The Public Order Bill - a potential body blow to the right to protest
In 2009, London hosted the G20. Six months after the financial crash which nearly wiped out the economies of scores of countries, the G20 meeting was always going to be contentious.
With governments around the world taking drastic measures to stop banks imploding, protesters from around the world gathered in London. Most were there to voice their frustrations and call for action to support struggling communities, a small number were out to cause trouble.
I volunteered to attend the protest near the Bank of England to act as a legal observer. On the day of the protest, at the beginning of April 2009, I donned a bright yellow hi-vis jacket and walked into the crowd of demonstrators.
During the following 7 hours or so ( the last 5 of which had me ‘kettled’ inside a police cordon unable to leave) I witnessed first hand the powers the police were able to deploy against protesters. They were extensive. They included filming and arresting protesters, the deployment of plain clothes officers in the crowd, and the containment of all protesters, innocent passers-by and observers to allow checks to be carried out on their identities, prior to their release from the kettle. There was no evidence of a lack of powers to deal with that protest.
Since the G20 protests, Parliament has passed the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014, Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and is now debating the Public Order Bill (POB). All have led to, or will lead to, a further strengthening of police powers. This has not gone unnoticed. Hongkongers in Britain are pressing Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, to scrap measures in her public order bill, drawing parallels with the powers used by the Chinese state in Hong Kong to crush dissent.
Our concerns in the POB, the latest Bill to clamp down on protest, relate to four areas; serious disruption prevention orders (SDPO’s) or ‘protest banning orders’; the expansion of stop and search powers; locking on offences; and new police powers to intervene in protests that have ‘more than minimal’ impact (a lawyer’s feast trying to define that). We lobbied over 200 peers about this illiberal bill. And they responded decisively. Peers defeated the Government. This Bill will now be subject to ping pong (toing and froing between the Lords and the Commons).
The threat to our civil liberties presented by protest banning orders is simple. They will allow the police to place restrictions on anyone who has attended two or more demonstrations in the last 5 years, irrespective of whether they committed an offence.
The expansion of stop and search will affect the civil liberties of communities of colour in particular. They are already disproportionately subject to stop and search. This will only get worse if suspicionless stop and search becomes law.
Locking on powers risk criminalising anyone in possession of glue or a bicycle lock or who links arms.
Finally the new police powers just introduced in the Lords, without any scrutiny in the Commons, create further confusion and legal uncertainty and risk imposing further restrictions on the right to peaceful protest.
Unlock Democracy are not arguing for an unrestricted right to protest. But we are arguing for a limit to police powers to clampdown on peaceful protestors - powers often which the police themselves have not called for or believe will be ineffective.
Our recent history is peppered with examples of advances achieved through activism. These extensions to our human rights have often been vigorously opposed by supporters of the status quo, fearful of their loss of power.
It would be a clash with British traditions if in 2023 the Public Order Bill put a permanent roadblock in the way of future progress.
Tom Brake, Director, Unlock Democracy