Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill — House of Lords, 2021-11-24
Topic: Civil Rights
Alan Beith (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I will speak to two amendments in my name. By way of preface, I must say how much I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, in his masterful presentation of the case against what the Government are doing, and of the observations of the Joint Committee on Human Rights The noble Lord mentioned proportionality. Proportionality was central to the case of Ziegler and others in the Supreme Court back in July. I thought the wording it used, as reported by the Times, summed up my feeling in a way: "Peaceful protest was capable of constituting a ‘lawful excuse’ for deliberate physical obstruction of the highway … There had to be an evaluation on the facts of each case to determine whether any restrictions on the protesters’ rights to freedom of expression and freedom of peaceful association was proportionate. There should be a certain degree of tolerance to disruption to ordinary life caused by the exercise of those freedoms." I do not think the Government like the concept of proportionality, and the whole direction of these clauses—and those in the subsequent group, more recently tabled —illustrates that The amendments I have tabled are probing one feature, which is the word "unease". They are Amendments 297 and 307. In the new subsection that the Government propose, which is about "the noise generated by persons taking part in" an assembly, there is reference to the impact it may have on "persons in the vicinity" of that assembly "if … it may result in the intimidation or harassment of persons of reasonable firmness with the characteristics of persons likely to be in the vicinity" A court is going to have some fun working out what the characteristics are of people likely to be in the vicinity, but that is another part of the story The subsection also applies if "it may cause such persons to suffer serious unease" That is a very low bar indeed. It made me think of the Governor of the Bank of England speaking to the Treasury Committee a couple of weeks ago. He said that he was "very uneasy" about the inflation situation¸ but not so uneasy that he sought to raise the interest rates. In his view of vocabulary, "uneasy" is clearly nowhere near the top at all. It is the purpose of numerous protests to make people uneasy; I have been made uneasy by both the intensity and subject matter of protests. The protests that went on in Glasgow were designed to make people feel uneasy about what is happening to the planet, and to do so in ways which might even more directly make them feel uneasy, by noticing that such a large number of people are involved and making such a lot of noise However, it has always been so. John Wesley and his followers made people uneasy, by preaching loudly out in the open air and singing loud hymns. It was to make them uneasy about the life they were leading and trying to cause them to change their way of life. I have been confronted in my time by all sorts of demonstrations and protestors, putting forward views which I sometimes agreed with and sometimes did not. But being even seriously uneasy does not seem any reasonable basis on which to restrict the rights of protest. I simply cannot conceive that the Government have any other intention than to make protest much more difficult, even in circumstances which most people, on reflection, would accept were reasonable.