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Gaza Climate Crisis Workers' rights Austerity Far right Labour
Features / 23 March 2020
Are these Britain’s ‘enabling acts’? Concern as state control tightens
As the government races emergency powers through Parliament to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic, STEVEN WALKER looks at Britain’s record of creeping authoritarianism and asks if we should be afraid
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Steven Walker
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Ecuador's President Daniel Noboa, his wife Lavinia Valbonesi
Features / 18 April 2025
Ecuador’s Trumpian Turn
18 April 2025

Ecuador’s election wasn’t free — and its people will pay the price under President Noboa

Features / 17 April 2025
Yes to workers’ rights, no to the far right: join the May Day march
17 April 2025

Join the traditional march from Clerkenwell Green, which will bring together countless international workers’ organisations in a statement against the far right

Features / 17 April 2025
USAid cuts expose meddling in Cuba
17 April 2025

The money tap to anti-Cuban agitators will never be shut off under Trump

Features / 17 April 2025
Violent and harmful: legally tackling online pornography
17 April 2025

Mountains of research show that hardcore material harms children, yet there are still no simple measures in place

Features / 17 April 2025
In Britain’s schools, we are fighting and we are winning
17 April 2025

We face austerity, privatisation, and toxic influence. But we are growing, and cannot be beaten

Features / 16 April 2025
What is Trump really planning with his import tariffs?
16 April 2025

Trump’s economic adviser has exposed the actual strategy: forcing other countries to provide financial support for US hegemony

Features / 16 April 2025
Protester for life
16 April 2025
Activist Angie Zelter has been arrested more than a hundred times. She’s not stopping now, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
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EMERGENCY powers being quickly enacted in response to the Covid-19 pandemic offer a rare glimpse of how quickly the state can trample on civil liberties and the rule of law. Currently, the 2004 Civil Contingencies Act is being invoked. This legislation unilaterally gives any government minister extraordinary power to do anything, anywhere to anyone without explanation. Margaret Thatcher used similar powers to attack strikers during the 1984 miners’ dispute, using the police as her storm troopers.

Tony Blair’s New Labour was described by Thatcher as “my finest creation.” So he proved when the Criminal Justice Act was introduced in 2003, allowing police to bail suspects without even taking them to a police station, with officers enjoying broad discretion as to which suspects should be treated in this manner. The Act also allowed the police to take DNA samples from anyone who was arrested.

The list of arrestable offences was expanded greatly by the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001, Police Reform Act 2002 and Criminal Justice Act 2003. DNA samples can be kept on file indefinitely, even if that person is not charged with anything, and there are currently no procedures for getting the police to surrender or destroy such a sample, raising serious privacy concerns.

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