Priti Patel’s next target? Pride parades
For more than 50 years, LGBTI+ people have taken to the streets in protest and celebration of equality and human rights. And for most of those years, there have been people — often religious, nationalist or far-right — who’ve done their best to prevent them from doing so.
In the end it wasn’t homophobes who managed to shut Pride down, it was a global pandemic. But as some Prides start to plan for their next events, some as early as this summer, there’s a bigger threat on the horizon: the British home secretary Priti Patel, and her disregard for democracy.
In recent months Patel has made clear her disdain for the Black Lives Matter (“dreadful”) and Extinction Rebellion (“eco-warrior criminals”) protests. Now she is sponsoring legislation that will — yes, will — give her and the police sweeping new powers to limit legitimate public protest, and must be resisted.
The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts bill was laid before parliament on Tuesday and now begins its passage through both houses. Sponsored by the Home Office, Ministry of Justice and the Department for Transport, the bill is wide-ranging and not dissimilar to previous criminal justice bills that have been used to ‘mop up’ various crime and disorder issues in the past.
Writing for Politics.co.uk, Ian Dunt has an excellent analysis of how the bill attacks fundamental freedoms and the right to protest, including giving much greater powers to police to intervene when a protest is causing ‘impact’ to those around it. Dunt states: The government is effectively sticking duct tape over the mouths of protestors. They are requiring, quite literally, that they do not make noise. They are silencing them. The inability to be heard is now a precondition for being able to protest.
What is a protest or a demonstration without noise? From the first march through Manhattan in June 1970 to today, the very point of Pride has been its ability to take over the streets, cause a fuss, and get-in-the-bloody-way. Laws that restrict this — or even have the ability to restrict this — will demean the UK even further.
The government’s dreadful record on LGBTI+ equality needs no repeating here — especially just 24 hours after the resignation of three of its own equality advisors and calls for the minister to quit — but we can’t discount the notion that this new legislation, if enacted, could be used to halt Pride parades or even stop them completely.
Imagine a situation where people living or working close to a Pride parade complain about the ‘impact’ it is having on their lives. Police send officers to check the situation and, under the proposed definition in the bill, they could put a stop to the parade there and then. This would not require an application to the courts, or even to a senior ranking police officer — a constable could make the decision alone.
A further clause in the bill, a radical departure from the 1986 Act it would replace, would mean that continued participation in the parade once it has been stopped by police would be a criminal offence — regardless of whether or not you knew the parade had been stopped.
One only has to consider how such legislation would be applied in Poland, or Hungary, or Latvia, to realise the dangers inherent in such a law. As the UK’s rolling back on LGBTI+ equality continues, so this legislation would be used by LGBTIphobic police and political leaders to stifle our right to protest.
Patel has famously never been troubled by logic, intelligence or the need for coherence — no-one who’s seen it can ever forget her evisceration by Ian Hislop on the BBC’s Question Time when she smirked her way through a conversation in which she was advocating for capital punishment. She is also not troubled by the need for decency, fairness or even adherence to core human rights treaties. But the Justice Secretary, Robert Buckland QC, signed the bill to state that it is fully compliant with the European Convention on Human Rights.
Sadly for Buckland, the European Court of Human Rights would likely rule against the government were a case brought. The right to freedom of assembly and freedom of association are fiercely protected by the Strasbourg court, and this has included rulings in relation to Pride parades. But any case being taken to Strasbourg takes a great deal of time and money.
The proposals in this bill must be opposed and the bill amended. Pride organisers across the country should lobby and engage their MPs, and I hope the UK Pride Organisers Network will make representations against the sweeping clauses in the new bill. MPs who don’t engage should be told that they’re no longer welcome to use Pride for their annual LGBTI+ photo opportunity.
If we don’t stand up and oppose these changes, this government’s already piss-poor record on LGBTI+ equality could be about to get a whole lot worse.
