Britain wants to make it easier to suppress environmental protests

Our right to protest is essential, especially at a time when we are facing a cost-of-living crisis, a climate crisis and when our public health care is disrupted, Yasmine Ahmed of Human Rights Watch told CNN.

Climate protests must be curbed

The purpose of the Public Order Bill is to give the police greater powers to take action against political protests deemed to be disturbing public order. As motivation, the government cites actions carried out by groups such as Extinction Rebellion, Just stop oil and Insulate Britain. “We cannot allow protests by a small minority to disrupt the lives of common people,” Prime Minister Rishi Sunak says in a press release on the government’s website.

The government wants to make it a criminal offense to lock up a person on objects or infrastructure and to form human chains to prevent police from taking them away. They also want to open up the possibility of handcuffing individual activists deemed particularly subversive, as well as searching people without suspicion.

With changes to the Public Order Bill, the government intends to lower the threshold for what can be considered a “serious disorder”. The government wrote that the police should not wait for the disturbances, but could call off the protest in advance. This should be possible through comprehensive assessments of specific groups, individuals or campaigns based on past behaviour.

There is no deterrent effect

Andrea Brooke is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Sussex and researches repression against the climate movement and the environment.

– We need to understand the public order bill in relation to other new legislation, such as the anti-strike laws and the police bill, she told Dagens ETC.

The Police Bill is an acronym for the Critical Collection of Laws, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, which, like the Public Order Bill, aims to limit the right to protest. This gave rise to the “Kill the Bill” movement with riots in Bristol in March 2021, after which the most controversial parts of the bill were voted on in the Senate. Andrea Brock says the government is now making a new attempt to include these proposals in the Public Order Bill.

She does not believe the bill will stop the protests.

– The government sees that there are protests everywhere. In a way, the new legislation can be seen as a sign of victory for the protests. I think it is very unpleasant for the government. The legislation will not prevent people from protesting, but rather will make protesters more creative in their choice of methods. We’re in the middle of a climate catastrophe, and that’s why people are protesting.

The public order bill was voted on in the lower house of parliament in October and will come to the upper house for a vote later this year.