Category: Criminal Justice

Beth Winter – 2022 Speech on the Public Order Bill

The speech made by Beth Winter, the Labour MP for Cynon Valley, in the House of Commons on 23 May 2022.

The Bill is a draconian piece of legislation that undermines our democracy. It is the sort of Bill I would expect from an extreme and authoritarian Administration anticipating opposition, and perhaps even fearing for their continued existence. As Members across the House have said, the provisions are not necessary. Existing laws are sufficient. The provisions would leave the UK in breach of international human rights law, would clearly restrict fundamental human rights, and severely compromise the UK’s ability to promote open societies and respect for human rights internationally. They have rightly been condemned by Members from across the House today.

Paul Bristow

Will the hon. Lady give way?

Beth Winter

No, I will not give way because of time. Causing obstruction at a site of key national infrastructure was something the Prime Minister proposed doing at Heathrow a few years ago, when he threatened to lie down in front of bulldozers. That was, of course, before he became Prime Minister. I wonder what his actions would be now. The offence of locking on, or being equipped for locking on, is far too broadly drafted and far too wide-ranging—purposefully so, I would argue, in order to restrict individuals’ willingness to protest. Those measures must be thrown out.

The “stop and search without suspicion” measures are an over-extension of police powers. Given our knowledge of the racial bias in the application of stop and search, the measures are a green light from the Government to create further racial tensions in policing. Those measures must also be thrown out.

The serious disruption prevention orders risk depriving people of the fundamental human rights of assembly and movement. As commentators and colleagues in the House have said, they are like the protest powers in Russia or Belarus, but even more extreme. They, too, must be thrown out.

I take issue with some of the comments and approaches of Conservative Members. The Conservative Benches are empty now, unfortunately, which I think says a lot about the Conservatives’ position. Their comments have been very selective and subjective, and a lot of the language used has been extremely offensive. The measures in the Bill are extremely broad and far reaching. For example, the protest banning orders are extremely broad in scope and allow the police to put restrictions on processions and assemblies beyond those mentioned in recent debates. They can include religious festivals and activities, community gatherings, football matches, vigils, remembrance ceremonies, and trade union disputes and pickets. These are absolutely terrifying proposals.

The powers in the Bill will be extended to Wales, but have the Welsh Government been consulted? I doubt it, given past experience. This is how the Government normally act towards our devolved, democratically elected Governments. They change the laws affecting Wales, but do not ask Wales its views. The Welsh Government were clearly opposed to the measures on protest in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. I believe that they will make clear their opposition to this Bill. Furthermore, there is concrete evidence that the Welsh police are not supportive or likely to make use of such powers, given what was said by four constables at a recent session of the Welsh Affairs Committee.

Paul Bristow

Will the hon. Lady give way?

Beth Winter

No, I will not. I believe that Welsh MPs will reject the Bill tonight. I will wrap up with one final point. This Conservative legislation has been presented as a necessary measure to deal with climate protesters. We are facing a climate catastrophe, and the Government should be addressing its root causes now. The overwhelming majority of climate protesters are using democratic rights that we have fought over for many, many years. Among those protesters, I include myself, my parents and my children, as we have been on many a protest in our lives, locking arms, so we would probably be criminalised and called eco-hooligans, which is how the hon. Member for Ashfield (Lee Anderson) shamefully described protesters earlier.

Paul Bristow

Will the hon. Member give way?

Beth Winter

No, I will not. As I said at the outset, there are sufficient laws in existence to deal with protests.

I believe that there is another reason for the Bill: the current cost of living crisis will drive such poverty and polarisation that the Government are concerned that their economic policies mean that public protest is increasingly likely. Rip-off energy bills—like the poll tax—pushing people into poverty and debt will lead to more protests on our streets. Is the Prime Minister readying himself for his Thatcher moment, confronting those on a low income in Trafalgar Square? How proportional will that be? I hope that we do not see such violence from this Government, but I fear that that is what the Bill is about.

Hundreds of civil organisations, legal academics, cross-party parliamentarians and UN special rapporteurs condemned the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and they will do the same with this Bill. I urge Members to listen to them and to us and to do the right thing today: vote against this absolutely rotten Bill on Second Reading. Throw it out.

May 25, 2022
Marsha De Cordova – 2022 Speech on the Public Order Bill

The speech made by Marsha De Cordova, the Labour MP for Battersea, in the House of Commons on 23 May 2022.

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) and to speak in this Second Reading debate. The provisions in this Bill pose a significant risk to the UK’s adherence to its domestic and international human rights obligations, and the Bill is unlikely to be compliant with the European convention on human rights, particularly article 10 on freedom of expression and article 11 on freedom of assembly and association.

Equivalent measures to the protest-banning orders were previously roundly rejected by the police and Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary and fire and rescue services on the basis that such measures would neither be compatible with human rights legislation nor create an effective deterrent. Many organisations, including Justice, have said that the Bill would give the police carte blanche to target protestors. Similar laws can be found in Russia and Belarus. Is this the country we have become?

That is why I support the amendment in the name of my right hon. and learned Friend the Leader of the Opposition. It is disturbing that the Government have put forward this Bill as their first piece of legislation in the Queen’s Speech, and when the ink is not even dry on their Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. We have not even been able to assess that Act’s impact on people and communities. It beggars belief that the Government have brought forward this Bill during a cost of living emergency, when they should be focusing on tackling the crisis facing so many of our constituents. Moreover, the Bill’s provisions are more egregious than those in the Government’s amendments to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 that were flatly and rightly rejected in the other place.

My speech will focus on the Bill’s equality impacts, especially in relation to protest. Before entering this House, I spent most of my life as an advocate and campaigner, and I know from first-hand experience the power that protest can have. My freedoms today are directly linked to the organising and protests that happened on our streets, from the suffragettes who chained themselves to Parliament to secure votes for women, to disabled people who locked their wheelchairs to traffic lights to fight the discriminatory cuts to social security, and the Black Lives Matter protests.

Protesting is one of the most effective ways for people from underserved and under-represented groups to organise and deliver change for our communities. Such people often do not have access to the seats of powers. They face significant barriers to democratic and civic participation. Clamping down on protest will not only have an impact on the types of issues that our communities will be able to voice their concerns about but shut down key avenues of mobilising the public to support and preserve our rights.

I urge Government Members, and the Policing Minister in particular, to watch “Then Barbara Met Alan”, which highlights the fight for civil rights for disabled people and the role that protests played in securing the imperfect Disability Discrimination Act 2005. But for those protests and disabled people protesting and making sacrifices, many of the rights that we fight to maintain today would not have been secured.

This Bill will criminalise protest tactics and drag people into the criminal justice system, and we know that people from our communities will suffer the most. Our communities are already over-policed and targeted by the authorities. I am especially worried about the provision on protest-specific stop-and-search powers. Those powers are a form of structural oppression that will continue to hurt and harm our black, Asian and ethnic minority communities. Their expansion will only entrench racial disproportionality in the criminal justice system and further erode trust in public institutions.

Last week, the Home Secretary announced that she was lifting restrictions placed on police stop-and-search powers in areas where police anticipate violent crimes by easing conditions on the use of section 60 orders under the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. The Bill will amend section 1 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 to expand the types of offences that allow a police officer to stop and search a person or a vehicle. It will also extend suspicionless stop-and-search powers to the protest context; police officers will be able to stop and search a person or a vehicle without suspicion if they reasonably believe that certain protest-related offences will be committed in that area.

Despite ongoing revelations regarding the misuse and racist application of stop-and-search powers, the Government decided to roll them out further. I therefore hope that when the Minister sums up, he will address disproportionality. I am sorry, but the equality impact assessment is flawed. It does not address the Bill’s disproportionate impact on our black and ethnic minority communities, and on black men in particular. Overwhelming evidence, including the Home Office’s own data, provided to human rights and civil liberty organisations, details the inherent disproportionality in the use of police stop and search. We know from the Independent Office for Police Conduct’s report that, in the year to March 2021, black people were seven times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people; Asian people were 2.5 times more likely to be stopped and searched.

We know that stop and search powers are ineffective. According to the Home Affairs Committee, between March and May 2020, more than 80% of the 21,950 stop and searches resulted in no further action. That is counterproductive. The decision to ease section 60 and the new powers in the Bill do not consider the trauma that structural oppression causes to our black and ethnic minority communities, and in particular to our black boys.

The Bill will also create the offence of intentional obstruction of a suspicionless, protest-specific stop and search. It might be used to target legal observers, or community-led protest marshals, who play a vital role in protecting the rights of groups by keeping them safe and explaining many complicated and technical laws. They are there in an observer or advisory capacity. The lack of that crucial function will impact many groups, and disabled people and people from ethnic minority backgrounds in particular.

We do not need the Bill. It will not solve the problems that it seeks to address. All it will do is increase the criminalisation of people from our under-represented and under-served communities. The Government are not interested in protecting people or serving those who need them most; they want only to protect themselves, to hold on to power by playing with people’s lives, and to manipulate the public to deflect from their failures. They are doing that at people’s expense. If they cared, they would have brought forward the victims’ Bill and ensured justice for the 1.3 million victims who gave up on the justice system last year. I will stand up for the people and, along with Opposition colleagues, I will vote against the Bill.

May 25, 2022
Alex Cunningham – 2022 Speech on the Public Order Bill

The speech made by Alex Cunningham, the Labour MP for Stockton North, in the House of Commons on 23 May 2022.

This is the first Bill of the Queen’s Speech and it is stark proof that the Government are out of steam and out of ideas. It is a sad day for democracy, as was best illustrated by some of the contributions that we heard from the Government Benches. Instead of the ambitious reforms that our country needs and deserves at a time when the cost of living is spiralling out of control for many of our constituents, the Government have served up these reheated proposals that contribute little, if anything, to the law. We on Teesside do not have a problem with protests, but we do have a huge problem with the massive increase in violent crime and antisocial behaviour. We also have a big problem with health inequalities and the fact that unemployment in our area remains over 30% higher than the national average. Dissatisfied by her attacks on our historical right to peacefully protest in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, which has yet to come into force, the Home Secretary is trying to have a second bite of the cherry. However, if she thinks it is so important to restrict protests, why has she not introduced any of the statutory instruments to implement the measures in the Act before bringing forward yet another Bill this year? The hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller) also questioned that. It is just more evidence that she is more interested in headlines than real practical policies.

We on these Benches believe that the vital infrastructure and services on which we all rely must be protected from serious disruption and that protests must not put others at risk, but the police and courts already have powers to deal with such dangerous and disruptive protests, including the use of injunctions and existing criminal offences such as the obstruction of a highway and criminal damage, among others. It is worth noting that these existing powers have already been used to arrest people and to prosecute cases of obstructing infrastructure and locking on during the Insulate Britain blockade of the M25 and the Just Stop Oil blockade of Kingsbury refinery.

This Bill’s assortment of new offences will do nothing to actually safeguard vital national infrastructure and ensure that it is protected from serious disruption, and we know that the most effective measures for preventing such disruption already exist, and that is with injunctions. We do, however, recognise that there can be a real problem with delays in seeking injunctions, and a lack of preparation, planning and co-ordination between different private and public authorities. So why is the Home Secretary not focusing on this issue, and including provisions for co-operation between the police and public and private authorities to improve resilience and prevent serious disruption? That is what we would do.

We have already heard the Home Secretary blow and bluster at the Dispatch Box after the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act was passed, deploying all manner of dodgy statements about the Opposition’s approach to law and order. She could have had our full co-operation with that Bill—there were some very good proposals in it—but she chose to play silly political games by introducing other measures that served to shackle our people and diminish their rights. She knew all too well the game she was playing, but so did the public, who recognise that the Tory Government, rather than getting on with fixing crime, prefer to muck about with the rights to protest.

This new Bill introduces powers that are far too widely drawn and that could criminalise protesters and even passers-by. All of us who work here will have seen many enthusiastic protests outside in Parliament Square. It is what we expect while working in this the seat of democracy. Many of us, more likely those on this side, have enjoyed many a protest. My favourite goes back 50 years to when students were demanding a better deal from Ted Heath’s Government. It was very noisy, but very successful. The morning chant was simple: “Heath out, Heath out!” No one was more surprised than me when the chant changed later to “Heath’s out, Heath’s out!” because that was the day he called the general election.

If Parliament Square were designated as an area for suspicionless stop and search, which the Bill introduces, could Members of Parliament and our staff coming to work on the estate be stopped and searched by police? It seems far-fetched, but that may be a logical conclusion of the measures in the Bill. I would be grateful if the Minister shared his thoughts on his staff potentially being caught by these measures as they head into the office. As Justice has said, this Bill will

“criminalise a breathtakingly wide range of peaceful behaviour”.

As well as rapid injunctions to protect infrastructure against serious disruption, we would create a fast-track buffer zone outside schools and vaccine clinics to protect children and those accessing medical care from dangerous anti-vaxxers. What we have opposed and will continue to oppose is the criminalisation of peaceful protesters and passers-by. The Home Secretary has said this Bill is necessary to prevent “mob rule”, but would she call those protesting against the Russian invasion of Ukraine a mob? Is that the term she would use to describe the thousands of women who have gathered together for vigils to demand action on violence against women and girls? It is gatherings such as those on which her Bill will impact, not just potentially dangerous and disruptive ones. Why introduce a new offence of locking on when it is effectively covered by existing offences such as criminal damage, public nuisance and obstructing a road? Why introduce SDPOs when the Home Office’s own response was initially to reject them on the grounds that they would stop individuals exercising their right to protest?

It is time for the Home Secretary to stop playing petty political games, and time for the Government to stop wasting legislative time on the Home Secretary’s hunt for headlines and to bring forward legislation that will actually address the many issues facing our constituents.

May 25, 2022
Rupa Huq – 2022 Speech on the Public Order Bill

The speech made by Rupa Huq, the Labour MP for Ealing Central and Acton, in the House of Commons on 23 May 2022.

Here we go again: illiberal legislation on public order and regulating protest boomeranging back in here after the other place flung it out last time. I do not deny that there can be value in appropriate sentences and tighter enforcement in the face of serious disorder—for example, pitch invasions are increasingly common and unwelcome nowadays—but we have to be proportionate about these things.

In 2019, it did seem a bit bizarre when we saw Extinction Rebellion on top of tube trains, when that is one of the most green forms of transport. It probably did not make any new fans there, and ditto when the A40 in Acton was blocked. We all prize living in a liberal democracy, but if curbs are disproportionate and the exercise is about curtailing everyday freedoms primarily to win favour with the red tops and to play to their party base and the gallery, then we do have a problem.

These things are always a balance, but we have to tread carefully when it comes to limiting protest. Not that long ago, the Government were going softly, softly on stop and search. We even saw the police dancing with protesters, but the Bill goes for the eye-catching and draconian, such as creating the offence of locking on, where someone is potentially subject to 51 weeks in prison and an unlimited fine for intentionally attaching themselves, someone else or an object to another person, to an object or to land in a manner capable of causing “serious disruption”. It is so vague that it could apply to people linking arms. That is not to mention, as has already been said, that the most famous lockers-on in history were the suffragettes. It is just outside here where Viscount Falkland’s foot spur is missing, because in 1909 people locked on to it. That is part of our history and it is never to be replaced.

We have to beware of being heavy-handed and being led by moral panic with these things. The European Court of Human Rights has held that the freedom to take part in peaceful assembly is of such importance that it cannot be restricted in any way, as long as the person concerned does not commit any reprehensible acts. Concerningly, there is such widespread discretion in the Bill that the police have carte blanche. These laws are not dissimilar to what they have in Russia and Belarus.

If we think about the memorable protests of recent years, yes there has been Extinction Rebellion, but there have also been the school strikes. I do not condone bunking off school, but Greta Thunberg and her lot and the UK equivalent did put the lie to the youth being apolitical and apathetic. We have had Black Lives Matter and what happened to Colston, but I would argue that the sea change should have been the heavy-handed policing of the vigil for Sarah Everard. It was a shocking incident, and the policing was disgusting. In the immediate aftermath, we had a little bit of hand-wringing and concern, but the content of the Bill is a huge disappointment.

Unlike with the average road, where there is a minimal risk of disruption or it being blocked when we get in our car, women going about their lawful business every day in this country find that their route is blocked. What I am talking about specifically is women seeking an entirely legal abortion. It could be for any manner of reasons, and it is probably one of the most stressful and distressing moments in someone’s life. There is a one in four chance—this is from the Home Office’s own figures—that the clinic they attend will be subject to protests or vigils from anti-abortion protesters.

I have raised this issue with a number of different Home Office Ministers. I presented a ten-minute rule Bill in 2020 with massive cross-party support—from Members of seven different parties—so I know the will of the House is there. Even the Home Secretary, in answer to my oral question in February, was positively glowing, and I know she sees a lot of merit in it—but here is a Bill to curb protests and there is absolutely nothing on protests outside clinics. At least four more clinics have been affected since my 2020 Bill and, if we add it up, the issue affects 100,000 women a year, yet the Government say that there is not enough impact to warrant intervention. We know that psychological distress and damage is being done to those women and that precious police time is eaten up—Members should ask the police in Ealing.

In Ealing, we are lucky to have a pioneering council that put through a public spaces protection order to end more than 20 years of harassment at the Marie Stopes clinic. The street is now transformed, with no more gruesome foetus dolls or women being told that they are going to hell for a completely legal medical procedure. We are lucky in Ealing, but it should not be about luck. It was an act of last resort by our council, and only two other local authorities have followed—Richmond and Manchester. It is a fundamental part of the rule of law that people get equal protection under the law wherever they are, so why are people covered only in those three places?

BBC Newsnight had a feature on the subject last week. There is a huge file of evidence at the clinic in Bournemouth, but the council does not want to act, or shows no sign of acting. It is enormously onerous for councils that do want to push through the legislation, because of the burden of proof and officer time, so with everything else on their plates, it is not a priority for most of them. We are in a bizarre situation where, pending the outcome of a Supreme Court challenge, women seeking abortion in Northern Ireland could soon have greater universal protections from harassment than those in England and Wales.

At the same time, the Bill criminalises a huge range of peaceful non-disruptive behaviour and goes far and beyond what most people would ever deem necessary by supplementing powers that are already there. I give the Minister advance warning that I will be seeking to amend the Bill to protect women from this most distressing and unpleasant form of protest. Canada, Australia and several states of the US already have such legislation; it is not a crazy idea. We need a national approach. People will still be able to protest if they do not like abortion laws in this country, but the appropriate place to do that would be here, rather than around defenceless women in their hour of need. Every woman should have the same protection as people in Ealing.

Mr Holden

Will the hon. Lady give way?

Dr Huq

No, because other people still want to speak. The so-called hon. Gentleman has eaten up everyone’s time and my hon. Friends will not get in because of him.

Give or take a bit of tinkering with wordings and clauses, this Bill is essentially a regurgitation of the failed Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. It replicates all the underlying principles and measures that their lordships previously debated and comprehensively rejected. There is no imagination in it to deal with real problems, so for that reason, I and all Opposition Members will vote against the Bill tonight.

May 25, 2022
Andy McDonald – 2022 Speech on the Public Order Bill

The speech made by Andy McDonald, the Labour MP for Middlesbrough, in the House of Commons on 23 May 2022.

It is an absolute pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Rebecca Long Bailey).

The Public Order Bill is the latest in a line of Bills that this Government have decided to introduce, which can only be described as some of the most reactionary and authoritarian legislation in living memory. Instead of bringing forward measures to support people, following a global pandemic that has ripped through our communities, with many now in the dreadful situation of having to choose between heating their homes and eating, and with 40% of households expected to be in fuel poverty, Ministers are using parliamentary time to criminalise our basic right as citizens to protest peacefully—or even noisily and irritatingly.

The Bill follows a raft of recent laws passed at the very end of the last Session that were designed to stifle our liberties. We had the Elections Act 2022, containing measures cynically designed to prevent people from voting. We had the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, which gives the Home Secretary powers to strip dual citizens of their British citizenship without notice, and—in contravention of the UK’s international obligations—criminalises many of those seeking asylum, who now risk being shipped off to Rwanda thanks to her cruel and inhumane scheme. We also had the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, banning noisy protests and criminalising Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities.

Thanks to the work of those in the other place, the Government’s attempt to pass provisions that, if implemented, would leave the UK in breach of international human rights law was scuppered. It is therefore very concerning that the Government have immediately opted to introduce them again in this Session through this Public Order Bill.

The headline measure banning people from locking on—attaching themselves to other persons or objects—is a dangerous assault on non-violent protest. To begin with, as has been pointed out, the Bill does not even properly define “attach”, so it is unclear what it means. Could linking arms with other protesters count? Could using balloons that need to be tethered to the ground fall under these provisions? On top of that, the Bill does not define what would constitute “reasonable excuse”. Would exercising the fundamental right to protest count?

Would the following example count, which I wish to bring to the Home Secretary’s attention, as set out in an early-day motion from 13 years ago, one of whose main signatories was the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May)? It begins:

“That this House commemorates the 100th anniversary on 27 April 2009 of the day that Margery Humes, Theresa Garnet, Sylvia Russell and Bertha Quinn, suffragettes from the Women’s Social and Political Union, chained themselves to statues in St. Stephen’s Hall to protest for the right of women to vote”,

and

“pays tribute to those and all other heroic women who fought for the rights of women during a time when society, and Parliament, thought them undeserving of equal rights”.

How can the Home Secretary countenance enacting legislation that would undoubtedly make protests such as that, which took place just a stone’s throw away from this Chamber, carry a maximum penalty of six months in prison, an unlimited fine, or both? What is more, the Bill would make it an offence merely to be in possession of equipment to lock on. A person would not have to lock on to commit a crime; just being equipped to lock on would be an offence punishable with an unlimited fine.

The right to protest was fought for by generations. When Parliament is not acting in the interests of the people, whom it purports to represent, the right to protest is paramount to keep this place in check. Were it not for those suffragettes, the securing of women’s rights would have been much delayed, which might have delayed the progress that enabled the Home Secretary or the former Prime Minister to be in this place. I cannot help but see the terrible irony in the Home Secretary’s introducing legislation that would criminalise the very means by which courageous suffragettes won women the right to take part in the political sphere. If it was right for the suffragettes to take that action, as the former Prime Minister advocated, why is it not right for other protesters holding this place to account?

Mr Holden

Legislation passed in 2007 turned trespass in this place into criminal trespass, so what the hon. Gentleman is talking about could not take place because of legislation passed under the last Labour Government. It is already a criminal offence, so the suggestion that the Bill does something different and criminalises something that was not already illegal does not hold water, does it?

Andy McDonald

The hon. Gentleman understates the significance of that process, which fundamentally changed our constitution and which was deemed to be illegal at the time.

What is so different between, on the one hand, the suffragettes, and on the other, protesters such as the esteemed international climate lawyer Farhana Yamin sticking her hands to the pavement outside the London headquarters of Shell to highlight the fact that the Paris agreement, which she helped to negotiate in 2015, was not delivering; or the Palestine solidarity activists locking on to one another outside the London headquarters of Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, whose subsidiary IMI Systems may well be responsible for supplying the bullet used to murder Shireen Abu Akleh? Just like the Government in 1909 withholding the right to vote from women, this Government’s failure to tackle the climate change crisis with enough urgency is an outrage that demands outcry. Much has been said of Insulate Britain and the objections to certain of its tactics. Government Members should contemplate why it is necessary for people to take such measures when we see our planet dying. If they want to shut up Insulate Britain, there is something very simple that they could do, and that is to insulate Britain and get on with it. In a healthy democracy, these uproars of objection would not be criminalised, but taken on board by a Government serving in the interests of the people.

The attempt to pass the Bill is a very dark day for democracy, and it is incumbent on us all to oppose it in its entirety. I encourage everyone who can do so to attend the TUC rally in this city, which is titled so aptly: “We demand better”.

May 25, 2022
Richard Fuller – 2022 Speech on the Public Order Bill

The speech made by Richard Fuller, the Conservative MP for North East Bedfordshire, in the House of Commons on 23 May 2022.

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas). She certainly put out the most certain bet that she has been on more protests than most other people in this House and she is honourable for doing so. She said that the contributions to the debate from the Government Benches had promoted divisiveness. I do not agree with her—people have been trying to express their point of view—but, standing alone, perhaps I shall be a sole voice in expressing some reservations about the intent behind some of the measures in the Bill.

I was grateful to hear some of the contributions by the Home Secretary, particularly her willingness to look at the Bill’s focus. I would like to take that up with the Policing Minister, who has been able to explain to me some of the more detailed provisions of previous Bills.

At some points in the debate, it has not been clear whether Members have been focusing on the Bill in the context of protest, climate change or criminal damage. The Bill is at its best when it focuses on those who would use protest as a cover to cause damage or create unreasonable disruption. It starts to lose its way when it strays away from that into an area where all democratic Governments need to be careful, which is how a Government of the day pass legislation that has an effect on protest.

My first concern of principle, then, relates to imprecision, in respect of which I shall mention a couple of clauses. Before I started to speak, I wrote down that I had concerns about why, with the Government having only recently taken a large Bill through Parliament, we had the provisions sort of re-presented today in this Bill. The right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), who spoke for the Opposition, had a point about why these measures have come back to the House so soon and whether we have had time to see the impact of the measures passed previously. Again, I can see the rationale for the Bill when it is tight to its intent; when it goes broader than that, I have significant questions.

One reason I am a Conservative is that I believe in freedom of speech—the right of people to express themselves freely. Indeed, as a Government we are emphasising that in a number of other pieces of legislation we are bringing forward. In questions to the Secretary of State for Education earlier, we highlighted the importance of free speech in schools and the need not to have ideological perspectives. We are talking about it in universities, too. As I thought in respect of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, the Government are at risk of being in conflict with their freedom of speech priorities in proposing a Bill that focuses on some of the restrictions on protests.

Another point that came up in respect of the previous Bill and does with this one, too, is the risk that it puts on police officers being seen as political because of their decisions, given the very broad framework that is set out and the fact that it is hard to explain to someone who is being noisy or disruptive why they are being selected rather than others. I do not expect the Policing Minister to address that today, but it would be helpful to learn a bit more about that in my conversations with him.

I think all Members present will recognise my final concern of principle. It is surely true that our politics have become far more divisive over the past decade. Whatever the reasons for that may be—perhaps it is a matter of political decisions or of social media—when people feel very divided on politics it is important that we keep open to them as many avenues as we possibly can for them to express dissent or an opinion or to say where something is wrong. That is an important context for the Policing Minister and the Government to consider as they think about the application of the Bill.

Let me turn to some points about the Bill’s provisions. I talked earlier about it being imprecise and straying from areas in which it is strong—its focus on the use of protest as cover for criminal damage—and unfortunately clauses 1 and 2 are where that level of imprecision starts. They are worded far too openly. Everyone here seems to know what attaching on means. Is that the phrase? I cannot remember exactly what it is.

Mr Holden

Locking on.

Richard Fuller

I thank my hon. Friend. I have no clue what locking on is. I do not know. Some colleagues have made the point. What does one have to attach oneself? I have no idea and there is nothing in the Bill to explain to me what locking on may be. It would be helpful for the Government to produce further provisions on that. It is disappointing that the Government are then extremely precise in clauses 3, 4 and 5 about some of the measures they wish to introduce. Precision is clearly not unavailable to them; it is a matter of choice where they have applied it.

A number of Members have spoken to clause 7, which introduces powers on stop and search. Some people have rightly made the point about the disproportionality of stop and search, which has been an important issue for me in my time in Parliament. My right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes), who is no longer in his place, made his point by saying, “But what about the number of knives and the number of offences that have been caught?” First, that does not answer the question of disproportionality, which is the fundamental reason why many of us have concerns about the use of stop and search. Secondly, that argument is completely inappropriate when stop and search is applied to people going on a protest, because it is about not the other aspects of serious crime or serious drug dealing that we talk about, but people expressing their points of view. I say to the Government, “Please, if you are going to look at the extension of stop and search, think carefully before putting that provision in this legislation.”

Stewart Hosie

The issue is not just the extension of stop and search but many of the extensions in the Bill. I was struck that, if Lord Hain—then Peter Hain—could be convicted of criminal conspiracy for leading direct action events in the 1970s, which he was as part of the anti-apartheid movement, why do we need this panoply of illiberal measures now? The law was more than capable of dealing with many of the same issues 40 or 50 years ago.

Richard Fuller

The right hon. Gentleman is entitled to his point of view about the broader panoply; my point is specifically about stop and search. I hate the fact that a black man, perhaps with his son, who walks in the streets of London or in my constituency in Bedfordshire is 14 times more likely to be stopped, and very often for no good reason. He may then have to explain to his son or daughter why that has happened. Until we as a population start to find some balance about whether stop and search is useful or not and focus on what it means to the next generation, we will be letting down our young people.

Clause 7(7) is chilling:

“A constable may, in the exercise of the powers conferred by subsection (6), stop any person or vehicle and make any search the constable thinks fit whether or not the constable has any grounds for suspecting that the person or vehicle is carrying a prohibited object.”

That is on the way to a demonstration. We can do better than that.

What is serious disruption? It has been mentioned by many Members. It is a lynchpin in the Bill for many aspects of what may happen, but it is not defined in the Bill. Does the Policing Minister intend to come forward with some more precise language about what constitutes a serious disruption, so that we do not put undue pressure on police officers to work it out for themselves in the heat of the moment when people are going on demonstrations? One Opposition Member—I cannot remember which—said that a large demonstration is very likely to cause serious disruption by dint of being a large demonstration. If there is a protest of hundreds of thousands of people going through a city, there is likely to be serious disruption. If we are not going to define “serious disruption”, we will be at risk of having some of these powers misapplied.

Mr Holden

Surely, large protests such as the ones we saw over the Iraq war or the hunting ban, would have engaged with the police at an earlier stage to facilitate a proper, lawful and peaceful protest. What the Government are trying to target are those small, sporadic numbers of people who are causing deliberate harm to specific areas of key infrastructure. Does my hon. Friend understand the difference between those two cases?

Richard Fuller

I do; that was why I said that the Bill is at its best when it focuses on those things. I am just saying to the Minister that we should have more precise definitions in the Bill.

Clause 14(4) lists the prohibitions that may be imposed on someone subject to a serious disruption prevention order. Let me tell the Minister what this reminds me of. Earlier in my time as Member of Parliament for Bedford, I had a constituent who was under a control order. Control orders were brought in for people who our intelligence services said were terrorists or were at high risk of causing a major terrorist incident. Some of the provisions in clause 14(4) remind me very much of the control order provisions that my constituent was under. I ask the Minister please to look at whether that level of intervention on the activities of an individual, who has merely gone about protesting in a way that, yes, may have caused disruption and, yes, may have been subject to the provisions of this Bill, is truly what we should be seeing in a free society.

May 25, 2022
Caroline Lucas – 2022 Speech on the Public Order Bill

The speech made by Caroline Lucas, the Green MP for Brighton Pavilion, in the House of Commons on 23 May 2022.

This is a deeply dangerous Bill, and I am pleased to support the reasoned amendments. The measures in the Bill represent a fresh outright attack on our fundamental rights. Indeed, as others have said, the human rights organisation Liberty has called it a

“staggering escalation of the Government’s clampdown on dissent.”

We are in the grip of multiple crises: a cost of living scandal that is pushing millions of households into fuel and food poverty; a war in Ukraine with disastrous consequences; and the accelerating climate and nature emergencies. What we need at this critical juncture is more democracy, not less—not a ban on our constituents participating in certain protests, not subjecting them to 24-hour GPS monitoring for the crime of disagreeing with the Government, and not barring them from participation in public life.

Today I want to focus on serious disruption prevention orders. I will also touch on stop and search, and the creation of new offences. Serious disruption prevention orders are a form of banning order that might more accurately be called “sinister disproportionate political orders”. They are sinister because the idea that someone can be banned from attending a protest for up to two years simply because they have participated in at least two previous protests within a five-year period is nothing short of Orwellian.

People do not need to have been convicted of a crime to be subject to an order. They just need to have dared to exercise the right to take part in a peaceful protest: dared to have attended rallies against Brexit; dared to have marched against going to war; dared to have held our children’s hands as they went on climate strike. How will the police know whether someone falls into that category? How will they know that someone is engaged in other activities that the Bill deems unlawful, such as buying a bike lock or painting a banner? Thanks to drastically expanded surveillance powers, of course, about which I will say more shortly.

The world was rightly outraged by footage of peaceful protestors in Russia being bundled into police vans and silenced for opposing Putin’s war in Ukraine. Make no mistake, this clampdown on British citizens is cut from the same cloth. I will spell it out: an SDPO would completely remove someone’s right to attend a protest, and therefore must be resisted by any right-thinking person who values our democracy.

Proposals to impose sinister banning orders are nothing new, and have time and again been labelled disproportionate. In response to a previous iteration of such orders, Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary and fire and rescue services, and even the Home Office, issued the same warning about their impact on people’s ability to take part in protest. Her Majesty’s inspectorate stated:

“It is difficult to envisage a case where less intrusive measures could not be taken to address the risk that an individual poses, and where a court would therefore accept that it was proportionate to impose a banning order.”

In other words, the provisions in the Bill to restrict citizens are disproportionate to the supposed threats they seek to address.

Moreover, the Bill takes state surveillance to chilling new levels—for example, allowing electronic monitoring of someone subjected to an SDPO, with only the vaguest safeguards applying to any data collected, and the potential for associated negative impacts on individuals’ privacy and the wider community. It bears repeating that this could happen to someone who has committed no crime. As someone who has used parliamentary privilege in this place to open the lid on the immoral and arguably unlawful actions and sanctioning of police spies, this causes me considerable concern. The Home Office argues that such levels of interference are justified by the emergence of groups such as Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil, but existing legislation—for example, the Public Order Act 1986 and the Protection from Harassment Act 1997—already grants the powers that reasonable policing of such protests demands.

The Bill is also disproportionate because the new offences could criminalise people for linking arms and having in their possession everyday items such as the bike locks that are simply “capable of causing” so-called “serious disruption”. There is no requirement for any disruption to be actually happening. The provisions just about fall short of policing people’s thoughts and intentions, but the direction of travel is clear and it should terrify us all.

The orders are sinister, disproportionate, and political—political, because the provisions allow far too much scope for police interpretation. On the new broad power for protest-specific stop and search, for example, a suspicion that someone might have knitting needles, a hoodie or even just a marker pen in their bag could be grounds for the police to act, but it does not stop there.

Mr Holden

The hon. Lady is making a powerful speech from her perspective. Could she ever consider a circumstance in which the section 60 stop and search power, which covers an area for a long period, is ever justifiable—or should it also be removed from the police?

Caroline Lucas

As others have said, evidence-based stop and search—where there is evidence and a good reason—is not in question. What is in question here is stop and search on the basis of a whim. As others have eloquently said, there is a very real danger of antagonising some groups who are already most disadvantaged, and therefore making the situation far worse.

The Government want to give the police powers to stop and search a person or a vehicle in a protest context, even when there are no grounds for suspicion. That will be permissible simply if a police officer believes that an offence—such as wilfully obstructing a highway or intentionally causing a public nuisance—might happen in the area or thinks that some people in the area might be carrying prohibited items; and there we are, back to the marker pens and knitting needles.

Protest is, by its very nature, liable to cause a public nuisance, disruption and noise, and to have specific targets, but real democratic leadership does not seek to ban opposition voices from protesting. Only a cowardly Government, who do not trust or respect their people, would take such a step.

Kit Malthouse

I wanted to ask whether the hon. Lady, notwithstanding her objection to the banning of protest, subscribes to the enthusiasm across the House for the ban of protests near abortion centres or clinics, and supports the creation of buffer zones that ban protests in those circumstances. If that is the case, is she possibly guilty of wanting to ban only protests with which she does not agree?

Caroline Lucas

I disagree with the premise of the Minister’s intervention. I have been proudly at the forefront of moves to say that women seeking their right to healthcare should not be subject to the personal, direct and threatening individual harassment that happens all too frequently outside abortion centres. I would wager that I have been on more demonstrations than anyone on the Government Benches—I have been arrested for them and I have been alongside them, and I have to say in parentheses that the characterisation of protesters by Government Members is wildly short of the mark—but I have seen nothing that is tantamount to the kind of harassment and direct intimidation that I have seen outside abortion centres, which is why the Minister’s comparison is not a reasonable one.

While I am on the subject of who protesters are, let me say that I am fascinated by the division between the protesters we support and those we do not. It seems to me that we support the ones who are silent and probably protesting in their own front rooms, because we do not like protest to be disruptive.

Tom Hunt

Will the hon. Member give way?

Caroline Lucas

No, I will not.

Protest is, by definition, disruptive. I can promise Government Members that the protesters I have been alongside include grandmothers who have never been on a protest before, nurses, doctors, teachers, care workers and people who collect the refuse. They are our community. I do not buy into the division that the Government are trying to make between a community on the one side and protesters on the other. The protesters are from those communities; they come up from them and are part of them. I say no to the kind of divisiveness that I have been hearing and we have been subjected to over and over again for the past five hours that we have been sat here.

Even if Ministers persist with this draconian and dangerous Bill, I sincerely hope that they will at least recognise the dangerous impact of already existing suspicionless stop and search powers, including their ineffectiveness, and their contribution to racial disproportionality and erosion of trust in the criminal justice system. I hope that the Government will not seek to extend them and therefore perpetuate such outcomes. More than that, though, my hope is that the Bill, which is riven with political ideology—and, frankly, puts the police in an untenable position—can be stopped in its tracks. I cannot find one shred of sense, proportionately or necessity in the Bill, and I hope that colleagues will join me in opposing it at every opportunity.

May 25, 2022
Lee Anderson – 2022 Speech on the Public Order Bill

The speech made by Lee Anderson, the Conservative MP for Ashfield, in the House of Commons on 23 May 2022.

Now then: I will try to keep my speech brief and, in my usual fashion, I will try not to be controversial.

We have a proud tradition in this country of being able to protest and have our voices heard. We have something else in this country, too: something called democracy, which sometimes Opposition Members forget about. At the last general election, we got an 80-seat majority to get tough on law and order. The Bill will deliver that.

I am one of the people in this Chamber who has stood on a picket line. In 1984, when the miners’ strike was on, I stood on the picket lines for a year with my dad, my uncles and my friends. I saw the good and the bad of protests. The good was that in the most dire circumstances, men could keep their spirits up and protest for something that they believed in. But I also saw the bad: the violence, the horrible scenes, the miners getting injured, the police getting injured, the police horses getting injured, the dogs getting injured. They were awful, awful times and I never want to go back to them; I did not think we would until I saw the horrible scenes on Whitehall when the BLM protests took place just a year or so ago. They were awful, awful scenes that I never want us to go back to, but protest is important in this country.

I have held my own protests over the years—I will tell the House about a couple. I was attacked viciously for both protests by the Labour party and the left in this country. I did a simple protest last year during the football. I refused to watch the England team because of their stance on taking the knee—that was my little protest. It was not a violent protest; I did not go out on the streets, I was not banging drums, I did not get my megaphone out, I did not shout at people. All I did was refuse to watch a few football matches, and what happened? I was attacked by every single Opposition Member and by the mainstream media. In fact, the Daily Mirror voted me the worst man in Britain, an accolade that is so close to my heart and that I am so proud of that I hope I get it this year as well.

Another one-man protest that I did was in Ashfield a few years back—it was when I was a Labour councillor, by the way. We had a problem at a beauty spot in Ashfield where the Travellers kept coming. They kept ruining the site: they would leave rubbish, they would be out thieving at night, and pets were going missing. There were all sorts of shenanigans: threatening people, effing and blinding, playing music, making fires and burning wire—all the typical behaviour that we would associate with a site like that. I asked the council to put some barriers up to stop the Travellers coming back. The council refused, so we tidied the site up—it cost thousands and thousands of pounds—but then the Travellers returned and did exactly the same. There was foul-smelling smoke from the fires—they were burning wire to get the copper out—neighbours were being threatened, and there was excrement everywhere. Eventually the conditions became so bad that the Travellers could not live there anymore, and they moved on again.

I thought, “My goodness, we cannot carry on like this—we have to sort this out.” Again I said to the council, “Put some barriers up”, and again they said no, so I got a JCB and two big boulders from a local demolition site, and I blocked the car park off. Guess what: the Travellers did not come back, because they could not get on to the site, but guess what the local Labour group did. Guess what the Momentum-controlled Labour group did, because of my one-man protest. They issued me with a £100 fine for fly-tipping. That was them agreeing with my protest, or rather not agreeing with it. My common-sense residents, in a red wall area, said, “We will pay that fine for you.” Luckily the fine was rescinded in the end, but that just shows what the Labour party thinks: when one person tries to organise a protest on their own, it issues fines.

What the House has to realise is that we are not voting to stop protests. We are voting to keep members of the public safe. We are voting to keep our roads open. We are voting to allow people to go about their daily business and not be hindered. We are voting to stop criminal damage. What is wrong with that? I just do not understand why anyone would vote against it. I have said this before. We have seen these eco-hooligans, or whatever they are, dancing in the street, off their heads on something, blocking motorways by gluing their ears to them. It is unbelievable, and unlike Opposition Members, the people of this great country of ours have had enough of it. They are sick of seeing it. They are sick of switching the TV on and seeing these idiots stopping our way of life. Anybody would think that we were voting to live in a communist state, but we are not. We just want people to live in a safe country and to go about their business. I wonder if that lot opposite understand how angry the British people are when they see statues being pulled down and buildings being damaged. Do they think it is bleeding clever?

An Opposition Member who is not in the Chamber at the moment spoke about the type of people who demonstrate. I will tell you about the type of people who have been on the demonstrations that we have been seeing, such as members of Insulate Britain and all these eco-warriors. There are three categories. There are the middle-aged hippies, who are probably about my age and probably have a few bob in the bank. They drive their big 4x4s, and they turn up to a protest in their hemp vests with, no doubt, a bowl of the latest eco-friendly muesli in their rucksacks, and they cause absolute mayhem, because they have nothing better to do. Then there are the Socialist Worker types. I used to meet some of them back in the earlier days, and not one of them went to work. That is the irony: they were socialists, but not one of them went to work. Not one of them had a job. They, too, had nothing better to do than go out and cause trouble. Opposition Members are looking at me with glazed expressions on their faces, but that is the socialist workers! I am not even going to start on the students, because they are young and they will grow out of it. They will know better.

We all saw the disgusting scenes in Whitehall during the Black Lives Matter riots just a year or so ago. As a party, we were quick to condemn the violence, and rightly so, but what did Labour do? Did they condemn the violence? No; they sent the troops out. They went out and stood shoulder to shoulder with the rioters, the same rioters who were attacking our police outside Downing Street. It is absolutely disgraceful.

All that we in the Conservative party want to less criminals on the street, less knives on the street and less trouble on the street, so for once, please, will those on the Opposition Benches do four things? Will they back our police, back our people, back our country, and back this Bill?

May 25, 2022
Clive Lewis – 2022 Speech on the Public Order Bill

The speech made by Clive Lewis, the Labour MP for Norwich South, in the House of Commons on 23 May 2022.

It is always an experience to speak after the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis)—what kind of experience, I do not think parliamentary etiquette allows to me to express, but it is an experience none the less.

I would like to comment on some of the engagement tonight from Government Members, because it is quite instructive. It is like a one-sided equation. They want to make this issue about the disruption to individuals and the cost to business, and although that is one side of the equation, there is another side to it: the disruption that the climate crisis is bringing to people around the world already and to this country. One thing that the House may or may not know is that, between 2010 and 2019, it is estimated that 5 million people have already died from the effects of the climate crisis. I understand that Government Members want to talk about an individual in an ambulance, an individual who has been disrupted, but we should think about the global disruption and what is happening around the world. Some 800,000 of those people were in Europe. This is not just happening elsewhere—it is happening here and now.

Jonathan Gullis

I am not in denial about the importance of dealing with the climate emergency, but does the hon. Gentleman accept that those who are leading these so-called protests should be leading by example? Saying that they do not care about insulating homes, or insulating their own home, does not send a very good message from the top when they are trying to convince the nation to follow their lead.

Clive Lewis

That individual has made their comments, but I guess the question we have to ask is who are the criminals. Are the criminals those individuals who are trying to come together collectively to stand up against a Government who are failing them on the climate crisis, or against billion-pound corporations with pockets deep enough to buy influence in Parliament and across politics? Are the criminals those individuals who are trying to use the only apparatus that they have to stand up and speak up for what they feel impassioned about? I would argue that the real criminals are those who are wilfully pushing to extract more oil from our oilfields and who are pushing us off an existential cliff edge. I think that this country and the British people increasingly understand that those are the people who need to be held to account.

Members need not take my word for it; they should listen to that socialist radical, the Secretary-General of the UN. The hon. Gentleman may think that the Secretary-General is woke, but I think he is increasingly important to global politics. He wrote:

“Climate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals. But the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels.”

Cue our own Government attempting to do just that.

Opposition Members know all too well this Government’s track record of attacks on human rights, democracy, the poor, the vulnerable, trade unions, justice and migrants. Undermining our democratic right to protest goes against the very essence of what it means to live in a democracy.

Again, hon. Members do not have to take my word for it. The Joint Committee on Human Rights described proposals set out in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 as “oppressive and wrong”. The Equality and Human Rights Commission stated that measures in it undermine human rights legislation. Former senior police officers described it as “harmful to democracy”. Some 700 legal academics called for it to be dropped. UN special rapporteurs and top human rights officials warned that it threatens our rights. More than 600,000 members of the public signed a petition against it.

What possible motivation could the Government have to push through such an authoritarian and regressive Bill? I think that that is a legitimate question for Opposition Members to ask. The Bill is so regressive and anti-democratic that even Conservative Members are baulking at its sweeping, draconian powers.

Let us take a look at the Bill’s provisions on protests involving critical infrastructure. Like so much of this Government’s agenda, they have been lifted directly from the hard neo-con right in the US. A Bloomberg News exposé from 2019 uncovered extensive lobbying by the oil and gas industry to criminalise protest near extraction sites. We know that the Conservative party has received more than a million pounds from the oil and gas industry in the past few years, so it is legitimate to ask what the Government’s motivations are for the Bill.

Jonathan Gullis

The hon. Gentleman talks about motivations. May I ask about the Labour party’s motivations from the millions that it takes from trade unions?

Clive Lewis

Trade union money is the cleanest money in British politics. [Laughter.] The hon. Gentleman can quote me: it is the cleanest money, because we declare it and because we are representing the interests of workers, which is why our party was set up. We have no shame; we are proud of where our funding comes from.

As many Opposition Members have seen, much of the money that funds the Conservative party has come from the kleptocrats of Russia, with whom Conservative Members have more in common than with the people of this country.

Tom Hunt

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Clive Lewis

No, I will make some progress.

The issue of freedom goes to the heart of the Bill. Conservative Members revel in being the so-called party of freedom, but let us interrogate that a little. Some freedoms are zero-sum, but unfortunately many are not. As Isaiah Berlin explained, freedom for the pike means death for the minnow.

Conservative Members often talk about freedom—freedom for people to go about their lives and so on—but we must ask a critical question: freedom for whom and freedom against whom? That is what they do not explain. Freedom from trade unions is freedom for corporations to exploit their workers. Freedom from regulation and red tape, as Conservative Members call it, is freedom for corporations to pollute our rivers and restrict our freedom to swim or fish. Freedom from tax, another Conservative staple, is freedom from the redistribution that is essential for fairness and social mobility.

Now freedom is being mentioned again, and this time it is freedom from protest. That means freedom against the public’s right and ability to hold big business and the Government to account for the climate destruction that they are undertaking. Opposition Members know which side Conservative Members are on. Increasingly, so do the British public. You may wrap this up in the ability of law and order to hold back the unwashed masses, but actually they are the people who are fighting for all our freedoms, for our future and for a world without a climate crisis fuelled by your friends in the big corporations and the oil sector. That is the reality.

May 25, 2022
Jonathan Gullis – 2022 Speech on the Public Order Bill

The speech made by Jonathan Gullis, the Conservative MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, in the House of Commons on 23 May 2022.

The people of Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke warmly welcome this important legislation, because it is doing exactly what they want to see: holding those criminals accountable for their criminality. No one is standing here seriously suggesting that, when the people of Stoke-on-Trent go to Hanley town centre to stand together to protest for the rights of the Kashmiri people—I have attended in person—the police will come in heavy-handed while we stand peacefully and speak through a microphone to constituents and residents from across the area to raise concerns about the human rights abuses happening to the people of Kashmir.

No one is saying that, when certain trade unions want to stand peacefully outside my office in protest, to demonstrate against some cause, I am expecting the police to come in and round those people up. I am not. I welcome them coming outside my office. I am more than happy to hear their cause, and engage with them in conversation and debate. Even if we end up agreeing to disagree, no one in their right mind is saying that the police are going to prevent that action from happening. No one in Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke believes for a second that that would be appropriate. If that were the case with this legislation, I would stand up to oppose the Bill. But I am supporting it because it is doing something: tackling criminal behaviour.

People gluing themselves to the M25, where people are traveling at 70 miles an hour—women and children in cars that could easily crash, ending up with loss of life —are apparently willing to sacrifice their own safety and their own lives for a cause. However, they are not even able to stand up for their beliefs and values. The hypocritical nature of those campaigns is what drives people berserk in Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke.

For example, Liam Norton from Insulate Britain says he “doesn’t care” about insulating homes—his words. He does not even insulate his own home. He has no insulation in the walls and has single pane glass. People simply do not like hypocrites. He even called himself a hypocrite. We are talking about individuals who are running campaigns—some crusty eco-woke warrior wanting to make some sort of point on Twitter, so they can get lots of likes from the far left that make that particular social media platform vile and abusive. Thank God I am not on it; great for my mental health. Then we see their actions. Gail Bradbrook from Extinction Rebellion drives a diesel car and takes an 11,000-mile round trip to Costa Rica, contributing 2.6 tonnes of carbon footprint, which is a quarter of a Brit’s yearly average.

Practice what you preach. Do not stand up and virtue-signal for the sake of it or try to pontificate—as the Labour party regularly does—in order to make a point that will get a few more likes in woke London or on Twitter. Instead, stand up for people of this country who want to see an end to criminal behaviour by those jumping on top of tube trains or blocking lorries, for example, some of which are carrying cooking oil or carrying oil at a time when we have a global fuel crisis. Those are the type of mad things that people are sick of seeing.

Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)

My hon. Friend is right that these are largely deranged members of the bourgeoise making working people’s lives difficult, but, actually, the situation is more serious still. In the case of the demonstrations and protests that he describes, the action meant holding up an ambulance on its way to an emergency and stopping a woman getting to the home of her 95-year-old mother who had had a fall. It meant that the people protesting were wholly and completely disregarding the horror and pain that they were causing. That shows the sort of people they are. This is about not hypocrisy, but carelessness and heartlessness.

Jonathan Gullis

My right hon. Friend makes a fantastic point. Let us think about the people who were not able to get to their cancer screening appointment; the children who were not able to be in school because of lockdown and who are having their education in the classroom—with their expert classroom teacher—further delayed; the emergency services trying to go about their jobs, having to deal with protesters; and the police from as far away as Scotland coming down to London, meaning that they are not on the streets of the local areas that they should be serving, allowing criminals potentially to run wild there because of some selfish individuals.

Anne McLaughlin

The hon. Gentleman keeps going on about criminals, saying “We’ve got to get rid of these criminals” and “We’ve got to do something about these criminals.” He is characterising an awful lot of people as criminals. If they are already criminals, that means that they have committed a crime and have already been charged and found guilty—or he thinks that they should have been, so why have they not been? Incidentally, the Bill creates an awful lot of civil offences. Those are not criminal either, so why and on what basis is he calling such people criminals?

Jonathan Gullis

I thank the hon. Lady for that intervention. She says that I talk about criminals. She referred earlier to the Black Lives Matter protest, and I have absolutely no issue with having that important debate about racial inequality in society and looking at what more can be done. However, when a particular individual went up on the Cenotaph and tried to set alight the Union flag, as though it was somehow making some sort of demonstration—this is a memorial to our glorious dead who made the ultimate sacrifice and gave their tomorrow for our today—that was criminal behaviour. That is why that needs to be called out and why I introduced the Desecration of War Memorials Bill, which was accepted by the Government and became part of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. I did so despite the sniping from the Labour party, which claimed that I was more interested in protecting statues—it was not statues; it was war memorials to the glorious dead and war graves so that every village, every town and every city of our country remembers those who made those important sacrifices. I am someone who lost a friend when he was serving his nation in Afghanistan. That is why I felt so incensed by those disgusting, vile scenes that I saw up on the Cenotaph.

That is why any Opposition Member who does not understand why this Bill is important is seriously out of touch with the people of this country. It is the silent majority, time and again. The problem is that the Labour party is obsessed with Twitter being somehow the mouthpiece of Britain, or with any other woke, virtue-signalling thing such as Channel 4 that Labour seems to believe must be right on every single issue. That is the problem with the Labour party and why it was so overwhelmingly rejected by the people of Stoke-on-Trent—in Stoke-on-Trent North, Stoke-on-Trent Central and Stoke-on-Trent South, for the first time.

If Labour Members want any more proof, they should look at the May local elections in Newcastle-under-Lyme. Labour was touted to take control of that council in every single national poll and every single national newspaper. The Labour party was openly briefing that it would win that council. The Labour leader of the group at that time openly said at the count that that was their No. 1 target council, and that Labour had thrown all the extra money and resources at it. What happened? The Conservatives took that council with seven gains. They took it from no overall control to being Conservative-led for the first time in that council’s history, while Labour went backwards. If that is not a wake-up signal, I do not know what is.

Lee Anderson

It is very pleasing to see that my hon. Friend has finally come off the fence in support of this very important Bill. With the Opposition—especially the Labour party—continually voting against the measures that this Government are introducing to protect the people of this country, does he think that it may be a good idea for those Labour MPs to come to Stoke-on-Trent North, Ashfield, Dudley or Ipswich and speak to some real people in real places?

Jonathan Gullis

I could not agree more. I think we do need to organise a trip round the red wall so that Labour Members can actually understand why the Labour party lost those seats. [Interruption.] I hear the sniggering from Opposition Members when I mention Stoke-on-Trent. The only Stoke that the Labour party is aware of is Stoke Newington. They have not gone any further north than that in the last number of years, which is why, again, we have a Conservative-led Stoke-on-Trent City Council, a Conservative-run Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council and a Conservative-run Staffordshire County Council. Under Tony Blair, a man who actually used to win Labour elections, it used to have six of the 12 MPs for the local area. Labour ran the county council at one stage, had control of Stoke city council and ran Newcastle borough council. Those are the facts.

Marsha De Cordova (Battersea) (Lab)

I do not even want to thank the hon. Member for giving way to me, because frankly, his speech is becoming quite insulting. He is talking to Members of Parliament who were elected by the people—in my case, by the people of Battersea—to represent them. I am really grateful that, finally, the people of Wandsworth decided to vote for Labour and kick the Tories out after 44 years of rule to elect a Labour council. We know what the people of London need and we do not need to take lessons from the hon. Member.

Jonathan Gullis

Well, Croydon spoke quite loudly, if I remember correctly, by deciding to elect a Conservative Mayor and upping the amount of councillors in Croydon. We had places like Bromley holding on, and Old Bexley and Sidcup, and Harrow going towards the Conservative party. And there is now mass opposition to the mental plan of the Mayor of London, who wants to expand the ultra low emission zone across the whole Greater London area, smashing 135,000 drivers in the pocket with a daily charge and killing small businesses. If this is Labour-run London, God forbid a Labour-run United Kingdom. It would be absolutely terrifying to see what could happen to our community. [Interruption.] It is lovely to see you in the Chair now by the way, Madam Deputy Speaker.

This Bill is so important because it is about making sure that action is taken if someone wants to glue themselves to a train, risk their health and wellbeing, and delay people going to work to earn their money at a time when we are facing a global crisis with inflation, a global crisis with the cost of energy, and a global crisis of food prices, because of events happening in Ukraine, as well as the fact, obviously, that we are coming out of a global lockdown—I know that Labour Members seem to want to pretend that that did not exist. Ultimately, all those things put together mean that, when people are not able to go about their daily lives because of a mindless minority of morons who want to act in an inappropriate way by blocking the road, stopping the trains, stopping oil tankers and smashing up petrol stations, this Bill is necessary.

Finally, I appreciate that the shadow Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), is no longer in her place, but I thought that, when she stood at the Dispatch Box today, she gave a very passionate and good speech about why the actions of Insulate Britain, Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil were unlawful. She made a fantastic point about why action needs to be taken, so the House can imagine why the people of Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke are simply baffled that Labour Members will not join us in the Lobby this evening and will instead vote against a Bill that they seem in principle to support. However, because of certain Back Benchers, they just do not want to face that rebellion and stare it down. It is a shame that the Labour party has a long way to go.

May 25, 2022