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Last orders for public order
As we went to press, the House of Lords was about to deliver what amounted to a weak verbal shrug of the shoulders back to the Commons in response to the latter's compromise amendments to the notorious Public Order Bill.
A public order situation at Bank Station in the City of London (likely on 27 September 1984)
Demands to amend the proposed legislation in various unsatisfactory ways - despite it having already reached the Third Reading stage in the Lords in February - have been ping-ponging back and forth between the two Houses of Parliament since the beginning of March.
The Public Order Bill was introduced by the government in May last year with the intention of strengthening restrictions on the public right to protest. Supposedly this was to help police deal with "disruptive and dangerous" protests that target major transport works and infrastructure sites; but the Bill has been widely criticised for trying to legitimise stop-and-search without need for suspicion. Amnesty International notes that many of these excessive measures previously appeared in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Court Bill before being roundly rejected by the Lords in February 2022.
This time around, the Lords specifically proposed an amendment protecting the rights of journalists to observe protests and report on them without police interference. The government was minded to reject this out of hand, insisting that these rights were already enshrined in law. But legislators were spooked by the backlash against the illegal arrests of reporter Charlotte Lynch, photographers Tim Bowles and Ben Cawthra, and film-maker Rich Felgate while covering a Just Stop Oil protest on the M25 last November.
Hertfordshire police later apologised for the arrests but did not admit they were unlawful - until forced into doing so after legal action by one of the arrested journalists. As has been revealed since the arrests, the officers involved had not been carried away by misguided enthusiasm: they had been ordered to make the arrests by their superiors.
The government's latest pong to the Lords' ping was to reject the amendment but offer a compromise alternative stating: "A constable may not exercise a police power for the sole purpose of preventing a person from observing or reporting on a protest". Discussion of this proposal in the Lords at the end of March suggests that they will not pursue their own amendments and are willing to accept the government's compromise wording instead.
Journalists' rights aside, the Bill may yet to turn out to be a case of closing the stable door. The legislation was intended to target Extinction Rebellion-style guerilla tactics - just as ER itself was reinventing itself to move away from such stunts.