“The move – which uses secondary legislation to bring the powers into force – violates the constitutional principle of the separation of powers because the measures have already been rejected by Parliament.”
It seems that the UK government is determined to use just about every trick up its sleeve to outlaw peaceful protest. In February, it lost a vote in the House of Lords on the Public Order Act to broaden the interpretation of “serious disruption” (of other people’s day-to-day activities) in the already draconian Public Order Bill, to mean “anything more than minor”. Undeterred, the Home Secretary (the British equivalent of attorney general) Suella Braverman then tried to reinsert the change via secondary legislation, which has less parliamentary oversight and cannot be amended.
“A Make-or-Break Moment for Parliamentary Democracy”
It was, according to The London Economic, the first time ever that a British government has tried to use secondary legislation to directly overturn the will of Parliament. To try to stymie the move, Green Party Baroness Jenny Jones tabled a “fatal motion” to kill off the passage of the proposed legislation, triggering a vote in the House of Lords on June 13.
“This is a make-or-break moment for parliamentary democracy”, Baroness Jones said. “The Lords defeated the government on this issue and the Minister is now acting like a seventeenth-century monarch by using a decree to reverse that vote. What is the point of Parliament if a Minister can just ignore the outcome of debates and votes by imposing draconian laws on the public?”
A good question. Unfortunately, the fatal motion that Baroness presented in the Lords did not pass. Only 68 members of the house, mainly from the Liberal Democrat Party, voted in favour while 154 voted against. The Labour Party, which has been prevaricating on this issue for months, officially abstained.
“The result,” tweeted Prem Sikka, one of just 10 Labour Peers who rebelled against his party’s whip to vote for the motion, is that the “government has removed our right to protest.” Shortly after the vote, the human rights campaign group Liberty launched legal action against Braverman for unlawfully bringing in by the back door anti-protest legislation despite not having been given the powers to do so by Parliament:
The move – which uses secondary legislation to bring the powers into force – violates the constitutional principle of the separation of powers because the measures have already been rejected by Parliament.
By bringing in these powers, the Government has been accused of breaking the law to give the police ‘almost unlimited’ powers to shut down protests due to the vagueness of the new language.
The Government’s plans to lower the threshold of what constitutes ‘serious disruption’ at a protest were previously voted out of the Public Order Act by Parliament earlier this year (30 January).
Liberty says the Home Secretary has now changed the law entirely in a way that is an overreach of her power – defining ‘serious disruption’ as anything that causes ‘more than minor’ disruption.
The Public Order Bill comes just a year after the government passed the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, which imposed onerous new restrictions on protests and public assemblies. Under previous legislation, UK police forces had to show that a protest may cause “serious public disorder, serious damage to property or serious disruption to the life of the community” before imposing any restrictions. Under the new act, they can place restrictions on any protests that might constitute an existing offence of public nuisance, including imposing starting and finishing times and noise limits.
Now, the Rishi Sunak government is trying to redefine the meaning of “serious disruption” in order to give police forces even freer rein to stamp out protests. The ultimate goal, it seems, is to give police in England and Wales new discretionary powers to nip any protests in the bid before any disruption even begins. By broadening the definition of “serious disruption” to mean “anything more than minor,” the bill will mean (in the government’s own words) that “the police will not need to wait for disruption to take place and can shut protests down before chaos erupts”.
Shami Chakrabarti, the Labour peer and former director of Liberty, described the government’s attempt to get even more powers as “very troubling”:
“The definition of what counts as serious disruption is key to this bill because it is used as a justification for a whole range of new offences, stop and search powers and banning orders. If you set the bar too low, you are really giving the police a blank cheque to shut down dissent before it has even happened.”
In recent testimony to a parliamentary committee, Adam Wagner*, a London barrister who is a member of the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s panel of counsel and author of the book Emergency State, warned that the Public Order Bill will criminalise peaceful protest “in a way that hasn’t been done before” and will result in “a lot more peaceful protesters in prison”:
It treats peaceful protest like knife crime, drug dealing or terrorism. And I don’t mean that metaphorically; I mean it directly. These are serious crime disruption orders, terrorism disruption orders, stopping people from doing that thing in the future. These are the kinds of measures we have used to disrupt terrorism, knife crime, drug dealing and gang violence. I’ve been involved in lots of cases involving those kinds of orders.
I think what the bill will end up doing — if it’s used by the police, and the police will be under pressure to use it in particular instances — the end result will be lots more protesters in criminal courts, in very long, complicated trials that will involve looking at the proportionality of the protest in question… The other thing we will see is a lot more protesters in prison and a lot more peaceful protesters in prison.
Squeezed from Both Sides
The UK, like many of its European peers, has witnessed a rise in political protests and strikes since last Autumn, largely in response to the stagflationary forces unleashed during the virus crisis and exacerbated by European governments’ self-harming sanctions against Russia. While the UK is forecast to sidestep recession this year, inflation remains stubbornly high at 8.7%. It is not just the prices of basic goods and services that have surged; so too has many people’s tax bill — the result of the Boris Johnson government’s decision in 2021, when Sunak was chancellor of exchequer, to freeze tax allowances and thresholds in cash terms at a time of surging inflation.
The resulting fiscal drag will raise significant sums for His Majesty’s Revenues and Customs as the average effective tax rate (total tax paid as a share of total income) rises more quickly over time, notes the Office for Budget Responsibility:
This happens as nominal earnings rise relative to tax thresholds, so that more of taxpayers’ income is taxed, and more of what is taxed falls into higher tax bands… Our latest estimate is that these measures will increase receipts by a combined £29.3 billion a year (1.0 per cent of GDP) in 2027-28… Based on HMRC ready reckoners, this would be equivalent to a 4p increase in the basic rate of income tax.
This is happening at the same time that costs of many basic products and services — particularly food — are surging. As a result, more and more working families, many of them debt-strapped, will fall into poverty. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 14.4 million people were living in poverty in the UK in 2021-2, including 4.2 million children, 8.1 million working-age adults and 2.1 million pensioners. More than half of the people in poverty lived in a family where at least one adult is in work (54%). Unsurprisingly, poverty among private renters has also increased – up from 32% in 2020/21 to 35% in 2021/22.
By early autumn last year, the frustration was boiling over. In October, protests over rising energy bills exploded across the country, drawing large turnouts. In 2022 as a whole the country suffered the highest number of strikes since Margaret Thatcher was prime minister. Among the legions of workers protesting for higher pay to offset the cost-of-living crisis were rail workers, nurses, ambulance drivers, postal delivery staff, bus drivers and civil servants. The government’s response was to propose legislation allowing employers in key industries to sue unions and sack employees if minimum levels are not met. From WSWS:
[The proposed bill] forces a proportion of UK employees to work during a strike, denying them the basic right to withdraw their labour and sabotaging effective industrial action.
Currently targeting the rail, firefighting, health and education sectors and impacting one in five workers, the law could be extended to cover ever wider swathes of the workforce.
A Broad Global Shift Towards Authoritarianism
What is happening in the UK is part of a broad global trend. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic upended an already fragile global economy, inequality and social divisions were already rising fast around the world. The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and the unwillingness of governments to tackle the underlying causes of the crisis — including huge levels of private debt (much of which was shifted onto public ledgers), unfettered speculation in the financial markets and the creation of ever more destructive financial instruments — have fuelled political instability and polarisation. According to the Global Peace Index, demonstrations, strikes, and riots surged by 244% between 2011 and 2019 (see Lambert’s in-depth round-up of this trend, from Oct 2019, here).
The economic havoc and supply chain crises unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the West’s subsequent backfiring sanctions on Russia have made matters even worse. As I reported just under a year ago, bank and insurance CEOs are fretting about the threat of civil unrest as soaring inflation takes its toll on average living standards. According to Srdjan Todorovic, the Head of Crisis Management at Allianz Global Corporate and Specialty’s London unit, civil unrest is now a bigger threat to global businesses than terrorism. Nafeez Ahmed, the special investigations reporter of Byline Times, published an article warning that global banks are privately preparing for “dangerous levels” of imminent civil unrest in Western homelands.
For their part, many governments of ostensibly democratic countries, such as the UK, are responding to this threat by adopting increasingly authoritarian methods while accelerating the roll out of digital identity systems and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) that offer the potential of much more granular surveillance and control of individual citizens’ behaviour and actions.
The number of countries that are moving toward authoritarianism is more than double the number moving toward democracy, according to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, a Sweden-based global non-profit. Last year was the sixth in a row that the trend moved in that direction, the longest uninterrupted run of pro-authoritarian developments since the IIDEA started tracking these developments. These declines affected 46 per cent of the high-performing democracies, including the US, which “still faces problems of political polarisation, institutional dysfunction, and threats to civil liberties,” and 17 countries in Europe.
* It could be argued, as some on the UK left do, that Adam Wagner played a part in facilitating the Boris Johnson government’s crushing victory in the 2019 general election by representing the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) in its case against the Labour Party, which inflicted so much damage on then-Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s electoral prospects.