Priti Patel has stuffed her anti-protest Bill with even MORE dictatorial attacks on liberty
Who knew that Boris Johnson’s Tory government, elected on a landslide because it promised us “sunlit uplands” of freedom, would prove to be the greatest threat to liberty in the history of the United Kingdom?
Well… Vox Political did, obviously, because I wrote about it before the 2019 general election. Perhaps people were deterred from reading it by the constant lies about This Writer being an anti-Semite, or the lies that only the Tory-biased mass media could possibly be able to give you the facts.
At the time, I wrote: “Page 48 of the Conservative Party manifesto… states: “We will update the Human Rights Act and administrative law to ensure that there is a proper balance between the rights of individuals, our vital national security and effective government.” It means: We will remove your right to protest against our dictatorship and if you try to stop us, we will use the police and the armed forces to PUT YOU DOWN.
“If you vote Conservative on December 12, that is what you are demanding.”
And nearly 14 million people, led by the nose by people like Laura Kuenssberg, Andrew Marr and Robert Peston, merrily voted away the hard-won liberties enjoyed by the other 54 million of us as well.
Now we find that, having already introduced dictatorial anti-protest measures in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill last March, Home Secretary Priti Patel has apparently decided, halfway through its progress through Parliament, that it is not harsh enough and has amended it to make it even worse.
And this is a Bill that proposes outlawing protest that makes any noise or disturbs, in any way, a single person (thereby obviating the point of any protest, which is to draw attention to the issue under protest)!
Here’s Nadia Whittome with the headlines:
If you thought the Policing Bill was bad before, that was nothing compared to the latest version.
Priti Patel has quietly added further measures to effectively criminalise protest.
These laws belong in a dictatorship, not a democracy.
Some of the worst new powers 👇🏽 1/5
— Nadia Whittome MP (@NadiaWhittomeMP) November 25, 2021
Most terrifying of all: new Asbo-like orders can be imposed on protesters, even if no crime is committed.
These remove rights to freedom of speech and assembly + can ban you from certain places, seeing certain people, carrying certain items, encouraging protest online. 3/5
— Nadia Whittome MP (@NadiaWhittomeMP) November 25, 2021
This article has more detail 👇🏽 5/5https://t.co/lQ4j1zRGs6
— Nadia Whittome MP (@NadiaWhittomeMP) November 25, 2021
So “stop and search” powers, currently used by police if they have “reasonable grounds for suspecting” someone is carrying certain items or something which could be used to violate certain laws, like burglary or theft – and habitually abused by them to victimise people of colour – are being expanded, rather than restricted.
The Bill proposes that they now be used “whether or not the constable has any grounds for suspecting that the person… is carrying a prohibited object” in order to avoid “serious disruption” or a “public nuisance”. So police will be able to stop and search anybody, for any reason that comes into their heads.
Anyone obstructing a stop and search during a protest risks imprisonment for nearly a year. This is how dictatorships behave.
Two new amendments appear to be intended to stop the Insulate Britain protesters who have been supergluing themselves to roads – but the wording is so loose that it may be used indiscriminately against the general public.
So Amendment 319A creates an offence of “locking on”, or carrying equipment which might facilitate it, targeting anyone who attaches themselves to “a person, to an object or to land”. It could equally be applied to protestors who link arms during a sit-down protest, or even hold hands – or to people walking past a protest, having nothing to do with it, who just happen to be carrying a fixative of any kind. Such a person could also find him- or herself in prison for 51 weeks.
Isn’t it handy for Patel that outlawing the kind of protest carried out by Suffragettes a century ago means she’ll be able to get on and deport all those black people she hates so much, without being stopped by people blocking the road outside detention centres. She knew what she was doing.
And then there’s the new ASBO for people who want to protest against Tory dictatorship:
The most far-reaching and alarming part of the legislation is called an SDPO, or Serious Disruption Prevention Order. It is one of the most egregious assaults on individual freedom we’ve seen in modern legislation.
An SDPO is basically a protest Asbo. It can be imposed on anyone convicted of a “protest-related offence”. This category alone is extremely broad. It potentially applies, under the provisions of the bill itself, to the examples above – possessing superglue near a demonstration, or holding hands during a protest.
even that is not enough. Amendment 342M.2.iii allows it to be imposed on people whose activities “were likely to result in serious disruption”. In other words, you do not even have to have been convicted of a crime. You do not even need to have caused disruption. It’s enough that you might have.
Once the order is imposed, it eradicates your rights to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. Those under an order can be forced to report to the authorities whenever the courts demand it, as often as they demand it. They must “present themselves to a particular person at a particular place at… particular times on particular days”.
They can also be prohibited from being at a certain place, or possessing certain items, or participating in certain activities, or socialising with certain people, for up to two years. They can be blocked from using the internet to “encourage” people to “carry out activities related to a protest”. Someone who used their social media account to promote a demonstration could be found in breach of the order. The SDPOs are a full-scale assault on the individual’s human rights. And they can apply even if they’ve never been convicted of a crime.
So that’s be it for This Writer; I have written in support of many protests in the past, including those attacking Tory government crimes against liberty.
This is really frightening. A big step towards authoritarianism, without meaningful parliamentary consent.
In the UK, now. https://t.co/skDVqAXIi2— George Monbiot (@GeorgeMonbiot) November 25, 2021
And if the people who voted this dictatorship saw reports of protesters being jailed under these proposed new powers, what do you think they’d say?
They would say the protesters – or innocent bystanders – deserved it because their protest was against the law – as though it always had been.
These people never seem to learn from their mistakes.
Imagine their surprise and shock when the Tories take their houses away from them to pay for social care (or name any other recent Tory attack on poor/working class people) and they feel the same law applied to them when they try to oppose it.
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You were of course spot on Mike. This has to be the most frightening piece of legislation proposed since 2010 – and there are lots of contenders. When on earth are people going to wake up to what is happening around them?