The bill seeks to criminalise effective means of protest and will further entrench racial inequalities in our criminal justice system

While so many of us are distracted by the implosion of the Conservative Party as it lurches from crisis to crisis, something else has been happening too, which should concern every single one of us who believe in the right to protest.

The government’s Public Order Bill passed its third reading in the Commons yesterday, in what is one of the most draconian pieces of legislation even by this government’s standards and which leading human rights groups warn aligns the UK’s anti-protest laws with those in Russia and Belarus.

The bill seeks to criminalise effective means of protest and will further entrench racial inequalities in our criminal justice system, as the government tries to stop protests before they’ve even happened.

Among the measures it contains are new offences for “locking on”, disrupting transport and infrastructure, and “Serious Disruption Prevention Orders”.

Rather worryingly, the Home Secretary Suella Braverman added a last minute amendment to the bill which will allow her to apply for injunctions against anyone she deems ‘likely’ to carry out protests that could cause ‘serious disruption’ to ‘key national infrastructure’, prevent access to ‘essential’ goods or services, or have a ‘serious adverse effect on public safety’. What this is clearly designed to do is stop protests before they’ve even happened. So much for the Tory mantra of being the party of ‘liberty’.

The bill defines illegal protest as acts causing “serious disruption to two or more individuals, or to an organisation”. “Serious disruption” has been taken to include noise, meaning that in effect it can be used to shut down any protest.

The new protest-specific stop and search powers contained in the bill will have a discriminatory impact on Black and minority ethnic groups in particular. Protesters can be subjected to a stop and search even if they suspect no wrongdoing.

One of the most sinister aspects of the bill are the ‘serious disruption prevention orders’(SDPO), which can be imposed on people who have participated in at least 2 protests within a 5 year period. Crucially, they can be imposed on an individual irrespective of whether or not they have been convicted of an offence and can be served with a two-year order forbidding them from attending further protests.

As George Monbiot writes in the Guardian: “Like prisoners on probation, they may be required to report to “a particular person at a particular place at … particular times on particular days”, “to remain at a particular place for particular periods” and to submit to wearing an electronic tag. They may not associate “with particular persons”, enter “particular areas” or use the internet to encourage other people to protest. If you break these terms, you face up to 51 weeks in prison. So much for “civilised” and “democratic”.

Given the vague way the Public Order Bill defines ‘protest-related offence’ and ‘protest-related breach’, SDPOs can be applies for an incredibly wide range of offences.

Writing for Mirror Online, Green Party MP Caroline Lucas said the Bill “is a truly staggering attack on our right to protest” and attacked the “terrifying expansion of the stop and search powers”.

She said: “This Bill represents a blatant attack on political community – on the vital networks of people involved in keeping protest movements alive.

“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.”

The government’s latest attack on our right to protest must be resisted at all costs.

Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward

Picture credit: UK Parliament: Creative Commons

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