,’ because once you ban protesting, that bans free speech
completely.”
Martha
Spurrier, the director of Liberty, said the new proposals are “an attack on our
rights” that “must be resisted”. She added they “should be seen for what they
are: a desperate attempt to shut down any route for ordinary people to make
their voices heard”.
She said:
“Allowing the police to shut down protests before any disruption has taken
place, simply on the off-chance that it might, sets a dangerous precedent, not
to mention making the job of officers policing protests much more complex.”
Leading
protest groups said the new laws would not deter them. A Just Stop Oil
spokesperson said: “Just Stop Oil supporters will continue; stopping, quitting
is not an option. It doesn’t matter what government does.
“They can
arrest, fine or incarcerate ordinary people for walking down the road or they
can take meaningful steps to protect the people of this country and start by
ending new oil and gas, insulate peoples homes and defend the NHS.”
Sarah
Jones, Labour’s shadow minister for policing, suggested the party thinks the
police already have the necessary tools to deal with disruptive protest.
“Police
have powers to deal with dangerous, disruptive protests and Labour backs them
to use those powers,” she said.
Alistair
Carmichael, the Lib Dem homes affairs spokesperson, described the move as
“shameless” and “part of the Conservative government’s anti-democratic attempts
to silence any opposition to its policies”.
Last year,
the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act placed onerous new restrictions on
protest – granting, among other measures, the ability for the police to ban
demonstrations that they believe will be too noisy.
The public
order bill goes even further in creating new offences of “locking on”, where
protesters attach themselves to things in order to cause disruption. It will
also bring in new serious disruption prevention orders to place restrictions on
individual activists and new stop and search powers for protest.
Announcing
the plans to crack down even further, Sunak said: “The right to protest is a
fundamental principle of our democracy, but this is not absolute. A balance
must be struck between the rights of individuals and the rights of the
hard-working majority to go about their day-to-day business.
“We cannot
have protests conducted by a small minority disrupting the lives of the
ordinary public. It’s not acceptable and we’re going to bring it to an end.
“The police
asked us for more clarity to crack down on these guerrilla tactics, and we have
listened.”
He was
backed by Sir Mark Rowley, the commissioner of the Metropolitan police, who
added: “Increasingly, police are getting drawn into complex legal arguments
about the balance between that right to protest and the rights of others to go
about their daily lives free from serious disruption.
“The lack
of clarity in the legislation and the increasing complexity of the case law is
making this more difficult and more contested.
“It is for
parliament to decide the law, and along with other police chiefs, I made the
case for a clearer legal framework in relation to protest, obstruction and
public nuisance laws. We have not sought any new powers to curtail or constrain
protest, but have asked for legal clarity about where the balance of rights
should be struck.”
But Anna
Birley, co-founder of Reclaim These Streets, said: “Handing new powers over to
the police to decide who’s allowed to protest is incredibly dangerous – the
high court case we won against the Met showed just how ill-equipped they are to
make those judgments.
“We cannot
claim to live in a healthy democracy if our government is curbing our
fundamental human rights and if new powers to crack down on dissent are being
handed over to police forces grappling with institutional racism, misogyny and
homophobia.”
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