Protest groups have condemned the Home Secretary’s announcement of her intention to grant the police more power to put conditions on repeat protests.
After a reassessment of the policing and organising of protests, the Home Secretary intends to grant the police the power to impose conditions on protests based on their cumulative impact.
This comes as 2,000 people have been arrested at protests aimed at overturning the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, including an 89-year-old at the most recent demonstration.
Zarah Sultana, Member of Parliament for Coventry South and a speaker at a national demonstration for Palestine on 11 October, described the new powers granted to the police as frightening.
“This is an unprecedented overreach of the state,” she told the Londoners.
“The Home Secretary is trying to curtail our ability to protest altogether.
“It’s scary and we must resist it.”
The Home Secretary’s changes to police powers will be made through an amendment to sections 12 and 14 of the Public Order Act of 1986, whereby a breach of the police’s conditions will result in either up to six months in jail, an unlimited fine, or both.
Tom Southerden, a human rights director at Amnesty International UK, called the government’s proposal ludicrous and described it as a cynical attempt to look tough.
Meanwhile, Liberty’s director Akiko Hart said: “During times of fear people understandably want to see action, but restricting protest further is likely to fuel tensions by taking away legal and safe ways for people to make their voices heard.”
But Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said that while the right to protest is a fundamental freedom in our country, that freedom must be balanced with the freedom of communities to live their lives without fear.
Mahmood added that large, repeated protests can leave sections of the country, in particular religious communities, feeling intimidated and scared to leave their homes.
She said: “These changes mark an important step in ensuring we protect the right to protest while ensuring all feel safe in this country.”
James Holmes, founder of Fly The Flag UK – a campaign centred around encouraging people to fly the Union Jack – believes it will be easy for protest groups to evade the new restrictions.
He said: “All that will happen is people will move the protest somewhere else.
“It will galvanise people into getting organised better and it will be harder for the police to get there as they’ll be going to different places.
“It will disrupt protest to some extent but the people who attend are pretty determined and this will strengthen the will of the protesters.”
Shabana Mahmood said that repeated large-scale demonstrations in support of the Palestinians in Gaza had caused considerable fear for the Jewish community in the wake of a fatal terror attack on a synagogue in Manchester last week.
Last month, a United Nations commission found that Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip.
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign estimated that over 600,000 people marched in London on 11 October as part of the national demonstration the group organised in support of the Palestinians in Gaza.
Ben Jamal, the director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, said: “The Home Secretary’s comments ignore the fact that on every single one of the marches we’ve held there have been a significant number of Jewish people marching.
“We do not march deliberately to or near synagogues – we will march to places of a particular political purpose like the BBC, the US embassy or the Israeli embassy.”
Jamal said that protests need to be cumulative in order to have an effect, noting that the suffragettes marched for 12 years before they got the first semblance of women’s suffrage.
He said: “If you want the protest to stop, listen to the reasons why people are protesting and address them.
“Protest is going to be disruptive. It’s meant to be disruptive.
“How you treat descent and deal with protest is the cornerstone of whether you are a democratic society. We are definitively on the march towards becoming a deeply authoritarian and potentially fascist state.
“This is one of the most draconian assaults on the fundamental right to protest that we’ve seen and it should be of concern to everybody.”
Following the Home Secretary’s statement, the pressure group Defend Our Juries promised to escalate the demonstrations in support of Palestine Action over a period of 10 days in November.
In an appearance on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, the Home Secretary said: “Just because you have a freedom doesn’t mean you have to use it at every moment of every day.”
Featured image credit: Kisakye Busuulwa
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