Keeping the Pressure Up

First off, it’s important to note that the fight is not yet lost. While the Lords are generally deferential to Commons MPs, they still have power to amend the Police Bill. We must demand that they use it.

As noted previously in Tribune, the Kill the Bill protests in the spring were the product of mass mobilisation, particularly in the wake of Sarah Everard’s death and the aggressive policing of the Clapham Common vigil led by Sisters Uncut. This mass mobilisation, along with the work of NGOs like Liberty, has been at the forefront of opposition to the Bill so far, and can continue to play a crucial role in raising awareness and anger over the fact that our most basic democratic rights are at risk of being dissolved. Indeed, there are a number of pressure points linked to the Bill that even a traditionally conservative body such as the Lords cannot be allowed to ignore.

The fact that the Bill appears to violate the UK’s most basic obligations under international law, for example, ought to provide a strong basis for a body like the Lords to object to many of its provisions. At present, the UK is legally required to protect the right to protest, as well as the right to non-discrimination, as a signatory to human rights treaties, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights. The extent to which the Bill infringes these commitments has been brought into focus by former senior police raising concerns: one, former police chief Michael Barton, has said that the Bill will bring Britain dangerously close to rule by ‘paramilitary policing’.

The Lords should also be empowered by the fact that the government has recently been exposed as having misled Parliament regarding the nature of the Bill. On its introduction to Parliament, Priti Patel told MPs that she had ‘worked closely’ with the Police Federation in the Bill’s development. However, freedom of information requests published earlier this month subsequently revealed that the Home Secretary had not in any way worked with the Federation, through either consultation or submissions.

The fact that the government made these kinds of false claims not only supports the view that these powers are completely unjustified—even from the perspective of the police themselves—but that MPs did not vote on the Bill with accurate information. In theory, these are exactly the kinds of abuses the second chamber exists to prevent.

To palliate its worst consequences, the Bill can be changed in a number of simple ways. Three amendments have been developed by Liberty, which would involve removing from the Bill: 1. the changes to the Public Order Act 1986 (i.e. the provisions introducing new powers to restrict protest) and the new criminal offences related to protest; 2. the provisions related to ‘unauthorised encampments’, which most understand as a thinly-veiled attack on Gypsy and Traveller communities, and 3. the provisions creating new stop and search powers. This is far from a radical overhaul of the aggressive policing of protests that already takes place – but it would be a step away from the destination toward which we’re currently travelling.

Not Protesting is Not an Option

These three changes, of course, will not happen on their own – and they will not change the creep towards more authoritarian modes of governance which produced the Bill in the first place. The right to protest is always important, regardless of the government in power, but it’s also true that this particular government and its current legislative agenda leaves us with no choice but to protest loudly and often.

The suite of legislation the government is pushing through Parliament—specifically while society is attempting to recover from a global pandemic—converge in their destructive consequences.  Together, they amount to a major dismantling of mechanisms of government accountability, minority rights, and protections for vulnerable communities.

The Nationality and Borders Bill, for example, creates broad powers to criminalise asylum seekers.  The Elections Bill will implement voter ID, which will shut out a significant proportion of voters, particularly voters from marginalised groups, from elections. The Judicial Review and Courts Bill enables laws which are found to violate human rights to remain in force. The Armed Forces Bill changes the law to limit government accountability for human rights abuses committed by the armed forces overseas. The list goes on, from the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill to the Health and Care Bill.

In light of such comprehensive erosion of basic protections, it’s clear that not protesting is not an option. Losing the right to protest, after all, is not a singular loss: for those in power, taking this right away opens a pathway to take away much more in the months and years that follow. If we assume that the fight is lost already, we play right into their hands.