As families across our nations worry about how to make the next rent or mortgage payment and meet mounting food and energy bills, the soap opera at the top the Tory Party continues. Too many political journalists comment as if they were sports pundits or drama critics, analysing the strength of blows landed by or upon Johnson, Sunak and the rest. Blows dealt to the rights and freedoms of British people via ever-more authoritarian laws barely make the news.

If there is one thing that many voters rightly resent, it is a sense that their leaders think there is one law for them and another for everyone else. This isn’t just a common-sense hostility to hypocrisy when multi-millionaires ask the poorest in society to tighten their belts. It also reflects a vital constitutional principle of equality before the law.

Partying during lockdowns was bad enough. Now there’s a new drive to clamp down yet further on peaceful dissent. The current Public Order Bill contains provisions previously removed by the Lords from what is now the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act. It is modelled on anti-terror law and designed to turn ordinary people against each other; to distract from the economic disaster made in Downing Street. These same Ministers cheer the historic suffragettes and modern-day Hong Kong democracy campaigners, while championing powers that Amnesty International and JUSTICE describe as going further than Russia or Belarus.

New offences of ‘locking on’ and being equipped to lock on criminalise attaching yourself or an object to another person, an object, or land. You are guilty if you intend to cause serious disruption to more than one person or an organisation, or are reckless about possible disruption. Disruption need not be caused; your action just needs to be ‘capable’ of causing it. There are also stop and search powers—including powers that don’t require reasonable suspicion—to back this up.

Such broad and vague powers could allow the police—despite all the continuing concerns about racism, misogyny, corruption, and discipline—to stop and search people without any suspicion of the individual concerned. Officers finding bicycle chains, medical equipment, or cameras in rucksacks could accuse peaceful civilians of carrying these objects with the intention that they would be used ‘in the course of or in connection with’ locking on.

Thought crimes and suspicionless stop and search powers are always dangerous to democracy. They make innocent people extremely vulnerable to abuses of police power. I have mostly seen them used in the UK in the context of violent crime and anti-terror legislation, and even then, they have been ripe for abuse on racialised and politicised lines. How much greater the risk when a government that bangs on about free speech and cancel culture chooses to criminalise and people with whom it simply disagrees?

New offences protecting major infrastructure works and operations may seem less controversial until you look at the detail of what is and is not included. Transport and even oil and gas infrastructure are sadly predictable, but why the inclusion of ‘newspaper printing infrastructure’ in an age of digital media? This is hardly a subtle partisanship in favour of Murdoch and chums over Thunberg and allies. Politicians are necessarily partisan, but the criminal law is supposed to be even-handed. Under this new measure, the printing and distribution infrastructure of press barons is protected from disruptive protest over the BBC or even the NHS.

Then there are protest banning orders to prevent people previously convicted of protest-related offences from protesting in the future. Once more there is a chilling similarity to the control orders and terrorism prevention and investigation measures (TPIMS) that restricted the liberty of those suspected but never convicted of terrorism in the past. Now those convicted of peaceful dissent may be barred from being in certain places, or with certain people, or from encouraging others to carry out ‘activities related to a protest’ over the internet.

So under this odious legislation, if it is allowed to pass, peaceful protests perceived as disruptive by wealthy commercial interests, the Home Secretary of the day, and any police chief who wants to keep their job will be treated like terrorism.

Protest is by definition a nuisance to those who don’t agree with the particular cause. But nuisance is not the same as violence, and other forms of direct and serious harm. That is why it should generally be a matter for the civil law, and if absolutely necessary, justify powers to have people moved on to end the disruption.

If an energy company starts digging or even fracking in my neighbourhood, that will be a nuisance—a serious disruption to the life of my community and arguably of much more lasting harm. If they continue to push prices and their profits and bonuses up, many innocent people will die. Yet ministers propose to bless that kind of activity while simultaneously criminalising the peaceful dissenters who try to make themselves heard against the wealth and power of those who profit, while others sit hungry and cold in darkness. Whichever side of fossil fuel, fuel poverty, or other burning arguments you are on, free speech is the ultimate two-way street. To ignore this principle is to side with the mighty over the vulnerable and wage a permanent culture, class, or even civil war.

Recent Home Secretaries have been the cartoonist’s friend with their hateful tub-thumping rhetoric and preposterous promises. Still the government’s use of home affairs policy and legislation as a tool of coercive control will not end with the exits of Patel and Braverman. Mild-mannered substitutes may reap fewer personal headlines, but the Public Order Bill will arm the police and government with more repressive powers. This will cause many prison terms for non-violent protest in the cause of the poor, the planet, peace, and free speech itself.