Dear Friends
Our entirely peaceful and legal presence at Whitehaven Harbour on World Oceans Day would be criminalised if a new law is passed as the Government intends on the Public Order Bill.
Baroness Jenny Jones has set up a petition to highlight that "Only a few weeks ago the Government lost a vote in the Lords on the Public Order Bill to change the interpretation of “serious disruption” of other people’s day-to-day activities to mean “anything more than minor”. The Lords opposed this change by 254 votes to 240.
The government are now trying to reinsert this change via secondary legislation which has less Parliamentary scrutiny and can’t be amended in any way. Baroness Jenny Jones has tabled a fatal motion to stop their proposal from becoming law.
If we lose the Lords vote on this Fatal Motion on Tuesday 13th June, then it allows Ministers, for the first time ever, to overturn a parliamentary vote against a new law. It sets a precedent where a government can lose votes in Parliament, when trying to pass legislation, then simply have the same laws waved through as regulations. It undermines the whole system of parliamentary democracy and allows government by diktat.
Labour needs to work with the other opposition parties to stop this legislation in its tracks. They have put a motion of regret, which opposes the government proposal, but doesn't change anything.
The government says this new law is about Just Stop Oil but in truth it will hurt anyone who ever wants to organise a protest or assembly - anyone from Friends of the Earth to local people raising an issue outside a council meeting. It allows the police and the home office to effectively decide what is a good or bad protest."
If this happens it will be bad on many levels not just for the criminalisation of peaceful protest but also setting a precedent as Jenny Jones says : "If we allow the government to get away with this repressive change to the laws of protest, which parliament has already rejected, then other Ministerial decrees will follow that see major changes to environmental and workplace protections. In the last 4 years we have passed a huge number of skeleton bills that give Ministers the power to make or change laws. This is a shifting of power from parliament to Whitehall. My Fatal Motion tries to stop Ministers taking this power grab onto a new level of government by diktat. Giving the police discretion to ban a protest that causes anything “more than minor” disruption is an assault on democracy and freedom of speech. The million strong march against the Iraq war caused masses of disruption, but under this law it would certainly make the threshold for a ban. Do we really want to give the Home Office and police the powers that we’d expect to see used in Russia?”
Please sign the Petition to ensure peaceful protesting such as ours continues to be a legitimate part of our democracy and that democracy itself is defended