Priti Patel’s plans defeated by protest & the Lords defence of the ‘Freeborn Englishman’
The authoritarian Police Bill designed largely around the prejudices of Priti Patel, was debated in the House of Lords on Monday evening. Measures aimed at cracking down on ‘noisy protests’, stopping protests being effective and preventing named individuals from protesting were all defeated. Some can be reintroduced in the Commons and some can’t be>
The House of Lords has a significant Tory majority that was absent on Monday either because they’ve had enough of Johnson or because even they are aware the rights of the ‘Freeborn Englishman’ promoted by William Cobbett and featured in E P Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class.
The Freeborn Englishman could appear on the left or the right of the political spectrum but one thing that was definitively not liked was the exercise of arbitrary State power, and that is what Patel’s Police Bill is all about.
Much as the Labour Lords work deserves credit, along with a number of LibDem and Crossbench Peers, pressure from without was also key here. Numerous and persistent protests on the Police Bill had raised the matter to one that could not be ignored politically. Those protests will need to continue.
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