George Monbiot: Here’s what you need to know about Starmer’s illiberal protest curbs: they would have killed the Labour party at birth
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/13/keir-starmer-protest-labour-rights-uk
The rights we enjoy in the UK, and the movement the PM purports to lead, were built on protest. Those rights are in dire peril
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The Labour party arose from a long wave of protests by workers against capital, calling for workers’ rights and for sweeping democratic reforms. These protests and their organisers came to be known as the labour movement. Its early actions included the radical war in Scotland, the Merthyr and Newport risings in south Wales, the Swing riots in England and the General Strike of 1842. No such protests would have meant no such movement. No such movement would have meant no such party.
Yet somehow, the party that arose from protest has formed, in terms of our rights to free expression and democratic challenge, the most illiberal government the UK has suffered since the second word war. This Labour government would have banned the labour movement.
Over 40 years, starting with the Public Order Act 1986, our rights to assemble and challenge power have been severely curtailed. That act was followed by the Trade Union Act 1992, the Criminal Justice Act 1994, the Terrorism Act 2000, the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023. Between them, they have largely bound and gagged effective protest.
Any government that fails to contest and reverse this trend, even if it did nothing to add to this bleak legacy, sides with illiberalism. Far from doing so, Starmer’s has already gone further than the Conservatives dared, by classifying a civil disobedience group – Palestine Action – as a terrorist organisation and banning it. It has also (so far with remarkably little resistance) inserted a clause into its crime and policing bill enabling the police to stop demonstrations “in the vicinity of a place of worship”. As our towns and cities are so richly endowed with religious buildings, that means almost any urban area.
But its latest proposal is even worse. The home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has announced that the police should be able to stop protests that have a “cumulative impact”, by recurring in the same place. She will also consider “powers to ban protests outright”.
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Original article at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/13/keir-starmer-protest-labour-rights-uk is recommended.
People on Westminster Bridge as they take part in a Palestine Solidarity Campaign march in central London, October 11, 2025