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Then they came for the slow-walkers
We face an avalanche of repressive, anti-democratic legislation designed to subjugate protest. Is an all-out uprising becoming the only solution, asks DAWN EVANS

SO yet another bid to block a repressive anti-democratic law has failed in Parliament, and police are to get even more powers to restrict protests and demonstrations. 

This time it is aimed at marches that are “likely to cause more than minor delays” and is aimed primarily at the so-called slow-walking protests that have been carried out mainly by the Just Stop Oil environmental movement over recent months.

Last week on June 12 Tory MP Kit Malthouse stated in Parliament that the reason it is necessary to bring in this special secondary legislation called a statutory instrument, is because slow-walking on roads is a different category of protest. 

He argued that usually disruption is just an unintended, if inevitable, biproduct of protest, not its primary aim.

Well, I am old enough to have been on several demonstrations and blockades in the 1980s around air and naval bases in Britain where US nukes were housed. 

We lay down in roads leading to such bases, had human chains surrounding miles of them so nothing could get in or out. 

We camped outside of them to the chagrin of locals who displayed hostility towards us using various unpleasant and often illegal tactics to get us to leave, while being totally OK about having nuclear warheads parked on their doorsteps. 

Then there were the environmental demonstrations in the ’90s when “Swampy” and his friends created a network of tunnels underneath the routes of proposed road and runway expansions and stayed down there, evading all police attempts to remove them for days on end, causing massive disruption — deliberately. Political history is clearly not Malthouse’s strong point.

The reality is that this government, the most far-right Tory government to date (with perhaps the exception of Liz Truss’s 49-day regime), knows its days are numbered and so is going flat-out to flood Britain with as many repressive, despotic laws as it can before it totally implodes. 

SNP MP Alison Thewliss’s apt remark to Parliament — that the government is “slow-walking towards fascism” — was if anything an understatement.

This latest piece of protest-stopping legislation is the third to be introduced in the last 12 months. In June 2022 the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act (PCSC Act) came into force — the main features of which strengthened police powers to impose conditions intended to stop “noisy” protests (political chanting etc), while also giving the Home Secretary more powers to make regulations about which type of protests to allow, or not. 

It also strengthened police powers of arrest, which we witnessed the Met make excessive use of during the coronation in May. 

But most interestingly of all, the PCSC Act 2022 amended section 137 of the Highways Act 1980 to increase the maximum penalty for obstruction of the highway, from a fine to up to six months’ imprisonment. 

So the police already had increased extensive powers to stop road-blocking protests before Suella Braverman’s latest foray into punitive regulative expansion last week.

Then in April this year the infamous Public Order Act came into being. This has introduced measures that significantly increase police powers to respond to protests and to restrict the actions of those taking part in them: new and expanded use of stop and search; orders that ban people from participating in protests and control their movement/activity/associations; and new offences that criminalise certain kinds of protests altogether. 

It also introduced the following new criminal offences: locking-on and being equipped for locking-on; causing serious disruption by tunnelling/being present in a tunnel and being equipped for tunnelling; and obstructing major transport works and interfering with key national infrastructure.   

And last week Braverman went further, surpassing her own hitherto notorious anti-democratic tendencies, with this latest piece of pernicious political guile. 

Having failed to get increased police powers specifically to stop protesters from blocking roads by slow-walking included in the Public Order Act in February (it was rejected by the House of Lords), she has now resorted to using a statutory instrument, which prevents MPs from amending the proposals — they can only vote to accept or reject it, so ensuring its smooth passage to the Lords, where again it faced certain voting restrictions. 

Green Party MP Caroline Lucas speaking against the instrument in Parliament called it “anti-rights legislation by executive dictat.”

When on Tuesday last week, the statutory instrument reached the House of Lords, a Green peer tabled a very rare “fatal motion” which could well have been fatal blow for this highly repressive piece of legislation. 

However, shamefully the majority of Labour peers decided not to back the motion, and instead Labour peer Lord Coaker introduced an alternative, much weaker, motion called a “regret motion” which did little more than signal a dislike of the law but nevertheless gave it the go-ahead. 

Sadly, as a result the “fatal motion” was defeated by 154 votes to 64, and the “regret motion” was carried by 177 to 144 votes. And Braverman got her way yet again.

This government may appear to be incompetent, chaotic, unfocused, narcissistic and generally losing the plot, but when it comes to repressing dissent, it is ruthlessly efficient and determined, and we overlook this at our peril because these draconian laws are not only intended to be used against environmental groups, which are probably primary test targets. 

The greater ultimate quarry is without doubt the organised working class, be it in trade unions or in progressive or revolutionary associations; from where the fightback will have to come, because it is becoming increasingly evident that with no parliamentary or effective political opposition anywhere in sight, a popular uprising is rapidly becoming the only option left open to defend people’s democratic freedoms in our increasingly benighted country. 

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