Public Order Bill

Baroness Hamwee Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 1st November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, who is this Bill addressed to? I know how I would answer that question, and my noble friend Lord Paddick has already referred to culture wars. I have no doubt that the Government have identified the audience to which they want to appeal, but that audience is not the potential offenders. If the Government are seeking to deter offenders, is this really the way to go about it? Is it not obvious that many lockers-on and serious disruptors seek publicity? Well, they will get it. Portraying oneself as a victim, even as a martyr, is a well-known tactic. Increased media coverage consolidates this; it is a big bonus.

Will these measures be divisive? Will they confirm some people’s views that the measures are an unnecessary sledgehammer; in other words, will the measures mean increased support for the protests and provoke more extreme forms of action? The noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, mentioned unintended consequences.

Some tactics used by some protesters do not appeal to me. I have been inconvenienced and had an immediate reaction—“This is simply not on”—but I have to remember that we are in a country where views can be made known, by the protesters in question and by me, by an accident of history. On one side of my family, I am only three generations away from being geographically in a country where my family would have experienced great brutality—I probably would not have been born—and, on the other, only two generations away from a regime that still exists now. These are extreme examples, but noble Lords will be well aware of contemporary examples too. It is an accident of history for us all that we are in the UK, and how precious—a word that has been used but deserves repetition—it is to be able to make our views known. That was not something I appreciated when growing up, although I went to the same school as the Pankhurst sisters. Suffragettes have been mentioned, and I thought about them because there is such a whiff of cat and mouse in the circularity of some of the measures in the Bill.

I support what has been said and will be said about these precious freedoms, and oppose the Bill on the grounds that have been well described—including that the statute book is hardly silent on the actions the Bill covers—but also because I just do not think it will achieve the objective of deterrence.