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How protest was banned in England and Wales [1]
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Date: 2025-05
The PCSC also introduced new penalties to “conspire” to cause a public nuisance, an offence that hung over Just Stop Oil activist James Skeet for two years before he and five of his fellow activists were acquitted in Southwark Crown Court in March 2025, with two of his colleagues found guilty. The group had been arrested for activities relating to a planned blockade of the M25, the motorway that encircles most of Greater London and is one of the busiest roads in the UK.
“I was staying in a house that got hit by a SWAT team,” Skeet told openDemocracy, recalling the night of his arrest in 2022. “The door got kicked in, and I got pinned to the sofa, at 1am.”
In the years between his arrest and court date, Skeet remained confident that the charges would not stick. “There’s no evidence of what they are alleging, and I know that because no evidence exists. But obviously it’s still a bit scary,” he said when we spoke in the run-up to his trial.
At the time, Skeet was on bail. “My bail conditions mean I can’t take part in any protest,” he explained. “So my right to protest has basically been curtailed since 2022.” He also expressed concerns that he and Just Stop Oil had been placed under a “pervasive surveillance campaign” while he awaited court. As the new anti-protest laws are categorised as far more serious offences than their predecessors, they allow for greater police surveillance. ‘It’s sort of terrifying,” he said.
Skeet owns his house and told me he felt “under duress” to plead guilty or to go to court without legal representation in order to protect his financial assets – pointing out that this “is counter to the right to a fair trial in the convention of human rights”.
As with everyone I spoke to, Skeet’s fear was real but his main concerns were not for his own safety, but the safety of the planet and the ways in which these new laws deny people the chance to take to the streets and fight for their future.
“It’s all pretty stressful and I haven’t been sleeping that well,” he said. “The way that I've tried to make peace with it is, if my experience of the climate crisis is some time in prison or a threat to my property, I think that that still leaves me in quite a privileged position.
“Because look, 30 million people got displaced in Pakistan in 2022 because of flooding, mothers in Valencia are having to drag their babies from the mud due to floods, there are floods in Manchester where people have lost everything. I can still count myself lucky.”
I couldn’t help but admire his statement of compassion for those suffering around the world. I am not sure I, facing a spell in prison for protest, would be quite so caring or philosophical.
Despite the crackdown that led to Burrell and Skeet’s arrests, the PCSC failed to stop protests. At least seven major climate demonstrations – including on the M25 – took place in the first four months after the law was passed in January 2022.
Faced with this reality, the Conservative government felt the legislation had not gone far enough. Rambunctious debates in the House of Commons and the Lords had defeated multiple powers that it wanted to introduce in the law, such as the ability to ban individuals from a protest and a ban on locking on (when protesters attach themselves to another person, land or an object in order to make it more difficult to remove them).
Ministers were not happy with the act they had ended up with. So they tried again.
Back to the benches
In May 2022, just months after the PCSC came into law, Patel launched her second attempt to crackdown on protest: the Public Order Act (POA).
“The Public Order Act is crazy,” Skeet said. “You basically had laws in the PCSC rejected by Parliament and the home secretary comes back and tries to crowbar them back in.”
Where the PCSC had failed, the POA was determined to achieve. It introduced a new definition of “serious disruption”, expanded the list of “key infrastructure” to make it a crime to disrupt ‘B’ roads (secondary, non-motorway roads), and forced through previously defeated offences such as locking on or being equipped to lock on, such as carrying a bike lock or ties.
It also reintroduced Serious Disruption Prevention Orders, which allow police to pre-emptively stop someone from taking part in a protest. An FOI request I submitted revealed these powers had not yet been used by the 40 forces that responded to my request, nor the transport and military police.
The effort to bring previously rejected laws back from the dead caused unrest in the House of Lords. During a debate in the upper chamber in November 2022, Green Party peer Jenny Jones remarked: “This is actually a zombie bill that the government have dragged out of its grave because they do not like opposition at all.”
Labour peers Peter Hain, Vernon Coaker and Shami Chakrabarti also expressed frustration over the POA, warning that it would criminalise a vast, law-abiding majority. But the law even troubled traditional antagonists of “woke” culture, such as Claire Fox, a crossbench peer who was appointed to the Lords by Tory prime minister Boris Johnson.
“When I explained to some people, including two Conservative councillors, how this bill could be used against the protests against low-traffic neighbourhoods [a climate initiative that involves closing some roads], they said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. This bill is about stopping Extinction Rebellion,’” Fox told the House of Lords.
She added: “The government are [...] shooting themselves in the foot and confusing members of the public, who think that this will be directed only at one type of protester. It will not.”
But this wasn’t a mistake, it’s what the government was counting on. By focusing relentlessly on how the new laws would target unpopular protests, such as Just Stop Oil blocking the M25, it created a public enemy of climate activists, ‘social justice warriors’ and ‘activist’ lawyers. This was the plan when then-home secretary Suella Braverman branded protesters the “tofu-eating-wokerati”, and when her boss prime minister Liz Truss called them the “anti-growth coalition”. The government turned protest into a culture war, an us vs them fight. The woke snowflakes vs the strongmen trying to protect the public from disruption.
Only, that’s not how laws work. These are sweeping powers that have taken away all of our civil liberties, not just the protest rights of people we don’t like. Politicians and commentators who supported the anti-protest legislation have since criticised its use to convict anti-abortion protesters for demonstrating in the ‘buffer zones’ that were introduced around reproductive health clinics in 2023.
Lewis, the Labour MP, is concerned that the government’s focus on climate protests is helping to normalise opposition to tackling the climate crisis. “It's made the ground fertile for far-right arguments against net zero,” he said. “We've shut down a legitimate area where those peaceful protests were keeping the climate crisis in the public eye and keeping pressure on the government. That's been taken out of the picture, in effect, and that's had a chilling effect on the debate more generally.”
Despite the objections by peers from all parties, the Public Order Act 2023 was passed on 3 May 2023.
Three days later, at King Charles’ coronation, republicans felt the full force of the new powers. Sixty-four people were arrested in London, including one royalist who was falsely identified as a Just Stop Oil protester and detained for 13 hours. The Met Police later expressed “regret” that its officers had arrested six people from anti-monarchy campaign group Republic, releasing them without charge.
As with the PCSC, I submitted Freedom of Information requests to police forces in England and Wales to see how often the new anti-protest powers have been used.
Once again, it was a variable picture. The majority of arrests made under the POA between the law being passed in May 2023 and November 2024 when I submitted my FOI requests, were for interfering with the operation of key infrastructure, such as roads: 36 of the 43 forces had made 786 arrests, of which 729 were by the Met.
Thirty-five forces said they had made a total of 87 arrests for locking on, with seven forces having made a combined 43 arrests for being equipped to lock on. There was one arrest, in Northamptonshire, for obstruction of major transport works. The majority of those arrested, where data was recorded, were white British individuals.
There are real concerns, however, about the potential racialised impact of the new laws. The POA gave police new powers to stop and search without suspicion if an officer “reasonably believes” a protest offence may be committed. Crossbench peer David Pannick told the House of Lords that these powers risked disproportionately impacting “Black people, in particular, many of whom feel that those in Parliament do not represent them, and for whom peaceful protest is even more important”.
He continued: “You are seven times more likely to be stopped and searched by the police using ‘with suspicion’ powers, and 19 times more likely to be stopped and searched by the police using ‘without suspicion’ powers, if you are Black than if you are white.” He pointed out that both ‘suspicion-led’ and ‘suspicionless’ powers – measures the Lords rejected when the government previously tried to pass them in the PCSC bill – were included in the POA.
The chilling effect
“The mood and the approach of the policing of that action was very different to how it was in 2019,” said Lindsay Parkin, an experienced activist and Greenpeace member. “The public perception of climate protest has been managed in ways that mean it is now legitimate to shut us up and put us in prison.”
In September last year, Parkin was one of 20 activists arrested during a protest outside Unilever’s London office – the first mass arrest for locking on. He later told openDemocracy that he had been “curious” to see how the new offences would be policed when he volunteered to take part. The case against him was eventually dropped for lack of evidence.
Parkin is concerned about the chilling effect the new legislation has on protesters. “I think it will probably be effective in suppressing participation in these kinds of activities or, to put it another way, our own government might succeed in frightening people out of challenging them,” he said.
The chilling effect, warned Paul Stephens and Richard Ecclestone – former police officers who now act as protest liaisons for XR – is also linked to how the new laws have given forces new licence to police protests more aggressively than they have in the past. This is, in part, because protests have been placed in the criminal sphere, rather than a human right.
Ecclestone says the approach to managing protest has changed since he was policing animal rights protests in the 1990s. “We were never there to arrest people and put them before the court and get them convicted,” he said. “Our role was to get them out of the road so the trucks could get through – it was all about safety.”
Now, Ecclestone said the police’s goal is to find reasons to arrest. “When XR started, you felt safe as a protester,” he said. “You felt able to express your right to protest without the risk of ending up with a massive fine and a criminal record, or even going to prison, which is what people face now.
“The difference five years has made to being able to express your view in public has changed beyond all recognition. That is the terrifying thing because if ordinary people can't go and protest, what's the difference between the UK and Russia?”
[END]
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/conservative-labour-protest-ban-climate-gaza-just-stop-oil-extinction-rebellion-black-lives-matter/
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