In a video posted on social media last week, Chris Philp MP, the minister for policing, signed a new law into being. In the clip, he says: “We live in a democracy and there are ways to change the law lawfully.” He then scribbles his signature on a piece of paper and new legislation is made. We at Liberty believe the law he signed was itself created unlawfully.
The new law – the “serious disruption” regulations – controversially changes the rules on how disruptive a protest is allowed to be before the police can act to restrict it. It is the latest in a long line of anti-protest measures introduced by this government. These new regulations give almost unlimited powers to the police to shut down any protest that causes a “more than minor” disturbance, significantly lowering the threshold from the previous, already vague, “serious disruption” wording.
Even before this definition change, the powers were too broad. Earlier this month, the Metropolitan police bragged that it had imposed conditions on 125 “slow marches” in the previous six weeks, making 86 arrests and 49 charges. With the new law in place, restrictive conditions could be imposed much more frequently – for example if a protest has too many people attending or is happening in too prominent a location, or because of its timing. Essentially, any of the things that make a protest effective.
Why is the government pushing this now? It smacks of a cynical move to weaponise media-stoked frustration at climate protesters in order to frame protest as a negotiated gift that needs to meet certain conditions in order to be allowed. Protest is not a gift: it is our right. What is at stake here is losing our right to protest because our protest is too popular, too well-timed, too prominent.
That’s why Liberty has filed legal action against the home secretary, Suella Braverman, for creating these new regulations. Not only because they are bad for us all and undermine our rights, but because she didn’t legally have the power to create them in the first place.
A few months ago, parliament debated what “serious disruption” meant, given that it is such a broad term. The government tried to use the opportunity to lower the threshold for when police can impose conditions on a protest. Parliament rejected this and voted to throw these amendments out.
Normally, this would have been the end of the matter, but Braverman has brought the same rejected ideas back via a “statutory instrument”. This is a way to bring a new law in without having to create a whole new bill, and has been used as a way to circumvent parliament’s original decision.
Under this method, MPs and Lords were unable to change the wording of the regulations or to consider evidence about their potential impact. A cross-party parliamentary group committee recently asked if this is the first time the government has ever sought to make changes to the law in this way.
In short, the home secretary has rammed through new regulation that weakens our rights, and she has done so by circumventing the will of parliament, who already rejected it. She has breached the constitutional principle of the separation of powers, dodged all scrutiny, and in doing so has set a dangerous precedent for lawmaking in this country.
This might be the first time it has used this particular tactic, but it follows a familiar pattern for this government. Over the past few years, MPs have repeatedly tried to make it harder for the public to stand up to power and to challenge them. Two new Acts have passed in the past 18 months that decimate protest rights. Voter ID has been brought in. Anti-strike legislation, which will take essential rights away from workers, is on its way through parliament. And the illegal migration bill is being fast-tracked, including measures that will set back the fight to combat human trafficking and modern slavery.
Even the means by which we are challenging the government – a judicial review – has been something it has tried to reduce access to, because it too often reveals that authorities have done something they shouldn’t have.
This all matters because accountability matters. We must make sure that this power-grab does not go ahead, and that the government is not able to weaken our rights by bypassing our long-established democratic procedures. Quite simply, the home secretary must repeal this law. If she doesn’t, we’ll see her in court.
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Akiko Hart is the interim director of the human rights organisation Liberty
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