"I was on the rota to drive the XR van that day," Raithby told openDemocracy. "We loaded up the van, including the water sprayers. I didn't know what they were going to be used for, but you'd struggle to cause any criminal damage with the things. They aren't like fire extinguishers, they are low-pressure, backpack water sprayers. We drove to the drop-off point, and the police were all over us.
"The police said the van had been seen handing out flares the day before, which was not true. Then they tried to say I was not insured to drive the van. Then they tried to say the van was not roadworthy even though it had passed its MOT the month before. So they impounded the van, and I ended up in the crown court accused of planning criminal damage."
If it sounds ridiculous, that's because it is. As solicitor Raj Chada, a partner at Hodge, Jones and Allen who has represented protesters including Raithby in recent years, said: "Nothing illustrates the absurdity of prosecution decisions when it comes to protest cases than the decision to prosecute Paul Raithby for having a canister full of water".
But stringent new protest laws introduced by the Conservatives, first under the Police, Crime, Courts and Sentencing Act 2022 and then the Public Order Act 2023, mean this is the new, surreal reality for anyone who chooses to protest or gets caught up in a protest in England and Wales. A whole raft of legislation has made it harder to take part in protest, intensified the punishment for anyone guilty of protest offences, and clogged up courts with cases such as Raithby's, where there is little to no chance of conviction.
In my younger days, I was a feminist activist. I remember jumping up onto a bench, loudhailer in hand, shouting statistics about men's violence against women and girls to a bemused crowd. Reading about the new legislation made me wonder whether the actions that I used to do unthinkingly would now be unthinkable. I wanted to find out what impact the new protest laws have on our freedom to protest and therefore on our democratic rights. In essence, is the old adage, 'if you do nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear', still true today?
That's why I have spent the past six months investigating the extent of the new anti-protest laws and their impact on democratic freedoms. I sent dozens of Freedom of Information requests to police forces, universities and government departments; interviewed dozens more activists, lawyers and former police officers; attended protests, and scoured through parliamentary debates, all to understand how a government that proclaimed to be a defender of free speech instead created the greatest threat to our civil liberties for generations.
"We used to have protests where some people would be the 'arrestables'," said Kristin, an XR activist who asked openDemocracy not to publish her surname. "They would be the ones who would volunteer to do the part of the action that could lead to arrest."
She took a deep sigh.
"Now, we are all arrestables."
And "all" means us all – not just climate protesters willing to glue themselves to tarmac, or throw washable powder on Stonehenge.
"What authoritarian governments and regimes do is take a wedge issue and use it as the thin end of the wedge," Labour MP Clive Lewis told openDemocracy. "They pick particular issues which they feel a section of the public may be exasperated about, or have concern about, or there's been a media storm about, and they then use that to prise open your rights, and to change the law.
"They can say – you have nothing to worry about. It's these other people we're after. The climate protesters, Gaza protests, Black Lives Matter; these are the people we're going after. You don't have to worry about your project. But it doesn't work like that, because once the law is there, the law can then expand to target anyone, depending on any new government front that opens up.
"Liberty is something to be protected, and it has to be universal, otherwise next it will be your liberties that will be attacked and undermined," he said.
New laws, new powers
In 2019, parts of central London were temporarily brought to a halt as a group of climate protesters gathered on Tower Bridge, demanding a global rebellion against the climate crisis. The protest was joyful, with one woman who attended recalling "a real warm and feminine energy".
Similar rebellions, often with theatrical and artistic elements, spread to cities across the country, in London, Brighton, Bristol, Leeds, Glasgow and elsewhere. Though police officers were often present, the atmosphere was quite jovial, according to various activists who attended.
"The police have the same worries about the climate we have," said Raithby. "We used to have chants reaching out to the police and saying we are doing this for their children too."
The following year, another wave of protests hit the UK's streets – this time in response to the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in the US. Black Lives Matter marches and vigils took over cities, and in Bristol led to the pulling down of a controversial statue of the notorious enslaver Edward Colston.
The Conservative government had a dilemma. Its MPs had built up a reputation as defenders of free speech against what they described as woke, "cancel culture"-driven snowflakes intent on shutting down debate.
In 2020, the Conservatives had condemned a failed attempt by a Labour MP to introduce buffer zones around abortion clinics – spaces where anti-abortion protests are banned – as an affront to free speech and protest. But they also wanted to stop the climate and BLM protests that challenged their policy platform, and which they perceived as threatening both the economy and their rule.
The answer was a two-pronged attack. The first was a wholesale culture war against 'social justice', which presented BLM, climate, feminist and migrant rights activists as a fifth column determined to bring the country to a halt. The second was passing new and draconian legislation to tackle this so-called left-wing 'threat'.
On 9 March 2021, Braverman's predecessor as home secretary, Priti Patel, introduced the Police, Crimes, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Bill, naming both XR and BLM protests as its targets. The act became law in early 2022, creating a new definition of "serious disruption" to give the police licence to ban actions that prevent or disrupt people's daily activities, including journeys and goods deliveries, "in a way that is more than minor".
The legislation also got rid of the common law offence of public nuisance, creating the more serious and more broad offence of "intentionally or recklessly causing public nuisance". The new law criminalised an action that "creates a risk of or causes serious harm to the public or a section of the public, or prevents the public or a section of the public from exercising their rights."
"Take a protest action such as obstructing a highway, maybe one of the London bridges," said Nic Harries, a retired solicitor who works closely with XR. "Under the old laws, a conviction for such obstruction would incur nothing more than a fine. Now, under Section 78 of the PCSC, such protest activity could well be considered to be a public nuisance, which carries a maximum ten-year prison sentence."
The changes in the law have had a "chilling effect", Harries added.
"There will always be a hardcore of activists who will be up for getting arrested no matter what. But there are far more people who are anxious about not being arrested and not going through the court process and ending up with a conviction.
"It's very hard for people who want to go and participate as there can never be an assurance that you'll never be arrested, because now you just don't know."
I asked the 43 police forces across England and Wales how they were implementing the new laws, requesting data on arrests made for the offences of "intentionally or recklessly causing a public nuisance" and "wilful obstruction of a highway".
Unsurprisingly, the results were variable, with some forces policing more protests than others.
Between summer 2022 and 30 November 2024, 30 forces made 1,151 arrests for public nuisance. Seven forces made no arrests, while the remaining six refused to answer my request. In the same time period, 28 forces made 1,234 arrests for obstructing the highway. Nine forces made no arrests for that offence and six refused the request on grounds that it would cost too much in staff's time to compile the data.
London's Metropolitan Police made the largest number of arrests for both offences: 174 for public nuisance and 955 for highway obstruction.
I also asked police forces how often they have used powers introduced in Section 75 of the act that allow police to prevent protests causing serious disruption, such as noise or property damage. Five forces had used the powers a total of 39 times, with Wiltshire police having used the powers the most frequently: 26 times.
Wiltshire was also the only force in England and Wales to confirm it had used new powers to restrict one-person protests that cause serious disruption, having done so on 10 occasions. Five forces refused to answer the request, and the remaining 33 had not used the power.
Katie Burrell is an XR activist who became one of the first protesters caught up in the new legislation, when she took part in a 2023 action that interrupted a women's golf tournament sponsored by the AIG insurance firm – part of the group's campaign to encourage insurance firms to divest from fossil fuel projects.
"We thought if we were arrested it would be for aggravated trespass," said Burrell, a 51-year-old who spent her career working in communications. "Then they told us it was for public nuisance. At first, I thought that's not so bad, that sounds better than trespass. Until I looked it up and saw it meant a maximum of ten years in prison."
The case was set for June 2026, three years after the action took place, with Burrell put on bail. "So you can imagine having that hanging over you for all that time," Burrell said. The charges against her were eventually dropped due to a lack of evidence.
Burrell does not believe the public is on board with the crackdown on protest. "I took part in a road sit-in, in Clapham [in south London], in 2021 so before the new laws," she said. "We chose a place where you could drive around us if needed. And I remember, this woman came out and I thought she might be annoyed but she actually brought me a glass of water and said that what we were doing was brilliant. A dad was watching us and talking to his children about the suffragettes."
Then a police car arrived. Two officers got out and physically dragged Burrell off the road as members of the public looked on.
"It really upset the spectators, to see the police dragging a woman in this way." Burrell said. "It's just a form of oppression. It's another form of oppression."
The PCSC also introduced new penalties to "conspire" to cause a public nuisance, an offence that hung over Just Stop Oil activist James Skeet for two years before he and five of his fellow activists were acquitted in Southwark Crown Court in March 2025, with two of his colleagues found guilty. The group had been arrested for activities relating to a planned blockade of the M25, the motorway that encircles most of Greater London and is one of the busiest roads in the UK.
"I was staying in a house that got hit by a SWAT team," Skeet told openDemocracy, recalling the night of his arrest in 2022. "The door got kicked in, and I got pinned to the sofa, at 1am."
In the years between his arrest and court date, Skeet remained confident that the charges would not stick. "There's no evidence of what they are alleging, and I know that because no evidence exists. But obviously it's still a bit scary," he said when we spoke in the run-up to his trial.
At the time, Skeet was on bail. "My bail conditions mean I can't take part in any protest," he explained. "So my right to protest has basically been curtailed since 2022." He also expressed concerns that he and Just Stop Oil had been placed under a "pervasive surveillance campaign" while he awaited court. As the new anti-protest laws are categorised as far more serious offences than their predecessors, they allow for greater police surveillance. 'It's sort of terrifying," he said.
Skeet owns his house and told me he felt "under duress" to plead guilty or to go to court without legal representation in order to protect his financial assets – pointing out that this "is counter to the right to a fair trial in the convention of human rights".
As with everyone I spoke to, Skeet's fear was real but his main concerns were not for his own safety, but the safety of the planet and the ways in which these new laws deny people the chance to take to the streets and fight for their future.
"It's all pretty stressful and I haven't been sleeping that well," he said.
"The way that I've tried to make peace with it is, if my experience of the climate crisis is some time in prison or a threat to my property, I think that that still leaves me in quite a privileged position.
"Because look, 30 million people got displaced in Pakistan in 2022 because of flooding, mothers in Valencia are having to drag their babies from the mud due to floods, there are floods in Manchester where people have lost everything. I can still count myself lucky."
I couldn't help but admire his statement of compassion for those suffering around the world. I am not sure I, facing a spell in prison for protest, would be quite so caring or philosophical.
Despite the crackdown that led to Burrell and Skeet's arrests, the PCSC failed to stop protests. At least seven major climate demonstrations – including on the M25 – took place in the first four months after the law was passed in January 2022.
Faced with this reality, the Conservative government felt the legislation had not gone far enough. Rambunctious debates in the House of Commons and the Lords had defeated multiple powers that it wanted to introduce in the law, such as the ability to ban individuals from a protest and a ban on locking on (when protesters attach themselves to another person, land or an object in order to make it more difficult to remove them).
Ministers were not happy with the act they had ended up with. So they tried again.
You can read the rest of the article here 
0 comentários:
Postar um comentário