Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 16th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I know that many on the Labour Benches do not want to hear this, but this Government are actually more authoritarian than the previous one. Not only have the Labour Government accepted all the draconian laws of the Conservative Government, but they continue to add to them. I have been here for only 12 years, but how many times in the past 14 years have the Labour Benches spoken against laws clamping down on protest? But now they are supporting them, defending them and even adding to them. The values of liberty and democracy and a passionate defence of the right to protest—it all sounded great in opposition, so why did Labour drop them when it came to power?

The desire to quash effective protest is the aim of this legislation. Of course Governments do not mind if protest changes nothing. The bulk of laws in recent years have been aimed at the kind of non-violent direct action protests that stop big corporations from, for example, setting up damaging fracking wells in our countryside, or support people trying to stop an ancient woodland being cut down to build a destructive new road.

A lot of those protests were successful and led to policy changes, either locally or nationally—like the direct action protests a few years ago that led to the passing of the climate emergency Act. The oil and gas industry does not like countries switching to renewables, insulation or net zero. So it paid a think tank to come up with laws clamping down on effective protest, which the last Government passed and this Government have kept. That is why we need to enshrine a legal right to protest, and I intend to bring an amendment to that effect.

I have spent 12 years in this House warning about this country being on the path towards a Big Brother state. A combination of laws against effective protest while using digital ID will enable a future Government to carry out repression with a biometric link. The police are already using facial recognition without any proper regulation or legal restraints. With the proposed rules against face covering and the rollout of digital ID, just being seen on a protest against a future Government could see you losing promotion, or your job, or state benefits. It has already happened to dissenters in Hong Kong and other repressive countries.

The Government can blacklist people, just as the UK building industry did to trade unionists, in conjunction with the police. We have to allow people to disrupt, make a noise and get noticed. That is democracy. The police should, of course, be able to arrest for serious infringements, and people should still face legal consequences—but not the very severe punishments of recent years that labelled protesters as terrorists. The proscription of Palestine Action was another nail in the coffin of democracy and dissent. The new powers for the police to ban repeated protests are the state trying to shut down the people who are putting a spotlight on the Government’s complicity in the genocide in Gaza. After all, when you are supplying military intelligence to Israel and exporting arms to a country that wants to ethnically cleanse people from a land that it wants to settle, those are actions which could land you in an international court.

My noble friend Lady Bennett, who cannot be here today, will engage on the issue of Travellers’ rights and abortion law at a later stage. So I just have a few questions for the Minister to answer. I will cram in as many as I can. Does he suspect that the proscription of Palestine Action has discredited the use of anti-terror laws? Will the Government look instead at the case for proscribing members of the Israel Defense Forces living in or visiting this country? These are people who have taken part in potential war crimes, and who have murdered and terrorised thousands of women and children in Gaza. Finally, does the Minister really feel it is a priority for the police and security services to waste their time enforcing this unpopular and largely pointless proscription when they have real terrorists to track down?