Tag Archives: politics of protest

Policing by consent in question after Clapham Common, police report and government bill on crime and justice

By Andy Boddington | Sun 14th March 2021 - 10:03 am

The scenes on Clapham Common last night as the police broke up the vigil for Sarah Everard were a disgrace and undermine the fundamental principle of policing by consent. Leading Lib Dems have called on the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick to resign. It was not a protest. It was a statement of solidarity with a woman who had been abducted from the streets of London and murdered. It was a declaration that women should be safe on the streets. Lib Dem Voice editor Caron Lindsay told of her personal experiences yesterday.

The UK’s tradition of policing by consent is being replaced by policing by authority. Legislation now in parliament looks set to reinforce authority at the expense of the fundamental right of freedom to protest.

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged #reclaimthestreets and violence against women | 31 Comments

Opinion: Lib Dems and the politics of protest

By Guy Burton | Fri 29th May 2015 - 1:30 pm

The other week I asked whether the Lib Dems were a party of government or a party of protest. Many welcome comments were made, including a good one pointing out that a political party can be both: that to reach government it needs to be a vehicle of protest, to identify what’s wrong so that it can offer change.

As I thought about that point, I read Ben Marguiles’ blog on Liberal/Lib Dem electoral performance in relation to other parties. Whether Lib Dems like it or not, his observations highlight the contingent relationship between the party and the politics of protest.

Marguiles observes that previous analysis shows that when the party system is polarised – i.e. the two main parties diverge from the centre, the Liberals and their successors have done well. This was the case between 1945 and 2010 when Britain had a two-and-a-half party system. But where the political party system as a whole is polarised, the Lib Dems suffer. Marguiles puts this down to the rise of other political parties, like the Greens, SNP and UKIP, which all drew votes away from both the centre and both Labour and the Tories. The result? The Lib Dems saw their share of the vote drop. Marguiles does add a rider to this; that the party’s in government may also have made it vulnerable, but that may be due to insufficient data analysis having been done on that specific topic.