On 23 August 2020 Home Secretary Priti Patel announced that existing Covid restrictions on gatherings of 30+ people would be tightened and that organising such a gathering would become a criminal offence subject to a fixed penalty of up to £10,000. This came into force on 28 August and was immediately used to target protests and parties. On 5 September the Metropolitan Police website reported that in London so far 20 people had been reported for consideration of a Fixed Penalty Notice for organising gatherings of 30+ people. On 14 September, the government brought in yet tighter regulations under the so-called ‘Rule of Six’ and on 23 September doubled the fines for breaching this rule, or for not wearing face coverings on public transport and in other designated places. NICKI JAMESON reports.
When the majority of lockdown restrictions were eased at the beginning of July, the Regulations for England continued to ban gatherings of more than 30 people, with fines starting at £100 and rising to £3,200 for those who participated in such a gathering in breach of the rules. However prior to the bank holiday weekend of 29-31 August, this was only very selectively enforced – in the main being used in an overtly discriminatory manner against some groups of young, predominantly black, people having outdoor parties.
Following Patel’s announcement, the first person targeted under the new Regulations was Ken Hinds, one of the organisers of the ‘Million Person March’, commemorating the anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream speech’. This was scheduled to take place on Sunday 30 August, assembling in Notting Hill, where the annual carnival had been cancelled due to the pandemic, and in the week prior to the event Hinds received a letter threatening him with arrest and prosecution if the march went ahead.
With the help of ITN solicitors, Hinds successfully challenged the police’s attempt to criminalise him and ban the protest. In a pre-action letter to the Metropolitan Police the solicitors argued that the planned protest was exempt from the restriction on numbers, as the Regulations stated that the ceiling of 30 people did not apply to an event organised by ‘a business, a charitable, benevolent or philanthropic institution, a public body or a political body’, where that body had carried out a health and safety risk assessment and ‘taken all reasonable measures to limit the risk of transmission of the coronavirus’.
This victory did not prevent the police continuing to use its new powers against political events. On 29 August, after an anti-lockdown rally in central London, at which the majority of attendees were right-wing conspiracy theory followers, Piers Corbyn, the increasingly reactionary brother of Jeremy, was arrested, held for ten hours and served with a £10,000 fixed penalty notice for organising the event. He has said he will fight this in court. The following week he was arrested and served with a further penalty notice after a similar event in Sheffield.
Prior to the weekend of 5/6 September a wide range of political groups which had planned events were targeted in advance by the police with threats that if they went ahead both organisers and participants would be arrested. Despite the example of the successful legal challenge by Ken Hinds, several of these organisations felt unable to withstand the pressure and cancelled their events.
RCG comrades in London attended various protests which did go ahead over that weekend and were involved in the organising and stewarding of the demonstration called by Earth Strike groups outside the headquarters of polluting and murderous multinational company BlackRock. Earth Strike was not contacted in advance by the police but the organising group was aware of the Regulations and had prepared a risk assessment and taken suitable steps to prevent the spread of the virus. When shown the risk assessment on the day, officers from the City of London police refused to accept it, claiming to have checked with the Greater London Authority who told them that it was ‘not fit for purpose’. The police refused to expand on this; however allowed the demonstration to go ahead, once the 80-90 protesters had divided into three groups, with just under 30 people in each.
The following weekend, in a further example of the arbitrary and subjective way in which the Regulations are used, on a demonstration outside the Israeli embassy, comrades were asked how long they planned to protest for, and when they stated an end time, were told that this was fine but if they stayed longer, Covid Regulations regarding limit on numbers, health and safety etc would then come into force!
On 11 September, after just two weeks of this policing regime, Boris Johnson announced that the law was changing again, and that from 14 September, no more than six people could attend any gathering which is not of a type listed on a list of exemptions. Regulations to this effect now exist in England, Scotland and Wales, although they are differently worded, with children of any age counting as part of the six in England, but not in the other two countries. In the north of Ireland the number of people who can gather indoors in a private home had already been reduced from 10 to six in August, and up to 15 people are allowed to meet outdoors.
Johnson’s announcement followed a steep rise in the numbers of new coronavirus cases; however it is apparent that the so-called ‘Rule of Six’ does not have the same public support as the initial lockdown measures did and as exists for the wearing of face coverings. The unpopularity of the measures was further increased by policing minister Kit Malthouse demanding that we assist the police by grassing up our neighbours, an edict disapproved of by some of his Tory colleagues but supported by Labour’s Ed Miliband.
Since January 2020 the government has issued 238 Coronavirus-related pieces of legislation in the form of Statutory Instruments. They comprise a plethora of instructions directed variously to the ‘four nations’ of the United Kingdom, to overseas British territories such as the Falkland Islands, and to different parts of Britain subject to local lockdown regulations. Keeping up with the law is an almost impossible task; however no study of the legislation is needed to see that many of the imposed measures are arbitrary, and that much of this legal framework, rather than designed to genuinely protect people, exists to shift blame for spreading the virus onto the public and away from the shambles the government has made of testing and tracing.
