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Labour’s Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has announced plans to give police new powers to restrict protests, claiming it will help “protect communities”.

This is a lie.

In reality, it is a plan to criminalise dissent – an attack on free speech designed to promote government policy and silence anyone who disagrees with it.

What Mahmood has announced

The Home Office says police will be given powers to consider the “cumulative impact” of repeat demonstrations. That means that if a protest has been held several times in one place, police may order organisers to hold it elsewhere, limit its duration, or cap the number of people who can attend.

Mahmood told the BBC this was not a “ban on protests”, but about “restrictions and conditions”.

But those “conditions” would, in practice, allow police to control who can protest, where, and how often – a profound shift in the way protest rights work in the United Kingdom.

The move comes after nearly 500 arrests at demonstrations in London last weekend, mainly of people supporting Palestine Action, a group the government banned earlier this year.

But the arrests are a smokescreen. Many of those detained were pensioners who police led gently away by the hand — hardly violent extremists. The figures look impressive on paper but collapse under scrutiny.

This is about silencing YOU

This plan is not primarily about protecting any community. It is about using fear to justify silencing opposition to government policy.

The “cumulative impact” test will let police declare that an area has seen “too many” protests on an issue and move it out of sight — or cut numbers so tightly that only a few dozen can take part.

That means the public and the media will no longer be able to judge how much support exists for any cause. Large-scale demonstrations are a visible measure of public feeling; limiting numbers deliberately hides that truth.

This is deeply undemocratic. If citizens wish to show their support for a political issue, they must be free to do so – and free to be seen doing so.

Labour and the Tories are united in suppressing you

Labour also risks being seen as little different from the government it replaced.

The previous Conservative administration tried almost the same thing — and lost in court twice.

In May 2024, the High Court ruled that then–Home Secretary Suella Braverman had acted unlawfully by lowering the threshold for police intervention against protests.

The Court of Appeal upheld that ruling in May 2025, describing the measures as a disproportionate interference with free expression and assembly.

Rather than learning from that, Labour is now threatening to re-stage the same circus, inviting both legal challenge and public backlash.

The only difference is that Mahmood plans to introduce her powers through primary legislation — a longer route, but not a safer one, considering Labour’s huge majority in Parliament, giving the government hundreds of nodding dogs who’ll pass it without once considering the consequences.

Liberty director Akiko Hart said:

The police already have immense powers to restrict protests – handing them even more would undermine our rights further while failing to keep people safe from violence like the horrific and heartbreaking anti-Semitic attack in Manchester.

The “Palestine Action” distraction

Mahmood’s announcement was wrapped around the government’s ban on the campaign group Palestine Action, accused of supporting terrorism.

But that proscription has been challenged in the courts, and the outcome has not yet been decided.

So it is entirely wrong to treat Palestine Action as a settled case.

The government is using the controversy — and public emotion after the Manchester synagogue killings — to justify a wider attack on civil liberties.

Defend Our Juries, which has supported the protesters, promised to resist:

It beggars belief that the government has responded to widespread condemnation of its unprecedented attack on the right to protest – from the United Nations, Amnesty International, legal experts and even the former director of public prosecutions – by announcing a further crackdown on free speech and assembly in our country.

The backlash: civil liberty and human rights

Human rights organisations have condemned the plans outright. Amnesty International described them as a “reheat” of the Tory policy already found unlawful, warning that the government is trying to dress up censorship as community protection.

Amnesty International’s UK human rights director Tom Southerden said:

These powers are ludicrous and bear no relation to Saturday’s protests. It looks like a cynical attempt to look tough while ignoring the real issues.

 Shami Chakrabarti, who was Labour’s Shadow Attorney-General when the party was in opposition, went further, warning that such powers will not stay in Labour hands forever. She said:

Street protest that isn’t a bit of a nuisance isn’t usually effective. But any government seeking to further restrict it should think about new powers in Farragist hands.

The warning could not be clearer. Once governments acquire the power to restrict dissent, they never give it up — and future administrations may use it far more aggressively.

Political calculation – and the cost problem

Labour believes it is shoring up its reputation for toughness and protecting vulnerable communities. But in truth, it is once again chasing short-term headlines, this time throwing away democratic credibility to do so.

Mahmood says she is worried about “the state of community relations”, but restricting protests does nothing to address the underlying causes of violence or anti-Semitism. It merely hides anger from view — until it erupts again later.

There are better ways to build safety and integration, but they require investment in community policing, education, and social cohesion programmes.

Labour’s problem is that these things cost money, and the government would rather be seen to “crack down” than to pay up.

Policing and practical problems

Police leaders themselves have said resources are stretched.

Adding new duties to monitor, limit, and enforce protest conditions will worsen that strain.

Every officer assigned to manage peaceful demonstrators is an officer not tackling real violence or protecting those genuinely at risk.

Sadly, that is exactly the argument that was used in an attempt to persuade organisers to cancel pro-Palestine demonstrations over last weekend. The organisers naturally said their peaceful protests did not need a huge police presence so officers would be better deployed elsewhere.

And now we know the response: confrontation. When peaceful protest is restricted, frustration spills into anger, and anger into resistance.

The government is manufacturing the very disorder it claims to prevent.

“Balancing rights”? It means removing them

Ministers like to say they are “balancing the right to protest” against “the right to feel safe”.

But there is no balance when one right cancels out another.

Freedom of speech and assembly cannot exist conditionally. Either people are free to express themselves in public, or they are not.

Once police can decide when a protest has been repeated “too often”, there is no limit to how far such powers can spread — against trade unions, climate activists, or any group that challenges the privileged status quo.

Legal and political consequences ahead

The Home Office says it will introduce primary legislation “as soon as possible”. That will mean a Bill in Parliament, where Labour’s large majority makes passage likely — but the courts may still intervene later if human rights laws are breached.

Civil-liberties groups are already preparing to challenge the measure as an unjustified interference with Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

They have won before — twice in the past 18 months — and may win again.

Protecting communities or protecting power?

Labour’s planned “protest powers” are not about keeping anyone safe.

They are about keeping the public silent.

The government is exploiting genuine fears of anti-Semitism and racist violence to advance a policy that will shrink the democratic space for everyone.

The arrests of elderly protesters show how absurd the claim of extremism really is.

The proposal to limit protest numbers shows how cynical the manipulation has become.

And the language of “balance” shows how easily fundamental freedoms are re-defined into privileges to be rationed by the state.

When a government seeks to decide who may speak, how often, and in what numbers, it ceases to serve democracy — and starts to fight it.

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