Earlier this year, Netpol and the Article 11 Trust published a report, This is Repression, warning that the scale of criminalisation and restrictions on freedom of assembly in Britain has reached a crisis point. More and more campaigners and organisations are now drawing the same conclusion: that protests rights in Britain are under severe attack.
There are two ways of interpreting how we have reached this point. The first focuses primarily on the negative impact of new anti-protest legislation – primarily, the protest elements of the Police Crime Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023. The demand that stems from this emphasis on legislation is both measurable and clear: organisations say to protect the right to protest, we need to amend or abolish the laws that created the wide range of new police powers.
An example of this is the recent action in London by Greenpeace, which caged the Gandhi, Mandela and Fawcett statues in Parliament Square and said all three would have been arrested under recent legislation.
We would always support a reduction in police powers, but the other perspective – and the position that Netpol argues – says the anti-protest crackdown is more complicated than this. There were numerous factors that have led us to this moment, all linked to a gradual breakdown in established democratic norms stretching as far back as 2016.
These include governments blatant favouring of corporate lobbying over public pressure from citizens, especially following the election of the Boris Johnson government in 2019. The sense that the government was only listening to the powerful had led to new forms of more confrontational street-based campaigning, particularly on the climate emergency. This, in turn, has led to a concerted effort to delegitimise, surveil and smear protesters, with the enthusiastic support of most of the news media.
This trend has been paraelled by a surge in populist rhetoric that sees political parties and the media dismiss climate science and question Britain’s commitment to the European Convention on Human Rights, often in ways that legitimise discrimination against ‘foreigners’.
Over the last two years, particularly in the case of the pro-Palestine solidarity movement, this climate has also led to what amounts to a rejection of the idea that human rights are universal.
The protection of the rights of Israelis has been continually presented as possible only through the denial of rights for Palestinians, and therefore supporters of Palestinian rights were smeared as ‘hate marchers’ or portrayed as a ‘threat’. This began under Conservative governments in 2023, but it has continued under the current Labour administration.
Whether the impetus was unconditional support for Israel, or to protect Britain’s economically important weapons industry, or a desire to avoid accusations of complicity in war crimes, Palestine solidarity demonstrations have faced the most extraordinary vilification – for some critics, there seems no acceptable or legitimate way, especially in London, to defend the rights of Palestinians. This was reflected directly by the decisions the police took on the streets in London throughout 2024 and into 2025.
It reached its pinnacle with the government’s decision to label the protest group Palestine Action a ‘terrorist organisation’, and then to ban it.
All this is why we say the expended new laws we have seen in recent years are a symptom, not the cause, of the attacks on our rights.
After the violent police response to protests against the banking crisis back in 2009, and the death of a bystander, Ian Tomlinson – protests that led to Netpol’s formation – British policing was forced by intense criticism into reviewing its approach to public order. For a brief period, the police were expected to try and show some interest in human rights, not simply to restrict or limit protests in ways that were the most convenient to them.
As governments and the media have retreated over the last decade from the idea that human rights matter – that interfering in the right to protest should only ever be exceptional, not routine – the police have enthusiastically embraced the strident voices demanding that ‘something must be done’ about the troublesome protesters that both the government and the media want to ignore.
At times, police have lobbied for new powers, but the state of repression we have documented rests primarily on the choices the police make to use powers: both recent, but also, far more often, public order laws that are almost 40 years old, like the ability to severely restrict the timing and location of processions and rallies.
Even if many of the laws created in the last five years were repealed, there are always new ones on the horizon as long as any consideration of human rights obligations is routinely ignored.
Government ministers plan more legislation soon: to stop ‘cumulative’ protests, to ban protests near religious institutions, to deny people the right to protect themselves by wearing a face covering.
What does that mean for groups wanting to resist the attacks on protests rights but struggling to explain what a ‘theory of change’ might look like in the long term? What if, as we believe, the restriction and disruption of movements and campaign groups is baked into public order policing and that simply surviving the current crackdown is hard enough on its own?
One of the real strengths of the Article 11 Trust’s small grants funding programme – and the support that Netpol receives from our funders – is the understanding that the solutions to defending dissent emerge in collaboration with the practice and experience of grassroots groups and that often it is not as readily measurable and clear as scrapping a law.
More often, survival means know-your-rights training, upskilling campaigners on the changing political and policing landscape, ensuring groups to understand the disruptive impact of surveillance. It means exploring ways to counter people’s understandable fear of potential arrest, or of putting themselves forward as key organisers.
Survival is also the reason why Netpol has continued to promote our Charter for Freedom of Assembly Rights. It is not because we think it will magically solve the lack of accountability the police have to interpret for themselves what constitutes “serious disruption”, but because a benchmark for what rights-based protest policing could look like is a tool for campaigners to demand answers to why this almost never happens.
If we want to know where ever-greater attacks on the right to protest may lead, we only need to look at the United States. But in the United States, resistance to authoritarian power is far from helpless: it is underpinned by movements and organisers with decades of experience defending human rights and dissent.
If the next round of media-driven, knee-jerk legislation means the crackdown deepens, or if the next general election leads to a future government wanting to remove human rights protections, we will need to survive as well as to resist.
That will require the same level of talent, experience, knowledge and organising skills here in Britain too.
This is the text of a speech given by Kevin Blowe of Netpol to ‘Defending Dissent: Resourcing the Right to Protest’, a roundtable for funders on 4th November 2025, co-hosted by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and the Article 11 Trust.