For little extra context here (for anyone not in the UK), since the OP article was published we had the coronation at the weekend during which many anti-monarchy protestors were arrested - despite prior approval and communication with the Police ahead of the protest. This has been seen as the first major use of these new powers:
> Police accused of ‘alarming’ attack on protest rights after anti-monarchist leader arrested
Not the MET, the UK government. The MET are just enforcing the law the UK gov enacted, regardless of whether you like the MET or not they didn't suddenly decide to attack the right to protest.
""> Our tolerance for any disruption, whether through protest or otherwise, will be low.
> We will deal robustly with anyone intent on undermining this celebration."
If only they had this much zest and conviction for actual, troubling issues, dangerous issues. While I agree that disrupting a ceremony now is in poor taste, there are much bigger issues at play in the UK that deserve hands-on policing.
The right to protest is important, but there's a different between disruption and protest that I feel you're overlooking.
> Our tolerance for any disruption, whether through protest or otherwise, will be low.
> We will deal robustly with anyone intent on undermining this celebration.
This sounds like you'll be arrested if you leap in front of the motorcade, scream something in church, etc. Not if you carry a sign protesting the monarch along the route
The most frustrating thing for me is that whenever you talk to people in the UK about this stuff you notice there is this cultural attitude that if you're sticking your neck out too much that its somehow your fault.
People here don't care about being monitored by CCTV because they believe that so long as you keep your head down you'll be fine – and that any respectable person is going to keep their head down anyway.
You'll also find a lot of people here just dislike the act of protest in general. Again, I think it's because protest involves drawing attention to yourself which a large percentage of people here dislike on an instinctive level. So you find even the most agreeable protests seem to receive some level of pushback and shame which I think bleeds into our attitude towards policing. That said, I don't know what it's like in other countries. I just get the sense that the UK has a much more conformist attitude which enables the state to take a more authoritarian approach to policing protest here.
As an example, I'm not an anti-monarch but I was extremely angry about how the police handled anti-monarch protestors during the coronation. Yet when I've spoken to people about this over the weekend, most people have expressed to me that it was rude for there to be protestors at the coronation... But that's the point of protest!! Still, this doesn't change the fact that the act of protest is largely incompatible with our otherwise polite and conformist culture.
Authoritarianism has clearly been feeling its way into the UK ever since the 90s when they put up CCTV cameras everywhere. The UK effectively has an inherently and self-evidently illegitimate government based on its own actions and words, as do most western governments at this point.
These types of bills/laws are those of authoritarian governments fearful of its own population wising up to what has happened or what the authoritarians are up to and they want to make sure they can snuff out any little bit of burgeoning opposition before it can organize and get off the ground. It’s the repression part of 1984 style government. It’s the same thing all authoritarian, evil governments do, regardless of how long they can get away with it or how much the brainwashed masses go along with it, even if just out of fear.
Yes, when you think about it on a fundamental level, having so many CCTV cameras recording people's movements everywhere is absolutely dystopian. It's incredible that it got this bad and there wasn't a backlash against it from the general public.
The presence of the cameras is a marker for what's going wrong with government and society. That the state is imposing the surveillance on us. And the people happen to tolerate it.
It has the potential to get worse, the Police are rolling out facial recognition, but by that time I will have left the UK for good, due to our civil liberties situation, in particular the forced encryption key disclosure laws.
I wonder if those cameras will ever go away. How long is it going to take, 20 years, 50 years, or even more?
When are we going to get our public spaces back? So we can be ourselves, be spontaneous, silly, eccentric, protest and so on, without experiencing the psychological effects of pervasive recording by the state. And thus the chilling effects.
There are certainly authoritarian wings of the two main parties.
Though I can't help thinking that a big part of the creep is driven more by spineless pandering to various public constituencies and short term perceived vote winning rather than a particularly thought through desire to crush dissent.
Weren't all the CCTV's based on frequent bombings? We've seen in US, that based on 'a problem of the moment' there are new laws passed, like Homeland Security. Then years go by, it looks authoritarian, then everybody is calling it 1984, when really the people asked for it. It seems less like a grand government plan and more humans just Forest Gump'n themselves along into this situation.
I am still unsure how I ultimately feel about the use of these technologies by government. I do believe that people want safety over all, and by most of the statistics I have seen, the UK is somewhat safer than before [1]. Is the government implementing these measures to take advantage of its people or to provide safety for them?
Is there any country in Europe not passing authoritarian laws?
In Sweden the current government is on its way to defund the largest opposition party.
The swedish riksdag recebtly (with broad support) changed the constitution to limit the freedom of speech.
Poland and Hungary are shitfests, with almost complete political control of the justice system.
Spain has increased the ability to give large civil fines, seemingly disconnected from the regular juridical process (please correct me on this one. My Spanish is sub-par).
Edit: my poland name-calling was apparently uncalled for. There are other bad things going on, with Kaczyński at the rudder.
Honestly it's pretty scary how easy it is to pass such legislation in the UK.
That's what happens when there's no written concise framework of government but centuries of "tradition" and "precedent" that are improvised upon, and which have no special threshold of change (e.g. to change the constitution in some countries requires a special assembly, or qualified majority, or plebiscite, etc.).
Don't forget, in the UK, you legally must notify the police of any march or protest. The police can then say no, change where you protest, or impose any other condition[1]
And yet we decry the way China handled protests in Hong Kong. The UK population are blindly walking into deeper in to the dark ... but hey, as long as the McDonald's drive-thru is has milkshakes there's no problem?
I'm pretty sure that legal requirement is not only quite old but was put in place to stop literal, actual fascists from holding marches a few years before World War II.
Interesting perspective from Joshua Rozenberg, a fairly well-known legal commentator in the UK:
"The Public Order Act 2023 was passed by parliament exactly a week ago, on 2 May. Regulations were made that day by a Home Office minister bringing sections 1 and 2 — as well as several other sections — into force a day later, on 3 May.
"This is unusual for new criminal offences. A couple of months is usually allowed for the Home Office to issue a circular explaining how the new offence is to be used. Those at risk of committing the new offence — people who carry bicycle locks, for example — can learn how the law has changed and seek legal advice. Police forces have time to train their officers. Police lawyers might regard items that can easily be cut — luggage straps or cable-ties, for example — as not capable of leading to serious disruption.
"Only a day’s notice was given on this occasion, presumably so that the new law could be used against anyone intending to disrupt the Coronation. Home Office officials apparently wrote to demonstrators but it is not surprising that the subtleties of the new law did not filter down to front-line police in time." [1]
I'm absolutely not a supporter of the current UK government, and I think the met police are pretty incompetent when they're not being corrupt, but the above may partly explain some the weekend's events wrt protest.
(Personally I think its a bad law, created for authoritarian purposes, rushed into effect, and incompetently implemented by police who seem only too happy to protect the interests of the state over the freedom of citizens.)
Everything you quoted makes it sound like an overtly anti-freedom power grab meant to meet a minimum of resistance, and implemented specifically to control protestors at an event that was planned for months.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say with "I'm not a supporter of the current government BUT" - it seems like the quote explains perfectly how bad it is.
It was blatently obvious the police were going to release the Republic protestors without charge, even if they have to pay them compensation. The Establishment didn't want anyone questioning their relevance. If this wasn't the case the BBC would have reported these arrests on Saturday.
One simple bullshit apology later and they have plausible deniability. "Oh, we'll learn a lesson for next time Charles has a coronation"
The UK has been watching Canada. Our Prime Minister had people's bank accounts frozen and their vehicles impounded and hundreds charged with mischief for attending a peaceful, albeit 3 week long protest in our capital. There was NO violence, no vandalism, no injuries and certainly no deaths and yet our PM chose to use the strongest law in the land, the one reserved for emergency situations like invasion or nuclear attack, to lock down protesters. Their primary crime was being too loud and too long.
The Met decided they needed to be seen to act to remove the "dangerous" rape alarms, but the easiest way to do that was to arrest these poor folks (https://twitter.com/ProfColinDavis/status/165561644937587509...). The police knew they knew were around and had rape alarms because that's their job and the police gave them the alarms.
There’s a similar crime in China called “Picking quarrels and provoking trouble”, it’s definition is so vague that the law enforcement has been abusing it and locking up whoever they want (especially those who go against CCP) for picking quarrels and provoking troubles… a very popular personality (Luo Xiang) who has been well known in China for spreading legal knowledge on Chinese social media was shadow banned due to him urging online the government to amend the law and get rid of this crime.
There's definitely a balance to be struck between allowing protests to take place and also preventing a minority of protestors disrupting the lives of ordinary people.
But when they organised "rings of steel" around the city, preventing drivers from coming and going about their business, as they did on a few occasions, they had gone too far.
I don't know the full details of the anti-monarchist arrests, but unless they were planning to disrupt the events, I feel they should not have been arrested.
Protesting itself is meant to be disruptive though - otherwise what's the point?
You can stand around in a group in a fenced off corner and make some noise and no one will care.
You can annoy people, disrupt a small part of their lives and suddenly they will have an opinion on what you are protesting about, but also an opinion on what protesting should be.
Disruptive protests do eventually change the little part of the world around you, for better or worse.
[+] [-] samwillis|2 years ago|reply
> Police accused of ‘alarming’ attack on protest rights after anti-monarchist leader arrested
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/may/06/head-of-uks-...
Prior to the coronation the Met Police tweeted:
> Our tolerance for any disruption, whether through protest or otherwise, will be low.
> We will deal robustly with anyone intent on undermining this celebration.
https://twitter.com/metpoliceuk/status/1653745710724968448
Again, this has been seen as further moves by the Met to quash the right of protest in the UK.
[+] [-] account-5|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zo1|2 years ago|reply
If only they had this much zest and conviction for actual, troubling issues, dangerous issues. While I agree that disrupting a ceremony now is in poor taste, there are much bigger issues at play in the UK that deserve hands-on policing.
[+] [-] Randomizer42|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nailer|2 years ago|reply
> Our tolerance for any disruption, whether through protest or otherwise, will be low.
> We will deal robustly with anyone intent on undermining this celebration.
This sounds like you'll be arrested if you leap in front of the motorcade, scream something in church, etc. Not if you carry a sign protesting the monarch along the route
[+] [-] kypro|2 years ago|reply
People here don't care about being monitored by CCTV because they believe that so long as you keep your head down you'll be fine – and that any respectable person is going to keep their head down anyway.
You'll also find a lot of people here just dislike the act of protest in general. Again, I think it's because protest involves drawing attention to yourself which a large percentage of people here dislike on an instinctive level. So you find even the most agreeable protests seem to receive some level of pushback and shame which I think bleeds into our attitude towards policing. That said, I don't know what it's like in other countries. I just get the sense that the UK has a much more conformist attitude which enables the state to take a more authoritarian approach to policing protest here.
As an example, I'm not an anti-monarch but I was extremely angry about how the police handled anti-monarch protestors during the coronation. Yet when I've spoken to people about this over the weekend, most people have expressed to me that it was rude for there to be protestors at the coronation... But that's the point of protest!! Still, this doesn't change the fact that the act of protest is largely incompatible with our otherwise polite and conformist culture.
[+] [-] frankfrankfrank|2 years ago|reply
These types of bills/laws are those of authoritarian governments fearful of its own population wising up to what has happened or what the authoritarians are up to and they want to make sure they can snuff out any little bit of burgeoning opposition before it can organize and get off the ground. It’s the repression part of 1984 style government. It’s the same thing all authoritarian, evil governments do, regardless of how long they can get away with it or how much the brainwashed masses go along with it, even if just out of fear.
[+] [-] 1827163|2 years ago|reply
The presence of the cameras is a marker for what's going wrong with government and society. That the state is imposing the surveillance on us. And the people happen to tolerate it.
It has the potential to get worse, the Police are rolling out facial recognition, but by that time I will have left the UK for good, due to our civil liberties situation, in particular the forced encryption key disclosure laws.
I wonder if those cameras will ever go away. How long is it going to take, 20 years, 50 years, or even more?
When are we going to get our public spaces back? So we can be ourselves, be spontaneous, silly, eccentric, protest and so on, without experiencing the psychological effects of pervasive recording by the state. And thus the chilling effects.
[+] [-] silasdavis|2 years ago|reply
Though I can't help thinking that a big part of the creep is driven more by spineless pandering to various public constituencies and short term perceived vote winning rather than a particularly thought through desire to crush dissent.
Never mind the effect is much the same.
[+] [-] FrustratedMonky|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zo1|2 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_by_country#Un...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_the_United...
[+] [-] cmilton|2 years ago|reply
[1]: https://popcenter.asu.edu/sites/default/files/230-priks.pdf
[+] [-] bjoli|2 years ago|reply
In Sweden the current government is on its way to defund the largest opposition party.
The swedish riksdag recebtly (with broad support) changed the constitution to limit the freedom of speech.
Poland and Hungary are shitfests, with almost complete political control of the justice system.
Spain has increased the ability to give large civil fines, seemingly disconnected from the regular juridical process (please correct me on this one. My Spanish is sub-par).
Edit: my poland name-calling was apparently uncalled for. There are other bad things going on, with Kaczyński at the rudder.
[+] [-] sofixa|2 years ago|reply
That's what happens when there's no written concise framework of government but centuries of "tradition" and "precedent" that are improvised upon, and which have no special threshold of change (e.g. to change the constitution in some countries requires a special assembly, or qualified majority, or plebiscite, etc.).
[+] [-] sirsinsalot|2 years ago|reply
And yet we decry the way China handled protests in Hong Kong. The UK population are blindly walking into deeper in to the dark ... but hey, as long as the McDonald's drive-thru is has milkshakes there's no problem?
[1]: https://www.gov.uk/protests-and-marches-letting-the-police-k...
[+] [-] shellac|2 years ago|reply
March, not protest. From your own source:
> If there’s no march organised as part of your protest, you do not have to tell the police.
On the few occasions I've organised protests I did inform them, because although they didn't really care about protests they don't like surprises.
[+] [-] niea_11|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makomk|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andyjohnson0|2 years ago|reply
"The Public Order Act 2023 was passed by parliament exactly a week ago, on 2 May. Regulations were made that day by a Home Office minister bringing sections 1 and 2 — as well as several other sections — into force a day later, on 3 May.
"This is unusual for new criminal offences. A couple of months is usually allowed for the Home Office to issue a circular explaining how the new offence is to be used. Those at risk of committing the new offence — people who carry bicycle locks, for example — can learn how the law has changed and seek legal advice. Police forces have time to train their officers. Police lawyers might regard items that can easily be cut — luggage straps or cable-ties, for example — as not capable of leading to serious disruption.
"Only a day’s notice was given on this occasion, presumably so that the new law could be used against anyone intending to disrupt the Coronation. Home Office officials apparently wrote to demonstrators but it is not surprising that the subtleties of the new law did not filter down to front-line police in time." [1]
I'm absolutely not a supporter of the current UK government, and I think the met police are pretty incompetent when they're not being corrupt, but the above may partly explain some the weekend's events wrt protest.
(Personally I think its a bad law, created for authoritarian purposes, rushed into effect, and incompetently implemented by police who seem only too happy to protect the interests of the state over the freedom of citizens.)
[1] https://rozenberg.substack.com/p/police-regret-anti-monarchy...
[+] [-] unethical_ban|2 years ago|reply
I'm not sure what you're trying to say with "I'm not a supporter of the current government BUT" - it seems like the quote explains perfectly how bad it is.
[+] [-] hulitu|2 years ago|reply
I'm sure it is a mistake. He surely meant China. /s
[+] [-] Randomizer42|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nprateem|2 years ago|reply
One simple bullshit apology later and they have plausible deniability. "Oh, we'll learn a lesson for next time Charles has a coronation"
[+] [-] RocketOne|2 years ago|reply
Democracy is dying by a thousand cuts.
Utterly unacceptable!
[+] [-] jbu|2 years ago|reply
Right-wing "English Constitution Party" were going to demonstrate with rape alarms (https://twitter.com/ProfColinDavis/status/165555531421578035...) and that got 'confused' in the more rabid press as 'eco-zealots' plot' sort of stuff.
The Met decided they needed to be seen to act to remove the "dangerous" rape alarms, but the easiest way to do that was to arrest these poor folks (https://twitter.com/ProfColinDavis/status/165561644937587509...). The police knew they knew were around and had rape alarms because that's their job and the police gave them the alarms.
Anyhoo, the rabid press, the deeply populist government, and the disgraced met police (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-65164489) are quite a mix.
[+] [-] livinglist|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] livinglist|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sirsinsalot|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] switch007|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] racktash|2 years ago|reply
For instance – I worked in Belfast while a series of flag protests took place (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belfast_City_Hall_flag_prote...) in 2012. In my view, these protestors had every right to make their views publicly visible and known.
But when they organised "rings of steel" around the city, preventing drivers from coming and going about their business, as they did on a few occasions, they had gone too far.
I don't know the full details of the anti-monarchist arrests, but unless they were planning to disrupt the events, I feel they should not have been arrested.
[+] [-] nonethewiser|2 years ago|reply
This wouldn't be so controversial if people didnt call riots protests.
[+] [-] stefan_|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _s|2 years ago|reply
You can stand around in a group in a fenced off corner and make some noise and no one will care.
You can annoy people, disrupt a small part of their lives and suddenly they will have an opinion on what you are protesting about, but also an opinion on what protesting should be.
Disruptive protests do eventually change the little part of the world around you, for better or worse.
[+] [-] Eumenes|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xbar|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steve76|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] vrglvrglvrgl|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] steve76|2 years ago|reply
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