People take part in a Palestine Solidarity Campaign rally outside the Houses of Parliament, London, as MPs debate calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, February 21, 2024
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Braverman is continuing her bid to ban peace marches even though the demand for a Gaza ceasefire commands majority support in Britain and indeed right across the world, where Britain and the US stood shamefully isolated this month as the only countries not to support a ceasefire resolution at the UN security council.
Lee Anderson, in the guise of moderating Braverman’s claim (“I don’t actually believe that the Islamists have got control of our country”) actually took it a step further (“they’ve got control of [Sadiq] Khan… He’s actually given our capital city away to his mates.”)
Leftwingers will be incredulous at the implication that peace demonstrators are Khan’s “mates” — the London mayor is no socialist and enthusiastically joined in the character assassination of Jeremy Corbyn when he led Labour.
But Anderson’s subtext is clear: Palestinians are Muslims (not all are, of course, but nuance is not Anderson’s strong point), people marching for justice for Palestinians must therefore be controlled by Muslims, the big marches in London haven’t been banned, and this must be because its mayor is a Muslim.
This is incendiary stuff. So rattled are British authorities that they have repeatedly misrepresented Palestine solidarity demos: the attempt to ban the huge Armistice Day demo rested on a baseless assertion it posed a threat to the Cenotaph (which the fascist thugs riled up by Braverman’s propaganda actually did).
Police during an Extinction Rebellion demonstration blocking Vauxhall Bridge in central London, April 10, 2022
Right to protest comes under fresh attack as Tories unveil new measures and fines
THE right to protest came under fresh attack today as the Tory government unveiled new measures directed at demonstrators.
Rattled by the repeated huge solidarity marches with Palestine in recent months, ministers presented amendments to criminal justice legislation designed to make protesting harder.
Among the acts now to be criminalised are wearing masks at a demonstration, climbing on war memorials or the use of flares or fireworks.
Protesters engaging in any of these activities now risk fines of up to £1,000.
Nor will they any longer be able to use the right to protest as a defence if they cause serious disruption, a change driven by the refusal of a jury to convict anti-racists charged with hauling down the statute of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol.
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Leading human rights lawyer and peer Shami Chakrabarti said: … “This is more culture war nonsense from the government while children go hungry and the planet burns.”
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Suella Braverman, who lost office trying to ban a Gaza ceasefire protest on Armistice Day, has demanded further measures.
These would include giving ministers, rather than the police, the power to ban marches they do not approve of; prohibit the use of particular slogans or phrases and proscribe groups deemed “extremist” even if they are entirely peaceful.
Demonstrators take part in a ‘Kill The Bill’ protest against The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, on College Green, Westminster, January 17, 2022
RIGHTS advocates have launched a campaign to overturn Tory legislation attacking the right to protest.
Liberty, formerly the National Council for Civil Liberties has condemned the government’s Police, Crime, Sentencing & Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023 as part of a clear pattern in which the right to strike and the right to vote had also been attacked.
It has launched an online petition and is gathering signatures for a letter to Home Secretary James Cleverly calling on him to scrap the legislation.
Liberty director Akiko Hart said: “No matter where we live, our backgrounds, or who we vote for, we all want people in power to listen to our concerns and work to build a brighter future for us and our loved ones.
“But this government is clamping down on the ways we speak up on important issues. Most recently it has given the police dangerously broad powers to crack down on protests and arrest demonstrators.”
Ms Hart said Britain’s leaders are “criminalising protesters to hide from their own failings.”
“This is part of a clear pattern of shutting down the ways we can all hold them accountable for their actions,” she said.
“They have also created laws that stop workers from striking and block countless people from voting.”
Meanwhile, police officers criticised for searching campaigners’ coach and ‘undermining their right to protest’
A huge protest against the Tories in Manchester, October 1, 2023 Photo: Neil Terry / Neil Terry Photography
THOUSANDS of people marched through the streets of Manchester today telling delegates to the Tory Party conference there that they are not welcome.
Headed by the banner of the Manchester People’s Assembly, which organised the march with the national People’s Assembly, the protesters represented trade unions and a huge diversity of campaign groups expressing their anger at the destruction wrought across society by the Tories.
Disabled people, peace activists and dozens more groups marched noisily through the city centre.
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Protesters from all across the country took coaches to attend the march.
One coach transporting protesters from London was stopped by the police, who signalled the bus to follow them to Knutsford in Cheshire where it was searched by around 30 officers.
The protesters were late as a result. Activists said it undermined their right to protest and was a waste of police time and money.
Lorraine Douglas, from the Communist Party, said: “The sergeant came on and said they’d received intelligence that there were people on the bus set on doing criminal damage and they were going to search the bus for equipment that could cause criminal damage.”
The police went on to read a section of the Public Order Act.
“They refused to say what the intelligence was, and they got us all off the bus and searched the bus, found one flare and it looked like they had some magic markers or pens,” Ms Douglas said.
The right to protest is a distinctive feature of democratic, liberal societies. Yet the way in which many leading British politicians are currently talking about Just Stop Oil might make you think otherwise. Far from engaging with the issues at stake in these protests, politicians appear to be encouraging the wider public to ignore them or even oppose them.
Having seen their initial protests largely ignored, Just Stop Oil members have been making more disruptive (but non-violent) protests lately. They’ve been present at high-profile sports events like Wimbledon and the World Snooker Championships.
Policing minister Chris Philp dismissed the temporary delays caused to such events as “completely unacceptable”“. He argued that “the vast majority of the public are appalled by this very, very small, very selfish minority” and called on those not protesting to intervene.
With the UK government announcing new licences for oil and gas drilling in the North Sea, it’s clear that collective action that allows people to demonstrate their disagreement in peaceful ways is needed. In apparent contradiction to warnings about the climate crisis, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s commitment to the green agenda is wavering.
Meanwhile, Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour party, has cancelled a plan to fund the transition from fossil fuels to green industries from the first day of government, should he win power. His response to criticism on this change was to turn on protesters.
He said: “The likes of Just Stop Oil want us to simply turn off the taps in the North Sea, creating the same chaos for working people that they do on our roads. It’s contemptible.”
Keir Starmer has deployed some divisive language about climate protestors of late.
Diverting the conversation
Referring to people defending the environment as a “minority” that acts against other citizens polarises society and marginalises protesters’ claims. It depicts people’s demands as somehow niche rather than amounting to a highly pressing threat to the majority.
One of the features of language is that when we talk, we only focus on one or, at most, a few aspects of a particular object or event. A lot will inevitably remain unsaid.
Still, when what remains unsaid is one of the most obvious elements of any given topic, what is missing becomes as informative as what was said. In this case, the focus on tactics instead of the substance of the protest betrays an unwillingness to engage with the climate crisis.
The government has put forward the home secretary Suella Braverman rather than the environment secretary to respond to the Just Stop Oil protests (itself a signal that they are seen as a public order issue more than anything else).
Braverman has referred to people protesting for environmental reasons as causing “havoc and misery”. Environment secretary Thérèse Coffey, meanwhile, doesn’t appear to have made any public statements regarding the matter.
To say that people are protesting and not mentioning the reason for the protest leaves the story incomplete. That’s something that rarely happens when UK politicians talk about protests in other countries.
But when talking about protests held in the UK, the debate looms over the disruption caused, as if the core message were secondary or even dispensable. It is only when the core message is ignored that politicians can refer to those acting in defence of human and nonhuman lives as “selfish”.
In the absence of meaningful political engagement, conversations about Just Stop Oil protests in the UK have strayed mainly into tactics and disruption at expense of their core message. However, politicians in democratic nations have a responsibility towards the electorate to engage properly with what citizens demand, not just with the way they make their claims heard.
