UK plans new police powers in crackdown on repeat protests

LONDON: Britain's police forces will be granted new powers to impose restrictions on repeat protests, the UK government said on Sunday – a day after nearly 500 arrests were made at a London march in support of the banned group Palestine Action.

The new powers, details of which will be laid out in the coming weeks, will allow senior officers to consider the “cumulative impact” of previous protest activity.

If a protest has taken place at the same site for weeks on end, and caused repeated disorder, the police will have the authority to instruct organisers to hold the event somewhere else, the UK Home Office said.

A breach of such conditions will result in arrest and prosecution. “The right to protest is a fundamental freedom in our country. However, this freedom must be balanced with the freedom of their neighbours to live their lives without fear,” said UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood.

“These changes mark an important step in ensuring we protect the right to protest while ensuring all feel safe in this country,” she said.

Her move comes after both she and Prime Minister Keir Starmer had called on the organisers of Saturday's pro-Palestinian protest to reconsider out of respect for the British Jewish community in the wake of the terrorist attack on a synagogue in Manchester on Thursday.

“Large, repeated protests can leave sections of our country, particularly religious communities, feeling unsafe, intimidated and scared to leave their homes. This has been particularly evident in relation to the considerable fear within the Jewish community, which has been expressed to me on many occasions in these recent difficult days,” added Mahmood.

The new powers her ministry is finalising will lead to “improvements” by amending Sections 12 and 14 of the UK's Public Order Act 1986 to explicitly allow the police to take account of the “cumulative impact of frequent protests on local areas in order to impose conditions on public processions and assemblies”.

The Home Office said the government will also review existing legislation to ensure that powers are sufficient and being consistently applied. This will include powers to ban protests outright and will also include provisions in the UK's Crime and Policing Bill, which is currently going through Parliament.

Mahmood has also written to England's policing chiefs, or Chief Constables, to express support for the “swift and professional response” following Thursday's terror attack on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur and ensuing protests across the country. She encouraged them to use the “full range of powers” available to them to prevent and respond to public disorder.

Meanwhile, the Crime and Policing Bill going through Parliament includes a range of other measures aimed at strengthening policing powers over protests.

These include banning the possession of fireworks, flares and other pyrotechnics at protests; criminalising the climbing of specified war memorials, making it clear that such disrespectful behaviour is unacceptable; and banning the use of face coverings to conceal a person's identity at protests designated by the police.

Police chiefs in the country have been calling for additional powers amid ongoing protests against the Israel-Hamas conflict in the Middle East, which have often involved clashes between police officers and protesters and a vast number of public disorder arrests.