The Police, Crime and Sentencing Bill 2021 - The Public Fight for the Freedom to Protest
Protests from each end of the political spectrum have erupted across the United Kingdom. A tenet of the democratic process is ensuring public opinion can be gauged and acted upon. Yet the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Bill, approaching its second reading in the House of Lords, is a risk to modern democracy (if this democracy exists at all) and the practicability of the Human Rights Act.
Following Brexit, this Conservative government has aimed to remove the Human Rights Act (HRA) 1998, which was adopted by the Labour Party during its time in office. The European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR), which is the parent Act that aided the drafting and interpretation of the HRA, declares the freedom of expression (Article 10) and assembly (Article 11) to be fundamental to a democratic state. However, the current government has voted to administer greater police force in public spaces, where speakers that cause a ‘nuisance’ could receive a maximum prison sentence for up to 10 years. The Bill itself declares that ‘serious annoyance’ can suffice as a form of serious harm, with forms of public obstruction potentially resulting in a serious imprisonment sentence. The Bill also proposes to abolish the common law offence of public nuisance, thus recreating the current law that already exists and works well.
The Bill has a few dangerous updates, which arguably overextend power and authority to the police and the Home Secretary. Sections 55 and 56 (Part Three) aim to impose conditions of public protest and assembly, through amending the Public Order Act 1986 - if the Bill succeeds, the police are able to act on the sole basis of noise disruption. This can apply to both large groups and an individual. s.55(4) allows the Secretary of State (currently Priti Patel) to “make provision about the meaning for the purposes of this section of — (a) serious disruption to the activities of an organisation which are carried on in the vicinity of a public procession, or (b) serious disruption to the life of the community”.
Need I remind the reader? In an LBC interview, Priti Patel not only refused to support the Black Lives Matter protests, but labelled them as ‘dreadful’. (NB her words were: ‘those protests were dreadful’). She described the protestors as ‘thugs’ and stated the public should ‘put health first’. Whilst coronavirus continues to be a very real issue, it is arguable that the Conservative government has always dealt with the pandemic in the context of our economy, rather than our collective health. They have let the NHS and its resilient staff suffer for over a year, all whilst working against medical advice and on a delayed schedule. Why should we expect regular people to put public health first when the current cabinet can’t even begin to set the prime example?
The new Bill also threatens travelling communities across the U.K., with the government actively stating that their community presence “can create significant challenges for local authorities and cause distress and misery to those who live nearby”. Travelling communities would likely be able to settle at a site, or move to transit sites, if there were some made available; 93.7% of police bodies believe the issue of unauthorised encampments could be solved through greater camp provision, rather than criminalising the inevitable alternative. The Bill also threatens seizure of assets- these being traveller homes and belongings- or imprisonment, paving the way to the familiar pattern of involvement of childcare services and rehabilitation. PCSC is a modern form of institutionalised racism, and it is actively legislating for an increased risk of homelessness whilst simultaneously restricting an individual’s right to protest against the fact.
Section 46 (Part 2) also proposes an update to the legislation on property damage, more specifically entitled “criminal damage to memorials”, sparked by the Black Lives Matter protests during summer 2020. Despite various attempts to apply for statue removal, every request was rejected. In a pluralistic and multicultural Britain, we need to acknowledge that our history, and idolised historical actors, are founded upon imperialism and the colonial empire - this is not something to be memorialised. This is not something to be celebrated. It is respectable to look back into our abusive history as a nation and correct our mistakes, as far as is possible to do so. Edward Colston was a deplorable Tory MP and a key actor in the slave trade in the 17th century. For the Home Secretary to find the removal of a coloniser ‘disgraceful”, “sheer vandalism” and “disorder” speaks true to the value of the xenophobic disregard that is fundamentally perpetuated in Conservative rhetoric.
The U.K. average imprisonment term for rape is 8 years (minimum 5 years sentence), and the average term for committing fraud is between 12-18 months. There is nothing as morally reprehensible as delivering a prison sentence to social actors fighting for the benefit of public good, whilst distributing minimum imprisonment terms for despicable crimes that are a plague to society. Articles 10 and 11 are a “manifestation of the importance attached by the common law to both the right to protest and free speech” (R v Roberts (Richard) [2019]), and thus protests are salient to public life, even if they cause inconvenience.
Ultimately, and I conclude on this point, we cannot allow the current cabinet to restrict our human rights and personal autonomy through this incoming statute. There has been a bombardment of pivotal legislation that has been ushered through the Commons without any real media or public criticism. For example, the new Health and Social Care Bill seeks to allow the Health Secretary to sign off on contracts with minimal Parliamentary scrutiny, further enabling a recurrence of backdoor deals, as seen with Hancock awarding countless corrupt contracts within his inner circle. It is vital that we stay educated on the direction in which this country is headed, because minority populations, above others, may find themselves in dire straits otherwise.
