Public Order Bill

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 13th December 2022 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Boycott]

117: After Clause 18, insert the following new Clause—
“Protection for journalists and others monitoring protestsA constable may not exercise any police power for the principal purpose of preventing a person from observing, recording, or otherwise reporting on the exercise of police powers in relation to—(a) a protest-related offence,(b) a protest-related breach of an injunction, or(c) activities related to a protest.”Member’s explanatory statement
This new Clause would protect journalists, legal observers, academics, and bystanders who monitor or record the police’s use of powers related to protests.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

I am delighted to move Amendment 117 and very grateful to be standing alongside the noble Baronesses, Lady Chakrabarti and Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, and the noble Lord, Lord Paddick. I will also speak to the revised Amendment 127A in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti. I thank the lawyers at Justice for their technical help with this speech, particularly Tyrone Steele.

These amendments seek to grant fuller protections to all those covering protests and reporting on the exercise of police powers in that context. I am completely confident that all noble Lords recognise the vital importance of journalists, legal observers and indeed the general public in being able to observe, report on and scrutinise what happens at protests and the actions of not only the protesters but, possibly, the police.

As many noble Lords will know, I have deep and vested interests in these amendments. I became a journalist more or less by accident at the age of 19. My first piece was on the left-handed shop in Beak Street for Time Out and was all of 189 words long. It was hardly earth shattering, but it did tell left-handed people where to buy a pair of scissors.

Trying to report stories and find out things that many people do not want known has been the whole obsession of my life. My second and third jobs were on an alternative newspaper and then on Spare Rib. Indeed, my second-ever piece was a report on an anti-Vietnam demonstration in the capital. I can confess quite freely that I was totally terrified to be in the middle of that demonstration, but I was not displeased to be part of it and I was very pleased to be able to go back and write about it. On Spare Rib we both marched and wrote about marching. We protested for equal pay, rights to abortion and rights to childcare, but we reported it; we were allowed to be there and to write about it.

In my long journalistic career, I have edited many magazines and written for more. I have edited three national newspapers and, again, written for many more. I have publicised protests, including many that I vehemently do not agree with, because they are not only important events; they are about people doing something that matters a great deal to them and worth taking to the streets for—or even trying to climb Nelson’s Column. People are on the streets because they do not know what else to do to make their voice heard and they have exhausted such routes as writing letters to MPs, Members of the House of Lords or, indeed, newspapers such as mine.

I have also sent reporters to countries where repressive regimes lock up journalists who are covering protests—think of the Arab spring, Myanmar and Hong Kong. As my friend and mentor, the late war reporter Martha Gellhorn, said, journalism is about bearing witness. We go to bring back the news, whether it is happening on the streets of Cairo or on the M25, to tell all of us, through words, images and sounds, what we have seen, what people are doing and what they care about. Journalists risk life and limb to do so. But, over my half-century in this profession, I have always believed that, at least in this country, we were able to go to a demonstration and then go back to our office and write about it. I also knew that, if a protest got too out of hand, plenty of laws were in place to deal with this—but never was a journalist told that they could not report on a story.

The arrest of Charlotte Lynch, the woman from LBC held for five hours for reporting on a Just Stop Oil protest —more about her later—has been referred to many times in this debate, but her story is extremely important. For me, it was as though one of the pillars of our democratic society had been kicked out from under my feet. She was held in a cell for five hours for reporting on a protest. It was peaceful, however bloody annoying people might find Just Stop Oil. Quite frankly, if a protest does not annoy someone, what is the point of it?

Sadly, I was wrong: this was not the first, and there had been previous attempts to curtail the reporting of protests. At 3.40 am on 30 November 1983, during strikes at the Messenger printers in Warrington, the police demanded that the television crews covering the dispute turned off the lights. After they complied, the police proceeded to charge at the picketers under the cover of darkness. In the words of Colin Bourne, the NUJ’s northern organiser,

“police were running up to them and kicking them and hitting them with their batons”.

It was reported that two police Range Rovers drove into the pickets. Today, with the vast majority of the public possessing smartphones equipped with high-quality cameras, it is thankfully much harder for abuse like that to go uncovered.

Last year, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport held a call for evidence on journalists’ safety, and there were masses of respondents. One said that the police themselves contributed to threats or abuse towards journalists, which included physically restricting access to spaces and arresting journalists. As I said, many noble Lords have referred to Charlotte Lynch, who was arrested while reporting on Just Stop Oil. But, that very same day, two others, Rich Felgate and Tom Bowles, were also detained. Again, they peacefully asserted their status as journalists—they had press cards—but they were held for 13 hours.

Back in August, another journalist, Peter Macdiarmid, was also arrested and taken in a police van to Redhill police station. He has notably covered several historic, monumental events, such as the Arab spring, refugees fleeing Iraq during the first Gulf War, Black Lives Matter and the London riots. The award-winning reporter told the Evening Standard:

“It’s the first time I’ve been in cuffs in the 35 years I have covered protests.”


Something is fundamentally wrong with our justice system if police feel so empowered, under the vast array of existing legislation, to arrest and detain journalists first and ask the questions—or worse—later, ignoring the fact that they are from the press. Last week, the Minister said that the issue lies with the training of the police. I am afraid that that is an inadequate solution for the current situation, and it is no remedy for what the Government propose, in terms of expanding the powers in the Bill.

The Bill contains a vast array of measures that could severely and detrimentally impact journalists just doing their jobs. The offence of being “equipped for locking on” is so broad in its ingredients that an individual would only have to be carrying an object with the intention that it may be used. Taking a photo of someone who is locking on could inadvertently fall foul of this because the camera could feasibly constitute such an object.

Journalists are no safer with respect to offences covering the obstruction of “key national infrastructure” and “transport works” or

“causing serious disruption by being present in a tunnel”.

On the latter, the BBC has reported from the tunnelling sites and even filmed the equipment and protesters inside the tunnels dug to disrupt the construction of HS2. The offence is engaged if you are “reckless” as to whether your presence will have the consequence of causing serious disruption.

Moreover, there is no explicit exemption for journalists. The only protection is the reasonable excuse. But as the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, said in Committee, since a defence is available only after arrest, journalists

“are still faced with the possibility of being arrested and detained for five hours by the police … It seems an onerous experience for a completely innocent person to go through”—[Official Report, 16/11/22; col. 948.]

The proposed, highly expansive stop and search powers would also offer journalists no relief from obstruction in performing their work. An officer who reasonably believes that an individual is carrying a prohibited object can conduct a suspicionless search. What worries me is the number of things—cameras, clipboards, microphones —that could conceivably constitute a prohibited object for use in connection with a protest. This would stifle the legitimate work of journalists and observers who monitor police powers.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, in answer to the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, I am getting a strong sense of how disappointing I am being, but it is also very fair to say that I have been completely unequivocal in sharing completely his concerns about the protection of our democracy and institutions. As I said earlier, it is a vital part of democracy, and I would expect and also demand, that protests are reported on fairly and freely. Of course I am sorry that the noble Baroness is irked, but I cannot second-guess what the police were thinking and I will not stray into that territory.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his reply to all the wonderful speeches, and I thank many noble Lords for speaking tonight in support of the amendment that the noble Baronesses, Lady Chakrabarti and Lady Jones, and the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, and I put forward.

What I want to say very much reflects what the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, was saying. I would call this the Government’s “bad apple” defence, which at the moment gets deployed all over the shop, whether we are talking about a single police officer who accosts a young woman at night with bad consequences or about a single police station in Hertfordshire. This is not about a bad apple; as the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, said, this is about a systemic situation, and as the noble Lord, Lord Deben, said, this has happened and it is now happening a lot more.

I suspect, although I am quite happy for your Lordships to disagree with me, that this is a lot to do with the climate and the feeling of people in a desperate situation who do not know what else to do. They end up gluing themselves to the road and they are seen as something extreme. That does not matter: it is still a protest, however annoying and nuisance making it is, and we can all debate that—but it is another debate. This is about the right to protest and the right of journalists to go to that protest and report on it. Journalists report on what human beings do. They report on people, what motivates them and what they care about, and what people are prepared to glue themselves to a road for or to padlock themselves to, or to climb Nelson’s column or whatever it happens to be.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, made the point about monitoring things across the world. We send journalists to monitor whether African countries are having free elections. How can we stand here and say that that is a good idea if, at the same time, someone reporting on a climate protest is chucked in jail? She was in a cell with a tin bucket as a lavatory for five hours. We are not talking about a quick slap on the wrist and “I’ll write you a letter later and send you a 30 quid fine”. This was a serious thing and it happened. We are therefore obliged to do something about it.

I come back to the “bad apple” defence. It is used by this Government over and over. They cannot use it in this instance and hope to hold their heads up high, or for people in this House to let them get away with it—we will not. I, the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, and others will bring this back on Report. We will work on the amendment, but it will fundamentally be the same. I am very grateful to all noble Lords who supported it. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 117 withdrawn.