Priti Patel's Public Order Bill threatens right to peaceful protest - Yvette Cooper

The Home Secretary said to us this afternoon: “From day one, this Government have put the safety and the interests of the law-abiding majority first.”

She claimed that she was prosecuting more criminals, but the opposite is the case.

Since she came to office in 2019, crime has gone up by 18 per cent and prosecutions have gone down by 18 per cent, so I have to ask her what planet she is living on? Just because she says things stridently, that does not make them true.

When she wonders about being on the side of criminals, maybe she should remember that it is a Conservative Government, and a Conservative Home Secretary, who are literally letting more criminals off–literally.

There are hundreds of thousands’ fewer prosecutions every single year than there were under the Labour Government.

Prosecutions, cautions and community penalties are going down, even now when crime is going up, and that genuinely means that rapists, abusers, serious offenders, thieves and thugs are all less likely to be prosecuted than they were seven years ago.

There is just a one in 20 chance of someone being prosecuted on this Home Secretary’s watch.

The Home Secretary said, too, that she would not “stand by” while anti-social behaviour caused misery for others, but she is.

There are 7,000 fewer neighbourhood police than there were six years ago, and the police are failing to send officers to more than half of all reported anti-social behaviour offences.

People and communities across the country are expressing serious concerns about anti-social behaviour being ignored time and again by this Home Secretary.

What is the Home Secretary offering today? She offers a Bill that targets peaceful protesters and passers-by but fails to safeguard key infrastructure and does nothing to tackle violence against women, nothing to support victims of crime and nothing to increase prosecution rates or to cut crime. This Bill fails on all counts. It will not make our national infrastructure more resilient, and it will not make it easier to prevent serious disruption by a minority of protesters. Instead, it will target peaceful protesters and passers-by who are not disrupting anything or anyone at all.

There should be shared principles throughout the House on this issue. All of us, whatever our party and whatever our political views, should believe that, in a democracy, people need the freedom to speak out against authority and to make their views heard.

We have historic freedoms and rights to speak out, to gather and to protest against the things that governments or organisations, public or private, do that we disagree with. That goes for protesters with whom we strongly disagree as well as for protesters whose views and values we support, because that is what democracy is all about.

But we should also share the view that no one has the right, no matter what they may think they are protesting about, to threaten, to harass or to intimidate others. No one has the right to protest in ways that are dangerous or risk the safety or the lives of others. Nor should they be able to cause serious disruption to essential services and vital infrastructure on which all of us in society depend.

That is why Labour has long defended the rights to speak out, to protest, to be heard and to argue for change, and it is why we called for greater protection for women and staff from intimidatory protests outside abortion clinics.

It is why we called for greater protection from harassment and threats outside schools and vaccine clinics after the threatening antivax protests. It is why we made common-sense proposals to give local authorities the powers to act which the Government initially voted against.

It is why we condemned the highly irresponsible protests on motorways because, whatever we think about the cause pursued by Insulate Britain or any other organisation, no one should put lives at risk like that, which is why we supported stronger sentences for those wilfully obstructing major roads.

It is also why we criticised those involved in Just Stop Oil for causing serious damage and trying to disrupt supplies to petrol stations, which could have stopped people getting to work or pushed up prices in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis.

Those protests were not just against the law, but counterproductive; at a time when they should have been trying to persuade people, they alienated people instead. That is why we called for national action to ensure that speedy injunctions were in place to prevent serious disruption.