Tories threaten the right to protest again
The £10,000 fine imposed by police on Manchester nurse and socialist activist Karen Reissman on Sunday for organising a small masked and socially distanced protest at the Tories outrageous 1% pay rise (in effect a cut) for nurses on Sunday underlines that the right to protest- even safely in current times-remains under attack.
The Guardian reported on attempts by the Metropolitan Police to ban Extinction Rebellion protests in central London in October 2019
My brief view on that appeared in the Guardian along with other letters:
The history of protest has many instances when a tactic or strategy didn’t work, was ill-conceived or counterproductive. The Extinction Rebellion protest that briefly halted trains in east London might fall somewhere in that area (Extinction Rebellion risks throwing away goodwill, Journal, 18 October). That doesn’t mean that protest on the climate emergency is not required and has some urgency. It also means that the right to protest needs to be protected and defended, in this case from the Metropolitan police. Effective protest that leads to real change is a difficult thing to achieve and historically has required what the sociologist Charles Tilly called an entire repertoire of contention. That is as true now as it was in the 1830s when the Chartists tried everything from petitions to a general strike and an armed rising to try and secure the vote.
Dr Keith Flett
London Socialist Historians Group
The police action was subsequently found to be unlawful. Their reaction was to lobby Home Secretary Priti Patel to change the law. She clearly remains minded to do so.
The Independent reports (9th March):
The Police, Crime, Security and Courts Bill will impose new requirements to notify the police and to cut noise, as well as restricting the ability to inconvenience Parliament.
Justice Secretary Robert Buckland has noted that a key motivator of the proposed changes has been the Extinction Rebellion protests.
There is a significant danger that the Tories will use the very necessary restrictions of the last year to try and permanently restrict the right to protest.
A reminder of the history of the defence of the right to protest and organise particularly in respect of police powers was provided by EP Thompson in his collection, Writing by Candlelight:
The Chartist, Radical Liberal, Irish Nationalist and formative Labour movements were distinguished by their sensitivity to libertarian issues, and their suspicion of the polity of statism. When the police forces were enlarged and rationalized (or, as some would have it today, ’modernized’) in the mid-nineteenth century, this was a victory for bourgeois utilitarian bureaucratic policy in the face of intense resistance extending from old Tory localism through Radical Liberalism to outright Chartist opposition— for Chartists and trade unionists very well understood what kind of imperatives dictated government policies. As a consequence of this opposition, the presence of the police in British public life remained unusually subdued. They must be seen as ‘servants’ of… either the gentry or ’the public’, and they must in no circumstances exhibit a brash public presence. And, as a more concrete evidence of the old libertarian tradition, which endures to this day, the British police (at least in Britain) must go about the streets unarmed.
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