Keir Starmer’s war on the right to protest
Keir Starmer is not the first lawyer to become a British Labour prime minister. Far from it, in fact. Labour’s post-war prime minister, Clement Attlee, was a lawyer, and so was Tony Blair.
And Starmer is certainly far from alone as a lawyer in the House of Commons. In a peak reached in 2015, one in five of the MPs sitting on the green benches had a legal background, up by 40 percent on the preceding parliament.
On average, since the 1970s, some 15 percent of MPs have been lawyers, second only to those with a business background.
Indeed, lawyers are uniquely suited to a political system in which real power lies elsewhere since, like actors, they are in a profession paid to speak other people’s lines. Consequently, they have always formed a considerable cohort among MPs.
All this makes MPs very different in wealth, background and outlook from the people that elect them.
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But even in this peer group of MPs, Starmer stands out.
Among Labour MPs who were lawyers, and fewer Labour MPs than Tories have that background, almost none were prosecution lawyers.
The social-democratic consensus, on the right as well as the left, was that in some way the legal system was biased in favour of the elite, in favour of money and state authority. It was consequently harder to get justice for the poor than it was for the well-off.
This was an analysis conclusively proved in JAG Griffith’s 1979 landmark study, The Politics of the Judiciary, a text incendiary enough to make the front page of the Times but, nevertheless, the primer for progressive lawyers to this day. In this framework, the job of defence lawyers was to help mitigate this institutional bias.
Darkening atmosphere
Starmer claims to have started out in this tradition as a human rights lawyer. However it should be noted that in this capacity he became a civil liberties adviser to the Northern Ireland Policing Board, the quango that is supposed to oversee the actions of the police in Northern Ireland.
But what makes Starmer unique is his elevation to the head of the British state’s Crown Prosecution Service, the post he held from 2008-2013. Most Labour lawyers are defence lawyers; few, if any, are prosecutors, and none have become director of public prosecutions.
It was as DPP that Starmer was responsible for the rapid, harsh sentences handed down by the courts to those arrested during the 2011 riots. Starmer maintained that his draconian response helped bring the riots to an end.
It was also "during Starmer's time in post", according to the website Declassified, that the DPP oversaw the proposed extradition of Julian Assange to Sweden over sexual assault allegations.
Surviving evidence shows that the CPS was encouraging the Swedish prosecutors not to drop the case, which they were then considering doing.
Freedom of information requests by Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi revealed that all the CPS files concerned with the Assange case during Starmer’s time at the CPS had been mysteriously destroyed.
It is perhaps not surprising then that there seems to be a darkening atmosphere around civil liberties since Starmer became prime minister. The previous Tory administration mounted a wholesale attack on the right to protest.
Conor Gearty, a London School of Economics professor of human rights law, has summarised the situation like this: "When it comes to the freedom to protest, things are worse today than they ever were at any point in our democratic past. A succession of public order laws has poured from Westminster in recent years and these have made protest increasingly difficult, not just old-fashioned stuff like marching and meeting but new-fangled ways of drawing attention to your cause as well ('slow marching'; 'locking-on'; even just being 'noisy' in the wrong places; and much else)."
There are no plans for the Labour government to revise or repeal these repressive extensions of police powers to curb or ban political protest.
Harassment of protest organisers
These powers have been used extensively against the Palestine solidarity movement.
Most of the 18 national marches in solidarity with Palestinians have been subject to police orders which proscribe the route of the march and dictate the time of departure and the time of dispersal to march organisers. Protesters can and have been arrested for deviating from the route of the march or remaining in the area of the march after the dispersal deadline.
In addition, and this is entirely historically unique, protesters with placards with the "wrong" slogans have been arrested and prosecuted, sometimes under anti-terror laws.
At this point, it is only the size of the Palestine mobilisations and the determination of the march organisers that have prevented a much more serious criminalisation of protest from being made effective.
But that has not stopped the harassment of protest organisers. Five Just Stop Oil activists were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment in July for organising entirely peaceful protests. The sentences are reported to be the longest in UK history for non-violent protest. Essentially, they were punished for being effective and the law was altered to prevent them from appealing to the jury on moral grounds.
Even more seriously, the police are now using anti-terror laws to detain, search and harass pro-Palestinian activists and journalists.
The police are now using anti-terror laws to detain, search and harass pro-Palestinian activists and journalists
In August, UK journalist Richard Medhurst was hauled off his plane on the tarmac at London's Heathrow airport by anti-terror police when he arrived back in Britain. He was held incommunicado under anti-terror laws for 24 hours while his phone and laptop were confiscated. The National Union of Journalists has taken up Medhurst’s case.
A week later, Sarah Wilkinson’s house was raided at 7.30am and searched by police. During the search, the urn containing her mother’s ashes was upended and the remains scattered on the floor.
Her bail conditions originally prevented her from using her phone or computer. All this resulted from a speech months earlier in which she is alleged to have spoken in defence of the Palestinian resistance.
Last month, Richard Barnard of Palestine Action was charged under anti-terror laws for allegedly making speeches supportive of Hamas.
University of Portsmouth academic Amira Abdelhamid was reported to Prevent by the university, and raided by the police who took her phone, laptop and notebooks. Last month, after two months of suspension, the CPS dropped the attempt to prosecute her for remarks she made on X.
Dangerous move
These are only some of the cases that represent an attempt by the state to intimidate activists and restrict the right to protest.
They represent an alarming extension of police power and a frightening extension of anti-terror laws being applied to domestic protest and speech.
The police are now being made the arbiters of what is and is not lawful protest, because the law itself does not specify this in any detail but delegates the power to the police themselves.
This is an especially dangerous move because the police, and especially the Metropolitan Police as the force concerned with national demonstrations in London, were once again officially condemned as institutionally racist as recently as last year.
Both the Prevent scheme and the Undercover Policing Inquiry interim report demonstrate how the police repeatedly underplay the threat of the far right, now intimately linked to extreme Zionist protests against the Palestine movement.
In response to this new threat to civil liberties, the Palestine movement, and the wider progressive left and labour movement, need to get more vocal about protecting the right to protest and more uncompromising in standing up to state attempts to restrict fundamental freedoms.
And all those lawyers on the benches of the Commons, and the one in 10 Downing Street, should reflect on the fact that the very democratic processes which put them there were won by exactly the kind of protests that the government is seeking to prevent.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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