Boris Johnson’s government came into power in 2019 on the crest of a wave of Brexiteering confidence. It had done with Europe and done with any threat from Labour, and was ready to reshape Britain in its own image. As with most crusading Tories, the Johnson gang’s vision centred on a liberalised and restriction-free economy exploiting a cheap, subservient workforce. In order to ensure no political resistance to this exploitation, or its accompanying racism and environmental destruction, the government has been determinedly building up its legal framework of repression. Although the government is looking a bit shaky now in the midst of ‘partygate’ and the rest of the fall-out from its cavalier handling of the pandemic, this repressive project continues apace. NICKI JAMESON reports.
House of Lords votes on Police Bill amendments
To date, the piece of legislation which has caused the most controversy and public protest is the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Bill. As we have previously reported, the Bill has received considerable attention for its anti-protest elements. It also contains a plethora of measures which will make life more difficult for prisoners, Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities, and other marginalised groups.
On 14 September 2021, the PCSC Bill began the stage of its progress through parliament which requires scrutiny by the House of Lords. The Lords then discussed and voted on a series of proposed amendments. This was completed on 17 January; after which the agreed amendments were added into Bill, which was given its Third Reading by the Lords on 25 January.
Britain’s unelected second parliamentary chamber is generally toothless, as the Commons can over-ride any amendments made by the Lords. In the case of the PCSC Bill, members of the House of Lords submitted hundreds of amendments: some attempting to ameliorate the most draconian parts, others suggesting yet harsher measures and some trying to use the Bill to bring in new ideas such as a ‘Duty to establish statutory inquiry into lessons to be learned from the death of Sarah Everard’.
The Lords’ stage also serves as a convenient place for the government to add in extra measures which it omitted from the original proposed legislation. As such additions also only have the status of House of Lords amendments, the game played between the two Houses of Parliament does mean that if they are voted down by the Lords, they cannot then be added back in by the Commons.
On 24 November, Baroness Williams, the Home Office spokesperson in the House of Lords introduced a series of amendments including:
- New criminal offences of ‘locking on’ or ‘being equipped for locking on’ and ‘obstruction of major transport works’;
- Powers to stop and search, with or without suspicion in relation to the possible commission of these offences;
- Serious Disruption Prevention Orders – a preventative measure to ban people convicted of protest activity from future protests for up to two years.
On 14 January, having previously prevaricated, Labour peers finally announced that they would join the Greens and Lib Dems in voting down these government amendments. Labour clearly did not want to become the main focus of Kill the Bill protests called across the country for 15 January.
After a lengthy debate on 17 January, the government was defeated in 14 votes. This means that the extra clauses tabled by Williams in November will not be included in the final PCSC Act. This is a welcome victory, although there is nothing to prevent the government reintroducing these measures in a separate piece of legislation in future. Other votes to remove the sections of the Bill allowing the police to impose conditions on noisy or disruptive protests are unlikely to be let pass by the Commons, as indicated by Justice Minister Dominic Raab the day after the debate.
The Bill will now go back and forth between the two Houses, in a parliamentary process referred to as ‘ping-pong’ until either they have agreement or the Commons uses its power to pass the Bill without it. It is not clear how long this process will take but it will need to be complete before the end of this parliamentary session at Easter.
Nationality and Borders Bill
Not far behind the PCSC Bill is the equally vile Nationality and Borders Bill, which is at the Lords Committee stage until 10 February. The Bill crudely divides asylum seekers into two groups: those who come via ‘legal’ routes and those who arrive under their own steam, with fewer rights for the second group and criminalisation of those who assist them. This is an open attack in particular on everyone who has made the dangerous Channel crossing from France to Britain.
As the parliamentary discussion has progressed, the spotlight has fallen on another part of the Bill – Clause 9, which enhances the existing powers to strip a British citizen of their nationality by removing the need to warn someone in advance that the government is planning to do this. As a requisite for the removal of British citizenship is that the person concerned either holds dual nationality or – as in the case of Shamima Begum – has at least a theoretical entitlement to obtain the citizenship of another country, it is clear that this is a blatantly racist measure.
On 5 January Conservative peer Baroness Warsi attacked this plan in an impassioned speech in which she emphasised that all those who came to Britain from former colonies, the ‘Windrush generation’, hold citizenship as a right, not a privilege. Warsi was clear that blame is shared by all parliamentary political parties: ‘The othering of our fellow citizens – which has happened over the years under Conservative governments; was made worse… by Labour governments, with some of the most dramatically expanded powers of deprivation; and was extended by the Coalition government — this chipping away at the basic right of citizenship, must now stop.’
More prisons, more tagging, more cops
Not content with these Bills imminently becoming law, the government has more in the pipeline, and in December published two consultation documents, paving the way for future legislation:
- The Prisons Strategy White Paper reiterates the government’s commitment to build more prisons and employ more prison guards, and adds promises to keep greater number of released prisoners under surveillance via GPS tagging.
- Human Rights Act Reform: A Modern Bill of Rights. A consultation to reform the Human Rights Act 1998 sets outs the government’s plan to replace the Human Rights Act with a new ‘Bill of Rights’.
Human Rights Act to go
Although Brexit only took Britain out of the European Union and, by extension, out of the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, successive governments have long been looking for ways to water down the country’s duty to conform to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
The ECHR was developed after the Second World War by European nations keen to set out their progressive credentials both in the wake of fascism and as a counter to the appeal of communism. In 1950 Britain was the Convention’s first signatory. In 1998 the Labour government passed the Human Rights Act (HRA), which made the provisions of the Convention part of domestic law from 2000 – a decision Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair immediately regretted, as his government sought to indefinitely detain suspected terrorists, in breach of Article 5 of the Convention.
The ECHR is a bourgeois charter, with clauses preserving rights to freedom of expression, freedom of association, family life, a fair trial and freedom from discrimination, but nothing enshrining a right to eat, be housed or be educated. Surprisingly, the government’s consultation paper quotes Karl Marx in relation to this point, citing the existence of ‘a movement grounded in the communist, socialist and social democratic traditions’ which takes a different view of what ‘rights’ are important. However, this is a side-track from the real thrust of the document, which is not to replace the HRA with something which adds in these crucial missing rights, but to pave the way for removing the positives which have been achieved by it.
The government’s plan is to ditch the HRA, reluctantly stay signed up to the ECHR itself (so those with the determination to pursue cases in Europe will still be able to) and introduce a new ‘British Bill of Rights’. This Bill will draw on the ECHR/HRA, downgrading the bits that the government doesn’t like and upgrading those it does, although how this will be worked out in practice is anyone’s guess as, for example – Article 10 Freedom of Expression is the bad guy when upholding protesters’ rights, but is to be applauded when it comes to ‘academic freedom’, ie allowing reactionaries to speak freely on university campuses.
Ironically, given the Attorney General Suella Braverman’s recent anger over the acquittal of protesters in Bristol Crown Court, the HRA Consultation document applauds the right to trial by jury, which it plans to include within the new Bill of Rights. The Consultation asserts that trial by jury – which is not specified within the ECHR sections on ‘a fair trial’ – is particularly British, deriving from the Magna Carta.
Rights for some, not for all
The consultation document runs through a list of HRA cases which the government is upset about. One of those referred to several times, is Ziegler – in which the Supreme Court upheld magistrates’ decision to acquit people who had protested outside the DSEI arms fair in 2017.
Many of the other examples are predictably ones in which foreign national prisoners used their Article 8 (family life) rights to avoid deportation. Despite the ability to do this having been massively curtailed by the ‘hostile environment’ legislation of 2014, any ‘foreign criminal’ who manages to stay in this way is one too many for the current government. Trampling over the underlying liberal ethos of the universality of ‘human rights’, the consultation laments that ‘human rights claims have been brought by many people who themselves showed a flagrant disregard for the rights of others’.
Attacking ‘positive duty’ and judicial review
There is also considerable disparaging focus on the ‘positive duties’ which are imposed on state bodies (and, indeed on private companies fulfilling state functions) by the HRA and the way in which human rights judicial reviews have been used to challenge public policy on issues such as the Universal Credit benefit cap or the withholding of student loans from overseas students. All of this, the consultation argues, using inflammatory terms such as ‘human rights inflation’, makes life very thorny for those bodies, who have to spend public money on making themselves proof against possible further litigation – money which they could spend on doing frontline work to help the needy. The consultation deliberately avoids the obvious point – that if these bodies weren’t in breach of their obligations no litigation would be needed.
Another insidious law, the Judicial Review and Courts Bill, is already wending its way through Parliament and is currently at the House of Commons Committee stage. Its aim is to water down what can be achieved by this form of legal challenge to decisions by bodies such as the Home Office, local councils, health authorities or prisons.
Join the fightback!
Amidst all this there are reasons to celebrate. On 5 January a Bristol jury acquitted four activists who in June 2020 were among the crowd who toppled the statue of slave-trader Edward Colston. This shows us that ordinary people are not fooled by racist prosecutions.
On 10 January the Israeli weapons manufacturers Elbit Systems announced it was closing its Oldham factory, after systematic targeting by Palestine Action. This shows us that direct action works.
And the very fact that the state has criminalised Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain protesters is going to come back to bite it, as a new wave of politicised prisoners enter the system’s jails and continue their resistance from within the belly of the beast.
Join the fightback! Stand together against attacks on our rights!
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 286, February/March 2022
