TORY prime minister Rishi Sunak announced yesterday that the government will be tabling fresh amendments to the Public Order Bill, being debated in the House of Lords this week, to give the police even greater powers to ban demonstrations and crack down on any disruption to ‘public order’.
Sunak said that the proposed amendments would broaden and clarify the legal definition of ‘serious disruption’ and allow the police to take into consideration protests by the same group on different days or in different places as part of the same wider action.
In other words, if any group or organisation had already organised a demonstration deemed by the police to be noisy or disruptive at any time and anywhere in the country then this would be grounds for the police to ban any future action even before it takes place.
This was spelt out by Sunak’s spokesperson who said it would mean the police ‘will not need to wait for disruption to take place and can shut protests down before chaos erupts.’
Shami Chakrabarti, the former director of the rights organisation Liberty, said: ‘The definition of what counts as serious disruption is key to this bill because it is used as justification for a whole range of new offences, stop and search powers, and banning orders.’
Martha Spurrier, the current director of Liberty, said that these amendments are ‘an attack on our rights’ and that they ‘should be seen for what they are: a desperate attempt to shut down any route for ordinary people to make their voices heard.’
These amendments to the Tory Public Order Bill are certainly aimed at giving the police absolute power to ban protests and demonstrations before they occur, but the real target is not environmental activists but the working class and its trade union organisations.
None of the clauses in the bill makes any distinction between the actions of climate change protests and demonstrations or picket lines organised by trade unions and workers fighting against the super-austerity being imposed on them by the bankers and bosses.
The Tory Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, brought in last year, gave the police and courts sweeping powers to ‘tackle non-violent protests that have a significant disruptive effect on the public or on access to Parliament.’
Now, the police and courts are to be given the power to ban them before they even take place, and make any body responsible for organising them and anyone attending open to prosecution, fines and imprisonment.
The police will have the power to ban and attack strikes, picket lines and demonstrations by workers as the Tories prepare to wage a class war on the working class and the unions.
This bill and the Police Act go hand-in-hand with the Tory anti-union laws being pushed through parliament that attack the very right to strike by enforcing ‘minimum service requirements’ on trade unions taking legal strike action.
Workers can be sacked on the spot for not obeying an instruction by the employer to cross a picket line.
The determination of the working class not to submit to having its right to strike and unions destroyed has forced the TUC to call a national ‘protest for the right to strike’ day on Wednesday 1st February.
If this latest amendment to the Police Bill was in force, the Tories would have all the legislation to declare strikes illegal.
One thing is clear – all the protests and demonstrations will not deter a Tory government and a bankrupt British capitalist system that has no way out of its economic crash except to attempt to drive the working class into poverty using the police and state forces to break any strikes.
The working class is the most powerful force in society, and it will not be driven into the ground for the profit of the bosses and bankers, or submit to having a police state imposed on it by a weak Tory government.
Workers will demand that the TUC mobilise the full strength of the working class by calling an immediate general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers’ government and socialism.
This is the only way forward today.
