Reply To: Braverman

[Heath]

I’ll give you the topic back with her additions to the proposed public order bill.

“Rather worryingly, the Home Secretary Suella Braverman added a last minute amendment to the bill which will allow her to apply for injunctions against anyone she deems ‘likely’ to carry out protests that could cause ‘serious disruption’ to ‘key national infrastructure’, prevent access to ‘essential’ goods or services, or have a ‘serious adverse effect on public safety’. What this is clearly designed to do is stop protests before they’ve even happened. So much for the Tory mantra of being the party of ‘liberty’.”

“The bill defines illegal protest as acts causing “serious disruption to two or more individuals, or to an organisation”. “Serious disruption” has been taken to include noise, meaning that in effect it can be used to shut down any protest”.

One of the most sinister aspects of the bill are the ‘serious disruption prevention orders’(SDPO), which can be imposed on people who have participated in at least 2 protests within a 5 year period. Crucially, they can be imposed on an individual irrespective of whether or not they have been convicted of an offence and can be served with a two-year order forbidding them from attending further protests.

As George Monbiot writes in the Guardian: “Like prisoners on probation, they may be required to report to “a particular person at a particular place at … particular times on particular days”, “to remain at a particular place for particular periods” and to submit to wearing an electronic tag. They may not associate “with particular persons”, enter “particular areas” or use the internet to encourage other people to protest. If you break these terms, you face up to 51 weeks in prison. So much for “civilised” and “democratic”.