The UK government has announced plans for police to get new powers to restrict “repeat protests”, including banning such protests outright. The home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said that police should be able to consider the “cumulative impact” of protest activity when placing conditions on where and when protests can take place.
The move comes after two people were killed at a Manchester synagogue on October 2. Following the attack, pro-Palestine groups were asked to reconsider planned marches and “respect the grief of British Jews”. The demonstrations nevertheless went ahead. The organisers said that cancelling a peaceful protest would be to “let terror win”.
The home secretary then announced the plans for new powers over the weekend, saying that large and repeated protests left communities “feeling unsafe and intimidated”.
Having researched protest and dissent over many years, I find the the position the government is taking on repeat protests, and the threat it poses to democratic rights, highly concerning.
Sustained campaigns are widely considered necessary for democracies to function. Successful attempts by the public to influence politicians are often the direct result of repeated actions seeking to hold the powerful to account through protest.
In recent research I conducted into environmentalist protest campaigns, “perseverance” was one of the most important factors determining whether a campaign would be successful. Those campaigns that lasted for at least one year, and staged repeated protests throughout their campaign, were highly likely to be successful.
The decision to halt fracking in the UK in 2019 came at the end of an anti-fracking campaign that involved repeated protests over the course of a decade. The controversial drilling method was ended once it became clear that it risked causing earthquakes for nearby residents.
The Reclaim the Power campaign against the UK’s largest opencast coal mine in Ffos-y-fran, south Wales, involved multiple protests over several years. Eventually the Merthyr Tydfil council refused the mine operator’s licence extension. Now that the mine has been closed, its full impact – on local residents’ wellbeing and on the environment – is finally being acknowledged.
There are plenty of similar examples both in the UK and elsewhere. Earlier this year, the government announced it would hold the Battle of Orgreave national inquiry. This followed sustained pressure by the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign that lasted 13 years and involved multiple repeat protests and demonstrations.
In Israel, massive national protests took place from January to October 2023, in opposition to judicial reforms that threatened to weaken the power of the country’s supreme court. While the reforms went ahead, they remained contested, and were subsequently reversed.
History is full of prolonged protest campaigns producing significant democratic outcomes. The national independence movement in India lasted for three decades. The fall of the Berlin Wall was partly due to an ongoing campaign of weekly Monday demonstrations.
The suffragette protest campaign calling for the vote for women in Britain lasted for nearly ten years. The British state repeatedly imprisoned and force fed protesting women before eventually granting them the vote.
The important contribution to democratic life that sustained and repeated protests can have – typically as a direct result of their “cumulative impact” – is not only recognised by academics and civil liberty campaigners.
The current deputy prime minister, David Lammy, made exactly the same point in 2021 when Labour opposed the first attempt to curtail protest by the previous Conservative government. At that time he remembered how the “anti-apartheid movement, of which I was part, marched continuously on Trafalgar Square for black and white people to be treated as equal”.
The (restricted) right to protest
The home secretary has argued that the latest proposals are not a ban on protest, but “about restrictions and conditions”.
Similar language was also used by the previous Conservative government when it introduced a first round of anti-protest legislation in 2022. In defending that legislation, the Conservative government repeatedly promised that it was not banning peaceful protest.
Conservative home office minister Victoria Atkins claimed at the time: “Peaceful protest is absolutely fundamental to a free society. The right to peaceful protest will not be, and will never be, in question by this Government.”
Yet, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 introduced a range of restrictions to prevent noisy or disruptive protests. This has had a concerning impact on the right to protest, and led to some of the most draconian sentences for environmental protest that the UK has ever seen.
The Labour party opposed that earlier anti-protest law. David Lammy (then shadow justice secretary) described how the legislation was “giving the police the power to prohibit the fundamental freedoms of protest that the British public hold dear”.
Since entering office, however, the Labour government has further tightened restrictions on the right to protest. The crime and policing bill currently going through parliament will ban the wearing of face masks during certain protests.
The recent proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation has led to hundreds of arrests of peaceful protesters, and been widely criticised by civil liberties groups. The UN’s high commissioner for human rights described the banning of the organisation as “at odds with the UK’s obligations under international human rights law”.
If “cumulative impact” is now to be grounds for limiting or prohibiting protest, it could mean certain protests are only allowed on a restricted number of occasions. As the evidence suggests, this risks permitting only those protests that have no chance of success. In curtailing or removing the potential for those in power to be held to account through public demonstration, the UK would lose a crucial democratic and human right.
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David J. Bailey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
