Kill the Bill, the protest movement that has formed against the proposed anti-protest Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, marks something of a crossroads in Britain for our collective relationship with the streets that we walk every day. This bill treats public spaces as private ones and places the police as enforcers of what feel a lot like trespass laws. It does an excellent job of ignoring the fact that the public space is the People’s space. If passed, this bill threatens the very fabric of our relationship with protest, free speech and free association. It allows the State further into our streets, and, what’s more, it pushes us out of them.

The history of protest is inextricable from the history of the public space. The two feed upon each other, enmeshed in a delicate web that rests on the notion that The People are entitled to A Domain. The streets have always functioned in British society as a place where authority is at once asserted and challenged. The historically long-standing practice of public executions demonstrates the extent to which public displays of power have been central to State authority in Britain, as do, more recently, the mass arrests of Extinction Rebellion protestors. However, public protest has long been a source of power too, one that also draws its potency from its visibility. The very fact that physical protest still exists in an increasingly online world pays testament to the fact that what goes on in the streets matters. The public space is an arena of power and is vitally important for maintaining some semblance of balance between the People and the State.   

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill directly threatens that balance; it seeks to privatise the public space, to strengthen the State in the streets. The language of the Bill itself is anodyne - its stated aim is to “strike a fair balance between individual rights and the general interests of the community” - the consequences are anything but. A selection of these include: 

• Wild, disproportionate and punitive prison sentences

• Increased surveillance

• Increased stop and search powers

• Increased police powers over the ‘conditions’ of protests

• Generally increased police control over what is and what is not permitted on the streets. 

The police are often presented as being the intermediaries in the public space. As an institution they are framed as being there to protect the State from the people, the people from the State and the people from each other. This is a fallacy and is one that arises from our idea that the law is something static, something dead, and that the police are therefore neutral parties. The law is not dead, the law is a living, breathing organism and an ever-evolving expression of the State’s will. The police, as the most visible arm of that State, are the manifestation of the law in the streets, channelling and staking a claim on the State’s so-called ‘monopoly on legitimate violence’, in service of private corporate interests whilst claiming to be there to protect people from each other. They do not protect people from each other. They act as a cartel protecting powerful interests, preferring to prosecute people accused of property damage or general non-violent disruption (50% prosecution rate for Extinction Rebellion protestors since 2019) than those accused of sexual assault (1.4% prosecution rate for suspected rapists in the same time span). While we fight an attempted increase in the criminalisation of protest, Dame Vera Baird, the Victims’ Commissioner, starkly comments that we are witnesses to “the decriminalisation of rape”. Nothing deals more of a blow to the police’s credibility as a public-service-minded institution than looking at what they criminalise in practice, and their treatment of Crimes against Big Business and the State. The State is an institution defined by its relationship to violence and its self-styled monopoly over it. The police are the conduit for that violence to be enacted through, in service of what the State currently cares about or is threatened by: Dissent. 

Once we allow protest to become a target, we relinquish our right to a space that has been responsible for cultivating nearly every civil right we have - from those won through the Magna Carter to the Chartists to the Suffragettes. But not only that, we lose access to something that is rightfully ours - access to the public space, to our streets. This bill is only one in a long list of measures taken in recent years to privatise the public space. In the past few years, we’ve seen dramatic increases in hostile measures such as spikes on benches designed to target the homeless, increased surveillance and CCTV, civic infrastructure that does not afford safety to women and other vulnerable groups. All of these measures are part of the wider picture, part of the increasingly insidious nature of State power that aims to exclude as many as possible from the public domain, because the public domain is a source of power that the State cannot contend with. This bill is their contention. We cannot let it slide. Where there is no notion of the public, private interests rule, and where private interests rule, predation, exploitation and corruption follow. Stand up, fight back.