Police will have ‘near total discretion’ to ban protests, according to leading human rights lawyer Adam Wagner.
‘Secondary legislation’ introduced by the Tories in parliament this week gives the police ‘near total discretion’ over which protests will be banned, along with the absolute power to impose ‘conditions’ on any demonstration or protest.
This would include the right to change the time of any demonstration, the locations and routes of any marches, and strict noise restrictions on any protest the police believe ‘may’ cause ‘more than minor’ disruption.
An article in yesterday’s Guardian newspaper said that this change would significantly lower the threshold for ‘serious disruption’ – which is the current criteria for police to interfere with protests. The current criteria defines this threshold as ‘significant’ or ‘prolonged’ disruption of day-to-day life of the community.
The article quotes Wagner, who said: ‘The threshold would be so low that it could lead to police imposing conditions on protests which would breach the rights of protesters.’ Any protest march, no matter how peaceful or small, would ‘undoubtedly’ be considered serious disruption within the meaning of the proposed changes Wagner said.
These draconian powers being handed to the police were rejected by the House of Lords when they were tabled as an amendment to the recent Public Order Act 2023. Now, the Tories are set on sneaking them back onto the statute book by use of secondary legislation which enables them to bypass the usual scrutiny.
This allowed a 90-minute debate, with no scrutiny, of the new police powers in the House of Commons yesterday before going to the House of Lords today.
In the Lords, Green Party peer Jenny Jones has proposed a ‘Fatal Motion’ to kill this attempt to reinstate the power of the police to ban or restrict any protest or demonstration if any ‘citizen’ claims minor inconvenience.
However, the Labour Party has instructed its members in the Lords to abstain on Jones’s motion, arguing that it would ‘set a precedent’ if the Lords block the legislation and be a danger to ‘parliamentary democracy’.
That’s a kick in the teeth for the TUC union leaders, who have repeatedly urged workers to put their faith in the ability of the Lords to protect them from the vicious union busting laws brought in by the Tories.
For Labour, defence of parliamentary precedent is more important than the democratic right of workers to organise demonstrations and picket lines.
In fact, Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is fully in support of all the anti-strike laws and legislation that gives the officially damned institutionally racist, misogynistic and corrupt police the powers to ban, break up and arrest anyone who dares protest against the government and its policies.
Labour’s refusal to support this motion is because Starmer wants these powers for any future Labour government, or any coalition formed with sections of the disintegrating Tory Party and Lib/Dems.
These are powers that will be used to try to smash the trade unions, and make ineffective any protest by workers against being driven into poverty by a bankrupt capitalist system, by assembling a brutal capitalist state machine to take on the working class in a class war to impose the capitalist crisis on the backs of workers.
The working class is the most powerful force in society – more powerful than the courts or the police and certainly more powerful than a collapsing Tory government or any reactionary right wing coalition government.
This powerful working class will not be driven into the ground to keep the bosses and bankers in profit or submit to having a police state imposed on it by the Tories with the support of a Labour Party leadership that has demonstrated its hatred of strikes and its determination to prove its loyalty to British capitalism.
The TUC must be forced to act by immediately organising the full strength of the working class in a general strike to bring down the Tories, or any coalition that emerges, and go forward to a workers’ government and a socialist planned economy.
Only the WRP and its youth section the Young Socialists fight for this policy – join today, there is no time to lose.
