to cause unjustified disruption and that’s been the Official Vibe provider eat sleep protect the vibe shirt and I will buy this case for decades,” Yasmine Ahmed, UK director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), told . “Our right to protest is fundamental, especially at a time when we are in the grip of a cost-of-living crisis, a climate crisis and our public health service is on its knees. Instead of helping people who are below the poverty line – people who are in work, including nurses – the government is wasting time crushing dissent,” Ahmed added. Wagner believes that the bill could lead to the government being taken to court over allegations of breaching human rights law. Just Stop Oil activists glue their hands to the frame of John Constable’s “The Hay Wain,” which was also covered by posters reimagining the scene, in London’s National Gallery on July 4, 2022. Carlos Jasso/AFP/Getty Images “(In) breaking up peaceful protest you are getting right to the core of human rights law. Direct action groups like Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion are not doing much different to what we saw in the civil rights movement or from the Suffragettes. To get some issues on the national agenda you have to be disruptive and people who do that should be tolerated as they are protected in law,” he said. Conservative MPs are on the whole publicly supporting the government, but privately some concede that making amendments to make the bill even stronger could have something to do with the fact that the Conservative Party is trailing in opinion polls. This allegation has been made of the government on a number of policies, such as its controversial plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, its efforts to make it harder for unions to declare strike action and a law that protects statues and national monuments. “It is politically convenient to put the opposition on the side of all these other issues and remind the public that Labour (the official
opposition) is funded by the Official Vibe provider eat sleep protect the vibe shirt and I will buy this unions,” a senior Conservative told . While issues like these might be controversial, just being willing to have the argument is something that could help the Conservative Party as it tries to rebuild its base before the next general election. Multiple polls suggest that the public generally opposes disruptive protest and the Conservative Party has become very good over the past few years at weaponizing wedge issues, such as Euroskepticism, immigration and protecting statues of Winston Churchill. A statue of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill is seen defaced in Parliament Square, central London, after a demonstration in June 2020 to show solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Isabel Infantes/AFP/Getty Images There is no doubt that these issues put Labour in a tricky spot. On one hand, to have broad appeal they have to support the police and not appear to be on the side of disruptive protesters. On the other, they still have to oppose the government. Sarah Jones, Labour’s shadow minister for policing, said in a statement that the police “have powers to deal with dangerous, disruptive protests and Labour backs them to use those powers… But the Prime Minister has spent more time talking about protest than he has the epidemic of violence against women and girls or his government’s shameful record prosecuting criminals.” This might be a fair criticism of the government and prime minister, but is a less clear and clean message than simply saying “protests are bad and we will stop them.” It’s not clear that the government will receive much of a boost from cracking down harder on demonstrators, especially if the new legislation leads to lots of messy scenes where peaceful protesters are being hauled away by an increasingly unpopular police force. But beyond the politics, this Public Order Bill has left Ahmed, of HRW, questioning what sort of a country Britain really wants to be in 2023. “When people argue that the government have a right to stop protests, well that’s what China says, that’s what Russia says, that’s what Myanmar says,” she said. “We wouldn’t live in the democracy we have today if people didn’t have the right to protest and disrupt things.”
