Jailed for 51 weeks
for protesting? Britain is becoming a police
state by stealth
By George Monbiot
December 03,
202:
Information Clearing House-- "The
Guardian" -
This is proper police state
stuff. The last-minute amendments crowbarred by the
government into the
police, crime, sentencing and courts bill are a
blatant attempt to stifle protest, of the kind you
might expect in Russia or Egypt. Priti Patel, the
home secretary, shoved
18 extra pages into the bill after it had passed
through the Commons, and after the second reading in
the House of Lords. It looks like a deliberate ploy
to avoid effective parliamentary scrutiny. Yet in
most of the media there’s a resounding silence.
Among the new amendments are
measures that would ban protesters from attaching
themselves to another person, to an object, or to
land. Not only would they make locking on – a
crucial tool of protest the world over – illegal,
but they are so loosely drafted that they could
apply to anyone holding on to anything, on pain of
up to 51 weeks’ imprisonment.
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It would also become a
criminal offence to obstruct in any way major
transport works from being carried out, again with a
maximum sentence of 51 weeks. This looks like an
attempt to end meaningful protest against
road-building and airport expansion. Other
amendments would greatly expand police stop and
search powers. The police would be entitled to stop
and search people or vehicles if they suspect they
might be carrying any article that could be used in
the newly prohibited protests, presumably including
placards, flyers and banners. Other new powers would
grant police the right to stop and search people
without suspicion, if they believe that protest will
occur “in that area”. Anyone who resists being
searched could be imprisoned for – you guessed it –
up to 51 weeks.
Existing stop and search
powers are used disproportionately against Black and
Brown people, who are
six times as likely to be stopped as white
people. The new powers would create an even greater
disincentive for people of colour to protest. Then
the media can continue to berate protest movements
for being overwhelmingly white and unrepresentative.
Perhaps most outrageously, the
amendments contain new powers to ban named people
from protesting. The grounds are extraordinary, in a
nation that claims to be democratic. We can be
banned if we have previously committed
“protest-related offences”. Thanks to the draconian
measures in the rest of the bill – many of which
pre-date these amendments – it will now be
difficult to attend a protest without committing an
offence. Or we can be banned if we have attended or
“contributed to” a protest that was “likely to
result in serious disruption”. Serious disruption,
as the bill stands, could mean almost anything,
including
being noisy. If you post something on social
media that encourages people to turn up, you could
find yourself on the list. Anyone subject to one of
these orders, like a paroled prisoner, might be
required to present themselves to the authorities at
“particular times on particular days”. You can also
be banned from associating with particular people or
“using the internet to facilitate or encourage” a
“protest-related offence”.
These are dictators’ powers.
The country should be in uproar over them, but we
hear barely a squeak. The
Kill the Bill protesters have tried valiantly to
draw our attention to this tyrant’s gambit, and have
been
demonised for their pains. Otherwise, you would
barely know it was happening.
Protest is an essential
corrective to the mistakes of government. Had it not
been for the tactics Patel now seeks to ban, the
pointless and destructive road-building programme
the government began in the early 1990s would have
continued: eventually John Major’s government
conceded it was a mistake, and dropped it. Now
governments are making the greatest mistake in human
history – driving us towards systemic environmental
collapse – and Boris Johnson’s administration is
seeking to ensure that there is nothing we can do to
stop it.
The government knows the new
powers are illegitimate, otherwise it would not have
tried to avoid parliamentary scrutiny. These brutal
amendments sit alongside Johnson’s other attacks on
democracy, such as the proposed requirement for
voter ID, which could deter 2 million potential
electors, most of whom are poor and marginalised;
the planned
curtailment of the Electoral Commission; the
assault on citizens’ rights to
mount legal challenges to government policy; and
the proposed “civil
orders” that could see journalists treated as
spies and banned from meeting certain people and
visiting certain places.
So where is everyone? Why
isn’t this all over the front pages? Why aren’t we
out on the streets in our millions, protesting while
we still can? We use our freedoms or we lose them.
And we are very close to losing them.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
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