According to today’s Daily Telegraph, Lord Walney – the crossbench peer tasked with conducting an investigation into domestic extremism – may recommend in a report this week that far-left protest groups should be liable for compensation when they deliberately disrupt day-to-day life:
“Individuals, businesses or institutions that could show they endured loss, distress or suffering from an illegal protest would be entitled to court-ordered compensation from activists”, according to the paper. It goes on:
“The measures are designed to hold protesters to account for incidents in which ambulances are held up, businesses lose thousands of pounds in trade and employees are delayed getting to work.
“They could also apply to incidents such as students being prevented from attending lectures or being awarded their degrees, as has been seen with pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses.”
Doubtless, this will set off another round of hand-wringing about the Government’s alleged hostility to freedom of protest. Yet such measures would be much more like the bare minimum than anything else.
Back in 2022, before the advent of the current spate of demonstrations over Gaza, legal commentator Tony Dowson set out on this site how campaign groups such as Just Stop Oil employ a sophisticated tactical handbook aimed at maximising their tactics’ disruptive effects on everyday life. Ministers ought to have tackled this before now; as Walney recently told Sky News:
“When you look at organisations who use criminal tactics as a means – very deliberate means – to try and force the conversation towards the kind of change they want rather than engaging in our democratic channels, I think it does ask questions.”
When groups such as Just Stop Oil bringing London to a halt, that costs the public purse millions of pounds in policing costs, and much more again in lost economic activity. When protesters blockade bridges or, infamously, access to hospitals, they are very explicitly seizing control of the public square.
Sadly, to date the police have not been especially keen on taking it back. The Met’s conduct since the start of the Gaza marches has shown time and again that it favours maintaining an outward semblance of peace over actually upholding public order. Peaceful counter-protesters, and even people who are merely “openly Jewish”, are forcibly moved on, lest they ‘provoke’ hateful elements of the march.
Even when demonstrators are arrested, they too often still don’t face consequences, with indulgent juries (and judges) letting them off even in clear-cut cases of criminal damage or hate speech.
Such cases doubtless please those who cleave to a maximalist definition of the right to protest, one in which concerted attacks on commerce, public transportation, and even individual private lives are completely justified so long as the people doing it have political motivations. (The right motivations, that is; nobody ever seems to go to the wall for the rights of anti-vaxxers or the English Defence League.)
But that definition is absurd. The right to protest is but one right, which must be balanced against others, including the right to go about one’s lawful business in peace, and to decide the policies of the State via the democratic process rather than via well-organised minorities mounting repeated attacks on public life.
Walney’s proposals (if they do eventually appear in his report, which is published later this week) would be a long-overdue step towards holding activists properly accountable for the consequences of their conduct. Ministers should waste no time getting them onto the statute book.
