The British government has reinstated restrictions on protests to a controversial policing bill amid criticisms from both opposition and backbench Conservative lawmakers.
The Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts Bill contains a wide-ranging raft of measures aimed at overhauling the criminal justice system.
These include plans to give police in England and Wales more powers to impose conditions on non-violent protests judged to be too noisy and thereby causing “intimidation or harassment” or “serious unease, alarm, or distress” to the public.
In the early hours of March 1, the House of Commons, in which the government enjoys an 80-seat majority, voted to reinstate the protest curbs to the bill which had been removed by the House of Lords.
Home Office minister Kit Malthouse said that the government rejected the Lords’ “watering down of the public order provisions.”
He said people have a “fundamental right to dissent, to protest,” but stressed “the right to protest is not unqualified.”
He said some protesters over the last couple of years have been “using tactics which are massively disruptive to other people’s lives,” and Parliament and the police need to “strike a balance between competing rights.”
The minister also defended proposals to crack down on tactics used by campaign groups such as Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain including blocking roads, which he said “put a lot of police officers in danger and did cause a significant amount of misery to many thousands of people.”
He argued people “want protection from the state of their rights to get to school, and to hospital, and to work.”
The main opposition Labour Party suggested the protest curbs went against Britain’s “long-standing and important democratic freedom to gather and to speak or to protest.”
Shadow Home Office minister Sarah Jones said: “Over the last five days thousands of people have been arrested and detained at anti-war protests across Russia. We would all defend their right to protest. And yet, here we are in the mother of all democracies debating an amendment to a bill that would criminalise in this country singing at a peaceful protest.”
Several senior Conservative MPs also voiced concerns over the restrictions.
Former minister Jesse Norman said it was “unfortunate” the government was bringing forward noise-based restrictions on protests when people in Ukraine are “dying for their beliefs and for the rights of freedom of speech and of association.”
Steve Baker, a former Brexit minister, said protests are “inherently noisy” and “inherently annoying.”
“If noise is ever used as a weapon I’m sure there are other instruments of law that can be used,” he said.
