LORD WALNEY may be the most dangerous politician in Britain that you’ve never heard of.

Who?  His Lordship was (slightly) better known as John Woodcock, Labour MP for Barrow and on the extreme right of that party.

His Labour affiliation ended when he resigned from the party in 2018 while under investigation for sexual harassment allegations, which he denied. His resignation terminated the party probe.

As a Labour MP, he was best known for his strong support for British nuclear weapons and the Saudi assault on Yemen. He did a shift as chair of Labour Friends of Israel — “a great nation rooted in progressive liberal values,” he said.

In 2019 he backed the Tories in the general election and was subsequently ennobled by Boris Johnson in a move few would regard as coincidental and which made him a legislator for life.

Today, Lord Walney is the government’s official adviser on political violence and disruption. It is in that role that he has emerged in the van of the mounting threat to democratic and civil rights.

He has gone into overdrive with the Israeli attack on Gaza, which he fully supports, and the development of a huge mass movement against that genocide and British political complicity in it.

Almost every week Lord Walney proposes a new way of stopping the pro-Palestinian protests.

He has recommended making organisations responsible for the demonstrations pay for their policing, without any suggestion of giving them a say in how they are policed.

He is unbothered by protest thus becoming the preserve of the rich, who have little to protest about.

He has urged a ban on protests outside “democratic” locations, including the House of Commons, MPs’ surgeries and Town Halls.

Lord Walney appears oblivious to the irony that a ban on demonstrations outside democratic venues would leave nowhere to protest at except his own workplace, the House of Lords.

Most recently, he has said that ministers and MPs should be prohibited by their parties from engaging with a range of groups, including the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

The transparent intention of this proposal is to make it impossible for Labour MPs to speak at or even attend events in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Walney would simply prefer the marches to be banned altogether, one may assume.

The reason for this is nothing to do with his mandate to advise on political violence, since there has been none at all.

The only such incidents related to the Gaza crisis occurred when Suella Braverman, in her last act as home secretary, summoned far-right hooligans to London who ended up in a ruck with the police.

No, he is acting solely to regulate democratic life to conform with his own political opinions. He hates Palestine Solidarity because he is a champion of Israel.

He extends his animus to climate change campaigners like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, but is keen to make it clear that disgraced Tory deputy chair Lee Anderson is much less of a menace than George Galloway, and that Tory Islamophobia is a minor issue compared to Labour’s purported anti-semitism crisis under Jeremy Corbyn.

In short, Lord Walney aims to gag progressive and, above all, pro-Palestinian opinion under the pretext of “protecting democracy.”

That he emerged from the womb of New Labour is also a salutary reminder that the threat to democratic rights is a bipartisan project, as no doubt a Starmer government will establish anew.

Democracy actually demands the abolition of the House of Lords. But as a first step, the eviction of Lord Walney from public life is a priority.