Anti-protest proposals put freedom of expression at risk | He objects
The Home Secretary’s plans to allow police to impose conditions on protests based on cumulative disruption are problematic in several ways (Civil Liberty Groups Express Concern over Plan to Give More Anti-Protest Powers, October 5). There were similar proposals They voted against By the House of Lords as a late amendment at the reporting stage to the Public Order Bill in January 2023. The Lords are unlikely to be more welcoming to the plans this time around.
First, the announcement came only a few days after the conclusion of the invitation-only consultation; Speed indicates an already formed mind. Second, part of the justification for expanding powers is the need to deal with protests that intimidate local residents in an area, yet the power to impose conditions on the basis of planned intimidation has been in the Public Order Act since 1986.
There are also a range of other provisions that actually enable police to regulate protests: those based on serious disruption to the local community, those based on significant noise, powers to disperse based on reasonable grounds to believe there will be harassment, alarm or distress, and powers to deal with individuals who incite hatred on grounds of race or religion.
Finally, as with all police discretion, there is a risk of overreaching and restricting the lawful speech of others. One real risk is that one protest group may be disenfranchised by the actions of another group (eg the day before). This calls into question the individual nature of the right and the need for an individual assessment of risks and harms so that restrictions are proportionate.
Professor David Mead, Dr Susan Dixon, and Dr Charmian Vereen Jack Jones
University of East Anglia School of Law
I have thought deeply about Owen Jones’s article (It begins with protests in Palestine. But where will the suppression of democratic freedoms end in Britain?, October 6).
I was arrested on Saturday along with hundreds of others during a “Defend the Jury” event in Trafalgar Square, against genocide and the Palestinian labor ban. It was also the 89th anniversary of my father’s arrest as one of the organizers of the 1936 Cable Street resistance to the rise of fascism in Britain.
Along with the obligatory statement: “I oppose genocide, I support action for Palestine,” she carried an additional sign that read: “This Jew abhors the genocide in Gaza and the attack on the synagogue in Manchester.”
Calling opposition to genocide anti-Semitic is ignorant and sometimes evil. My desire to fight anti-Semitism, which was seared into my soul as a child born three months before the liberation of Auschwitz, leads me to stand against the emerging fascism and genocide unleashed by the right-wing Israeli government.
The same basic morality underlies my horror at Israel’s apartheid regime, the brutal killings of October 7, 2023, and the indiscriminate and repeated massacres of the following two years.
My father would have been horrified by Tommy Robinson’s far-right demonstration on 13 September in Westminster, and even more so by his subsequent invitation to Israel as a heroic defender of the Jews, by a Likud minister. Even the Zionist Board of Deputies of British Jews opposed this.
The vast majority of those who march to oppose genocide or work against it oppose all forms of racism. There is work to be done to replace the government that engages in genocide and suppresses protests, not with an oppressive far-right, but with a progressive movement demanding justice and promoting peace.
Professor Tony Booth
Cambridge