Kill the Bill to Save The Future
By: Tom Hobson
Tags: UK Politics, Existential Risk, Protest, Catastrophe, Policing

Kill the Bill to Save The Future

How The Policing & Crime Bill for England and Wales Makes us More Vulnerable to Catastrophe Tom Hobson Dec 29, 2021·9 min read

Illustration by Magdalena Adomeit

This article was written by Carla Zoe Cremer, Tom Hobson, Alex McLaughlin & Luke Kemp.

In 1985 the Greenpeace protest ship ‘Rainbow Warrior’ was bombed and sunk in New Zealand. The ship, on its way to protest a French nuclear weapons test in the Moruroa atoll, had been sabotaged by two French spies. But these efforts did not kill the resistance. Instead, the fallen ship inspired a flotilla of yachts, crewed by New Zealand citizens to take its place. Thereafter, the French abandoned nuclear tests in the Pacific for almost a decade.

The Rainbow Warrior is an example of how dissent and defiance paved the path towards reducing risk from nuclear weapons. The US saw national strikes, with hundreds arrested for civil disobedience at testing sites. In India and Pakistan, protests and petitions spread widely despite strong police responses. In Kazakhstan, a protest movement led by a poet, Olzhas Suleimenov, in coalition with indigenous peoples managed to halt numerous Soviet nuclear tests.

Protests, demonstrations, and civil disobedience are an essential part of a healthy democracy. Most, if not all, human rights advances, have been won through and accompanied by hard fought campaigns — protest, solidarity movements and organised resistance. We owe civil rights, the five-day working week and universal suffrage to dissent and disobedience.

The lesser-known story we want to tell is of how protest can reduce the greatest threats facing humanity, from nuclear weapons to climate change and emerging technologies. Choking expressions of dissent will make the world more dangerous for us all. This is what the proposed ‘Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill’, if passed, will do.

The Bill

The British Government’s Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill of 2021 seeks to strengthen law enforcement and curtail protest. Under this bill, the police could set time and noise limits on protesters, determine methods of protest and be given greater legal authority to make judgments about what is and is not an acceptable way for citizens to express their views.

The Police in the UK already have significant powers to issue arrests for failure to comply with their instructions during public protests — with many arrests justified under the broad ranging Section 14 Public Order act. The new Policing and Crime bill will further embed the legal standing of police forces to sanction or prohibit protests based on their own discretion. It would allow police forces to class a single person as a protesting crowd. Protestors that fail to comply with police rules for a given protest can be criminally charged, even if they were not directly informed about these restrictions.

The bill is still under review with the House of Lords. Here, away from the attention of the public it is being loaded with even more shackles for protestors. Priti Pratel has added amendments to give police the right to stop and search individuals to avoid “serious disruption” or a “public nuisance”. In other words, they can stop and search protestors with no reason to suspect them of carrying a weapon or prohibited object. Those who refuse face a maximum of 51 weeks in jail. The same penalty applies to those who engage in ‘wilful obstruction of a highway’ or ‘major transport works’, as well as those who lock themselves onto another person, object or land.

This is a draconian criminalisation of protest. One carried out in the middle of a pandemic while the public is distracted. If this bill passes through parliament, it will mark a major blow to the rights of UK residents to protest against policies that may harm them and their communities, or to stand in solidarity with others who may be harmed.

The bill will directly undermine protest by cutting demonstrations short and making them more difficult to organise. Fears of being charged will keep people away. If the police can determine what is too inconvenient, inconvenient protests are under threat. But inconvenience is partly what makes protest effective and protest is vital in responding to some of the most urgent global challenges.

A Short History of Catastrophe and Protest

Throughout the 20th and 21st Century, civil disobedience and resistance were at the heart of efforts to prevent humanitarian or ecological disasters. Whether we look to the more than a million US citizens who gathered in Central Park in 1982 to demand unilateral disarmament, or the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, which was occupied from 1982–2000 — it is impossible to tell the story of reductions in nuclear arsenals without looking to ordinary people.

Perversely, credit for mitigating harms is often given to the very states and corporations that produce them in the first place. While the nuclear START treaty was doubtlessly a major accomplishment, and the signing of the Kyoto climate protocol appeared at the time a major step in the right direction, these histories only tell a part of the story. They must be understood in a broader context, where the preconditions for political change were established through resistance, and where the defiance of a range of actors guarded against catastrophe in the meantime.

Sometimes even individual disobedience can have large effects. In 1962, Vasily Arkhipov, a Soviet military officer, defied orders to launch a nuclear protocol. Stanislav Petrov did the same in 1983. They trusted their better judgement that the situation did not justify a nuclear strike and both turned out to be right. Safety depended on them refusing to do what they were ordered to — had they not, it is plausible a nuclear war could have unfolded.

Solidarity works too. Recently, Italian dockworkers made the news by refusing to load ships containing military supplies bound for Israel. In 1977 Rolls Royce workers in East Kilbride refused to repair bomber engines that were destined for Chile and Pinochet’s coup forces. This act forced the manufacturer to break its contract with Chile. Google employees recently took a stance against the company’s involvement with the Pentagon’s Project Maven which forced a withdrawal and pushed the company to take steps towards developing an ethical code for its work on AI. The general precedence of coordinated workers thwarting dangerous action is promising. It could affect some of the greatest threats facing humanity, from nuclear weapons to fossil fuels.

The Future of Catastrophe

As important as these acts of resistance have been, more will be needed in the future. Our world remains a dangerous one. States have developed increasingly lethal weapons technologies and humanity is now more able than ever to sow the seeds of its own destruction, whether deliberately or in error. A zealous pursuit of technological supremacy fuelled the creation of nuclear weapons. If geopolitical and big tech rivalry alone are allowed to guide the development of biotechnology, artificial intelligence and geoengineering, the consequences could be dire.

Protest, as history indicates, could be a vital mechanism for curtailing the worst effects of risky technology deployments. Growing awareness of inequality and of the scale of environmental destruction has recently inspired a wave of citizen resistance movements. Extinction Rebellion, the Dakota pipeline protesters in the US and the Farmers Protests in India, indicate the global nature of their concerns. States have often tried to delegitimise or to repress such movements. We must ask whether the UK bill is simply the most recent example of this trend.

Criminalising public protest in the wake of both environmental movements and renewed demands for meaningful equality for black and minority ethnic citizens, is a familiar reactionary move. It could come at a steep cost: if the past is anything to go by, the movements the government seeks to curtail might play a vital role in keeping us safe.

The voice of the public is precious and must be protected if we are to navigate an age of extraordinary global risks. Ordinary citizens tend to be precautious about risks, ranging from climate change to GMOs (whether the risks are real or perceived is a separate debate) and nuclear weapons. They are likely to be more risk averse, in part because a lot of them will bear the cost of global catastrophes.

The Point of Protest

Are there any legitimate concerns that might justify the bill’s curtailment of protest and civil disobedience? One concern raised by the bill is about the cost of protest. Protests, through disruption of economic activity, policing costs, and sometimes repairs, can cost the taxpayer money. Protests often deliberately aim to create costs and inconveniences. Yet the costs of the political action that the bill is a response to are trivial compared to the problems protesters seek to address.

A series of protests by Extinction Rebellion in 2019, for instance, cost the MET approximately £37m. By contrast, the 2015–2016 Winter floods cost the UK £1.3–1.9 billion. Climate change was likely a strong contributor to these floods and will drive more frequent and severe storms in the future. Worrying over the costs of protest in this case appears akin to being concerned over firefighters kicking in a door, rather than the raging inferno behind it.

It is ignorant to recommend that protesters should instead explore more formal democratic channels. Protest is more often than not a last resort when formal democratic procedures have been exhausted. The argument rings especially hollow in cases like climate change, where political change has been obstructed by vested interests and officials for over three decades.

Protest is one democratic path of accountability and an important protection against government overreach and serious wrongdoings. Unaccountable powers, be those government or corporations, do not only create new hazards. They also feed vulnerabilities that come to bite back during periods of instability. They worsen disaster by amplifying emerging threats. Inequality and corruption are vulnerabilities we can never afford and their harm is particularly striking when crises hit.

Not all protests will always or directly lead to better outcomes. But mass protest is also unlikely to trigger a tail-risk catastrophe. Leaving concentrated power uncontrolled and unaccountable however, is more likely to end in disaster.

Shackling the UK Risk Machine

Is any of this relevant to the UK? We might agree that protest is important and can help us alleviate global risks, but still doubt that this has much to do with the UK Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. After all, we are just an island of 66 million people, not a superpower. Unfortunately, while small, the UK does play a sizable role in producing global risks.

Only eight countries in the world possess nuclear weapons and the UK is one of them. The cap on warheads was meant to be 180, but under Johnson’s government this figure suddenly rose to 260 — a number that would give the UK the fourth largest nuclear weapons state in the world, surpassing China (although China too appears to be growing its stockpile). While some analysts have highlighted that the UK’s nuclear infrastructure means that it is unlikely to actually deliver new warheads in line with the expande cap, the “deterrence ambiguity” is clearly a contributor to creating an arms race dynamic.

There are already early signs that the UK may look to use genetic engineering for security and defence purposes. Investments into ‘robot soldiers’ are central to the UK’s planned five year defence review and the country has been one of a handful to torpedo international efforts to create a ban on the development of lethal autonomous weapons.

While the UK government is making positive statements about decarbonisation and tackling climate change, independent experts have repeatedly pointed out that these statements have yet to be translated into effective policy. At the same time, we need to bear in mind that on a per capita basis the UK is the world’s worst historical emitter.

Protest, whether it be on global risks or matters of injustice in the UK are not low stakes. Whether it is by example or direct impact the UK and its citizens will shape our global future and the risks we face. The Crimes, Police and Sentencing Bill will strangle the right to protest and with it one of the best ways of ensuring that the UK tackles rather than worsens the greatest risks of our time.

Carla Zoe Cremer is a DPhil student in the Human Information Processing Lab at the University of Oxford. Tom Hobson, Alex McLaughlin & Luke Kemp are Researchers at the Cambridge University Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.