Last week, some 474 people were arrested at a London protest for expressing support for the newly-proscribed Palestine Action; per the Terrorism Act 2000, this can carry a sentence of up to fourteen years in jail. Footage circulating online makes for galling viewing: among those arrested on suspicion of terror offences were retired nurses, a blind gentleman in a wheelchair, and former Guantanamo Bay inmate Moazzam Begg.
What is happening? How did we get here? And most importantly, what is to be done?
The erosion of protest rights
The erosion of the right to protest has not come overnight. The previous Conservative government’s Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 Act gave police sweeping new powers to impose conditions on protests. Any disruption that causes “serious annoyance” is liable to be shut down; it introduced the statutory offence of public nuisance; and the sentence for blocking a highway was increased from a fine to 6 months in prison. This trajectory accelerated with the Public Order Act 2023, which introduced new offences such as “locking on”, and even criminalised being merely equipped to “lock on”. It also handed police the power to stop-and-search anyone at a protest without the need for suspicion of wrongdoing, criminalised ‘interference with key national infrastructure’ (any A or B road) and introduced the Serious Disruption Prevention Order, a civil order that prevents repeat offenders from exercising their right to protest altogether.
A glimmer of hope came in the form of a legal challenge to Suella Braverman’s attempt to unilaterally change the definition of what constitutes ‘serious disruption’. The High Court found this unlawful. But far from reversing course, the current government elected to take up Braverman’s case, though it ultimately lost in the Court of Appeal. It has pressed forward with the Crime and Policing Bill, which criminalises concealing ones’ identity at a protest, and creates an offence to climb on a specified war memorial or monument of national significance. And now, with the proscription of Palestine Action, it has deployed a national security tool directly against a non-violent protest movement.
What can be done?
It is time for the Liberal Democrats to reclaim the mantle of ‘the party of civil liberties’. Across the political spectrum, “tough on crime” rhetoric is in abundant supply. We will never win the race to the bottom on authoritarian posturing. Instead, we should offer a clear alternative rooted in the defence of this country’s proudest-held principles: individual freedoms, civil liberties, and the rule of law. Five things in particular should be pursued.
The first and most urgent reform is to campaign for repealing the sections of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023 surveyed above. We should also campaign to remove overzealous clauses of the Crime and Policing Bill (currently in Committee).
The second is that the Lib Dems should call for the end of the creeping normalisation of mass surveillance. The 2024 manifesto and 2025 Policy Review both call for a ‘halt’ to the use of facial recognition technology by police departments. In the September Conference Baroness Doocey and Lisa Smart MP will call for “strengthening the role of the Office of the Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner (OBSCC) to oversee the impact of emerging technology such as facial recognition and its impact on civil liberties”. This is good, but it does not go far enough. In my view, the policy should be to ban the practice altogether, with only very limited carve-outs for legitimate national security and terror threats, and with the prior approval by a judge.
Third, we should be calling for an independent review of sentencing in protest cases. Roger Hallam received a sentence of 5 years for blocking the Dartford Crossing, the longest ever for a non-violent protest. A defendant can be convicted of attempted murder and receive less. The review should deeply consider the proportionality of these sentences in the context of an over-burdened criminal justice system and a prison system at breaking point, and should reassure the public that sentencing decisions are made consistently and fairly, free from public or political pressure.
Fourthly, we should call for the appointment of a statutory Civil Liberties Commissioner (CLC) in the mould of the Children’s Commissioner or the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation (IRTL). The CLC would have the power to spot-check police departments unannounced; compel the release of training manuals, surveillance technology deployments, and internal documents; produce annual reports on the state of Article 8, 10, and 11 rights; and make recommendations to Parliament to change the law when found lacking. These powers are broadly in line with the existing body of commissioners, with the CLC’s remit to act as an independent watchdog for the full spectrum of civil liberties.
Finally, we must resist the temptation to treat national security and civil liberties as opposing poles. A society that undermines its own freedoms in the name of protecting them is not more secure — it is weaker, less open, and less resilient.
The choice ahead
Protest rights are often a canary in the coal mine for civil liberties more broadly. Protests (and protestors) are easy targets: idealistic wokery clashes with the hard-nosed real world. But a government willing to curtail peaceful assembly will not hesitate to constrain other freedoms when they become inconvenient. Indeed, we are already seeing this at work: intrusive surveillance through facial recognition without oversight; sweeping online content restrictions that catch political expression in their net; and a steady blurring of the line between dissent and disorder.
This is a practical matter as well as a principled one. Our prisons are overcrowded to the point of crisis. The Ministry of Justice has been scrambling for emergency measures to free up space. Meanwhile, the 77,000 strong Crown Court backlog has left thousands of people waiting years for their cases to be heard. We cannot just keep throwing people at a criminal justice system that is already buckling under the strain.
The Liberal Democrats have a responsibility to stand against this drift. Civil liberties, once lost, are rarely regained without a long struggle. The time to defend them is now.
* James Gant is a member of the Liberal Democrats and is training to become a barrister.
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16 Comments
Historically, that’s an interesting one, James. What happened to civil liberties between 1914-18 was one of the factors leading to the decline of the once powerful Liberal Party ……. though not often referred to.
I agree with parts of this article, but not all of it. Yes, defending civil liberties is a good and very liberal thing and we should do that. But I find some of the choices of civil liberties James cites odd. On the one hand, Roger Hallam’s 5 year sentence seems totally excessive, but on the other hand blocking a main road, deliberately preventing other people from getting to work, to hospital appointment, etc, is not a legitimate form of protest in a democracy and it should be illegal (albeit maybe carrying a much lighter sentence).
And there’s nothing wrong with being ‘tough on crime’ – crime ruins countless people’s lives and is arguably the biggest destroyer of basic civil liberties in the UK: How many women for example are scared to do normal things like walk the streets at night because of fear of being assaulted. If we as liberals want to protect people’s freedom then we shouldn’t be shy away from being tough on criminals. And if we’re letting Reform and the Tories make all the running on that issue, that is our failing.
So yes, be a party of civil liberties. But we need to be a lot more thoughtful about how we do that, and not conflate supporting civil liberties with supporting what is actually criminal behaviour.
To echo Simón R, we must support the liberty for people to be able to travel to work, medical appointments, job interviews or funerals, without having people think they can block peoples’ rights to do these things as a way of pressurising the government. I thought Roger Hallam’s sentence was absolutely appropriate.
@Simon R – “but on the other hand blocking a main road, deliberately preventing other people from getting to work, to hospital appointment, etc, is not a legitimate form of protest in a democracy and it should be illegal (albeit maybe carrying a much lighter sentence)”
It already was (and is). Obstruction of the highway is against the Highways Act 1980, which carries a maximum sentence of 51 weeks in prison, or a fine, or both. I suggest that would be more proportionate.
Likewise, Palestine Action have broken various laws against criminal damage, assault etc.
The Government already has all the laws it needs to prosecute violent, damaging or seriously disruptive protests without the various draconian laws introduced (by the Tories) against protesting, or lumping groups in with the likes of Al Qaeda as supposed “terrorists” and then arresting hundreds of peaceful protestors.
If (god forbid) we end up with a Reform Government in 4 years time, they will have all these laws at their disposal. Is anyone really comfortable with that?
If the law only allows protests that are convenient for the general population there is very little purpose in having protest at all. 5 years is an utterly disgusting sentence for a non-violent protest and speaks of nothing so much as increasing governmental control. Sometimes I think we need quite harsh reminders that the Labour party is a controlling and authoritarian organisation that has a very fluid relationship with liberty. I take seriously the points about crime, having been robbed at gun point, but I balance that against hollow and vindictive calls to control young people (incidentally young people who have had their youth clubs stripped away from them by cuts) in places where they may be being annoying or noisy but ultimately harmless. I dont trust this government as far as I can throw it on any concept of civil liberties, and we are the only party that has ever been sort-of consistent on it. We must remain so.
Even though retired I hate my routines to be disturbed, but this happens to me far more from the neglect of public services (eg roadworks) than protestors, so I welcome James Grant’s thoughtful and informed post. I regret the necessity to cause inconvenience in order to get one’s point across but , in our distorted system with its biassed press sometimes that’s the only way to be heard. Think of Bertrand Russel’s anti-nuclear weapons group,, Greenham Common. Labour, as is pointed out, are a top-down authoritarian party and have produced some of the least liberal home secretaries. so it’s up to us to shuot out for civil liberties. That’s what we’re for
The voice of sanity from Peter Wrigley…again! When he says “that’s what we’re for” this echoes the way in which many of us joined the party because of civil liberties issues being so important for it, something which has kept us in it through thick and thin and which sometimes has made us really proud of our party – not least when there was only a handful of MPs in the House of Commons to call out the illiberality of Labour and Conservatives at the same time.
@Nick Baird thanks for your comment – this is exactly the point I was going for. Using terrorism legislation (in the case of PA) or extreme sentences (in the case of Roger Hallam) is unnecessary – the criminal law is already more than equipped to handle these kinds of serious disruption. It’s more about the message that such action sends: these measures are chosen because they dramatise the state’s determination to be seen as “tough.” Successive governments have shown themselves willing to aggressively crack down on protests in ways that are genuinely new, and that concerns me. Interesting too to note that the Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts Bill 2022 upped the sentence for obstruction (s.137 of the Highways Act 1980) from a fine to 51 months.
@Simon, on your point about there being ‘nothing wrong’ with being tough on crime, we are in agreement that punishing and deterring wrongdoing is absolutely essential to a well-functioning liberal democracy. Three things deserve mention though.
First, the problem is that tough on crime rhetoric rarely matches up with the realities of criminal justice policy. More often than not it means ratcheting up strong language while simultaneously starving the system of resources. Part 1 of David Gauke’s Independent Sentencing Review is well worth a read on this [1]. What we end up with is a kind of punitive theatre: harsher sentences, more overcrowding, and yet fewer opportunities for rehabilitation or reintegration. With chronic under-funding (thank you, austerity!), overstretched staff, and no coherent long-term plan, this does little more than shovel more people into a system ill-equipped to deal with them.
Second, when it comes to disruptive protestors like Hallam and PA, it would be fine if they were treated like ‘ordinary’ criminals, but they aren’t. They’re being treated like terrorists. This is where the “competitive toughness” becomes dangerous: courts and politicians trying to sound more than the other severe risk collapsing all meaningful distinctions between different kinds of offending. Consider this, from the judge who wrote Hallam’s sentencing remarks: “the plain fact is that each of you has some time ago crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic” [2]. That’s hardly a fact, that’s an opinion – and a very politically loaded opinion at that. What is the end-goal here? If executive, legislature, and judiciary are all in on this game, who is actually checking the power?
[TBC for length reasons]
[continued from above]
Third, the overriding irony is that Britain is not even effectively tough on crime in any serious way. We’ve likely all seen from last summer that in over 160 neighbourhoods in London, the police failed to solve *any* crimes in three years [3]. Not one. So “toughness” is applied selectively: phone theft is functionally legal, but a disruptive protest is met with the full force of the law and then some. And this most recent frenzy of arrests is only going to make this problem worse: the Met Police only has ~600 custody spaces [4]. If we’re filling them with 450+ pensioners – for whom we deploy virtually the entire Metropolitan Police – we are going to let ordinary victims down.
For those reasons, I’m sceptical about the value of “tough on crime” rhetoric.
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/682d8d995ba51be7c0f45371/independent-sentencing-review-report-part_2.pdf
[2] https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/R-v-Hallam-and-others.pdf at §41
[3] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/met-police-neighbourhood-crime-dispatches-b2580025.html
[4] https://www.met.police.uk/foi-ai/metropolitan-police/disclosure-2023/may-2023/police-stations-closures-cells/
Thanks for the detailed reply James. It’s left me a bit confused though: In your original post, you described ‘tough on crime’ rhetoric as ‘authoritarian posturing’. It’s very hard to interpret that in any way other than that you are opposed in principle to being ‘tough on crime’ (And realistically, that’s how almost any voter is going to interpret that kind of remark). But in your replies to me you seem to be saying that the problem is, Governments allocating insufficient resources etc. to be really tough on crime – which implies you do support it in principle and gives a very different message. So which way do you actually want the LibDems to go? 🙂
@Peter Wrigley: You cite the Greenham Common women, but remember in the end they achieved nothing other than getting some publicity. We kept our nuclear weapons and the movement eventually lost momentum. The thing is, when change happens it’s normally either because people have convinced politicians of their arguments, or because politicians have got scared that too many voters disagree with them and they’ll lose an election if they don’t change. Disruptive protest – where you’re deliberately seeking to disrupt other people’s lives – almost always simply alienates people and hardly ever achieves its goal, so it’s really no loss to any cause if that kind of protest is illegal.
Simon,
Disruptive protest – where you’re deliberately seeking to disrupt other people’s lives – almost always simply alienates people and hardly ever achieves its goal, so it’s really no loss to any cause if that kind of protest is illegal.
Unless, of course, you believe in both the right to protest and the obligation to accept the consequences of unlawfulness if you cross the line between legitimate and criminal protest, something that should be decided by judges, not politicians.
I do think, in addition, that you have rather carefully “reinterpreted” what James said in his original piece and his subsequent replies. He was quite clear, at least to this reader, that “tough on crime” rhetoric is “authoritarian posturing”, not that being genuinely tough on crime was. What he appears to be calling for is a greater degree of consistency in terms of how crimes are dealt with – and I think that it’s fair to say that the attention given to mostly peaceful protesters, compared to, say, drug dealers or muggers, who make people feel unsafe as opposed to inconvenienced, feels disproportionate.
Simon R. I accept that the Greenham Common women did not achieve their aims, and neither, for that matter , did Russell’s “Committee of 100.” But at leat they tried, and influenced public opinion. The lead letter in today’s Guardian from a Mark Nixon argues that , historically “street fighting and property damage (for example) have played [a part] in successful protest in the past.”
Maybe it’s a Liberal cliché, but I can’t resist adding that if we had PR then people would have their views more successfully represented and wouldn’t had to go to all this disruptive trouble.
Agree with Peter Wrigley and Geoff Reid legitimate protest may be inconvinient but far better than right wing mob power used to bully or intimidate others which is growing with alleged democratic politicians from Reform then able to claim our streets are lawless . and the state needs more and more powers to curb our freedoms .
lets not let the silent majority be silenced by the calculating and manipulative hard right .
James Gant has done well to highlight this issue. However his main challenge seems not to have been picked up. The word ‘become’ should give all of us pause. That a liberal Party needs to become the champion of Civil Liberties? If so not acting or being seen like one at the moment. James sets out the actions urgently needed, the first of which is “To campaign for repealing the sections of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023 ….Also ….to campaign to remove overzealous clauses of the Crime and Policing Bill (currently in Committee).” This is a timely reminder. It connects with the recent regrettable decision that Lib Dem MPs would only abstain on the Bill to proscribe Palestine Action. Deeply regrettable on several grounds, not least because of public perceptions at a time when many hundreds of courageous citizens are protesting the proscription, risking arrest and prison. Hard to believe there were no ways in the Commons to record and publicise a Lib Dem objection to Yvette Cooper’s PA proscription Bill, as well as objection to her cynical lumping of PA in the Bill with two neo nazi groups. Thankfully 4 Lib Dem Peers voted for a Green amendment in the Lords which sought to undermine the Cooper Bill, but this has unfortunately passed relatively unnoticed. Gant’s article and the PA proscription saga remind us that Lib Dems have some way to go to be seen as the champions of civil liberties and his case for prioritising this now is compelling.
The right to an opinion, to express it and to protest peacefully is a fundamental part of what it is to be British. This needs to be taught at school, university and be given a statutory basis in law. A proper constitution would leave no doubt about this right.