Kettled Into Silence: How Britain's New Public Order Laws Are Extinguishing the Right to Dissent

The Legislation Nobody Quite Noticed Passing

In April 2022, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act received Royal Assent. In May 2023, the Public Order Act followed. Between them, these two pieces of legislation fundamentally altered the legal terrain on which public protest in England and Wales takes place. They created new criminal offences, expanded police stop-and-search powers, introduced the concept of 'serious disruption prevention orders' — civil orders that can restrict an individual's movements and communications based on anticipated, rather than actual, behaviour — and lowered the threshold at which police may impose conditions on assemblies to a standard so broad as to be almost limitless.

The PCSC Act 2022 introduced the concept of 'serious annoyance' and 'serious inconvenience' as grounds on which police could impose conditions on a protest. These are not legal standards with established meanings. They are subjective assessments that vest enormous discretionary power in individual officers and senior commanders. Liberty, the human rights organisation, described the legislation at the time as 'the biggest threat to the right to protest in a generation.' That assessment has, if anything, proved conservative.

From Principle to Practice: The Cases That Define the New Landscape

Law is tested in its application. The application of these powers has been revealing.

In February 2023, five Extinction Rebellion activists were acquitted by a jury at Inner London Crown Court of charges arising from their role in a 2021 protest outside the News International printing works at Broxbourne. The acquittal came after the judge ruled that the jury could consider whether the defendants had a 'lawful excuse' for their actions, given the context of the climate emergency. The government's response was not to reflect on whether the prosecutions had been appropriate. It was to introduce a provision — section 78 of the Public Order Act 2023 — that prevents juries from considering the wider context or purpose of a defendant's actions in such cases. Parliament, in other words, legislated to remove the defence that had just secured an acquittal.

The implications of that provision are difficult to overstate. The right of a jury to hear and weigh a defendant's stated justification for their actions is not a technicality. It is one of the mechanisms by which democratic societies distinguish between criminal conduct and political dissent. Its removal in the specific context of protest law is a statement about how the state regards the latter.

In separate proceedings, Just Stop Oil activists have received custodial sentences of unprecedented length for offences relating to slow-walking on public roads — a form of protest that caused inconvenience but no physical harm to any person. In July 2024, two Just Stop Oil protesters, Roger Hallam and Rupert Read's former colleague Daniel Shaw, along with other co-defendants, received sentences of four and five years respectively for conspiracy to cause a public nuisance — sentences that a number of senior legal figures publicly described as disproportionate. The Court of Appeal subsequently reduced some sentences, but the initial terms had already signalled something important about prosecutorial intent.

The Chilling Effect Is the Point

Civil liberties organisations, including Liberty, Amnesty International UK, and the Civil Liberties Union for Europe, have documented extensively how the combination of expansive new offences, broad police powers, and severe sentencing creates what lawyers call a chilling effect — a suppression of lawful activity that operates not through direct prohibition but through the threat of disproportionate consequences.

The effect is visible. Protest organisations report that potential participants are deterred not by the illegality of what they are contemplating — which is often entirely legal — but by uncertainty about where the legal line now falls, and by the prospect of arrest, prosecution, and civil orders that could restrict their lives for years. This is not incidental to the legislation's purpose. It is its mechanism of action.

The strongest version of the opposing argument runs as follows: the right to protest is not absolute; it must be balanced against the rights of others to go about their lives without disruption; and a democratic society is entitled to set reasonable limits on the manner and method of public demonstration, even if not on its content. This argument is not without force. No serious civil liberties position holds that all protest is beyond regulation. The question is whether the powers introduced by the PCSC Act and the Public Order Act are proportionate, necessary, and consistent with the United Kingdom's obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights.

On all three counts, the evidence is troubling.

Trade Unions and the Forgotten History

The application of these powers has not been confined to environmental activists. The Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act 2023 — which sits alongside the protest legislation as part of the same legislative programme — effectively criminalises industrial action that falls below government-set thresholds, threatening unions with injunctions and individual workers with dismissal for participating in lawful strikes. The Trade Union Congress described the legislation as 'the most restrictive anti-strike law in any Western democracy.' That description is contested, but the direction of travel is not.

The historical resonance matters here. The right to withdraw labour and the right to demonstrate publicly are not separate freedoms that happen to be under simultaneous pressure. They are expressions of the same underlying principle: that organised collective action by working people is a legitimate and necessary counterweight to the power of capital and the state. The legislative programme of the past three years has attacked both simultaneously. That simultaneity is not coincidental.

Labour's repeal of the minimum service levels legislation was a welcome first step. But the Public Order Act 2023 and the relevant provisions of the PCSC Act remain on the statute book, and the new government has shown no urgency in revisiting them.

Lone Protesters and the Logic of Pre-Emption

Perhaps the most chilling development in recent years has been the use of pre-emptive powers against individuals engaged in entirely solitary protest. The case of Steve Bray — the anti-Brexit campaigner who demonstrated outside Parliament for years — saw police invoke amplified noise provisions to confiscate his equipment in 2022 under powers introduced by the PCSC Act, before he had committed any offence. The case attracted attention partly because Bray was a familiar figure, but the legal principle it illustrated applies to any individual whose presence the authorities find inconvenient.

Serious disruption prevention orders, which can be applied for on the basis of anticipated future behaviour, represent a further extension of this pre-emptive logic. They are civil orders, which means the standard of proof required is lower than in criminal proceedings, and they can impose conditions — on where a person may go, with whom they may associate, what they may post online — that would be extraordinary in any other context.

What Is at Stake

Protest is not merely a right. It is a mechanism of democratic accountability. It is how those without access to the levers of institutional power make their voices audible. Every significant social advance in British history — the abolition of slavery, votes for women, the eight-hour working day, equal marriage — was preceded and accompanied by public demonstration, often disruptive, often illegal at the time. The current generation of climate activists, housing campaigners, and trade unionists are operating in a tradition that the state has always sought to contain and that history has consistently vindicated.

The erosion of the right to protest is not a side effect of public order policy. It is, as the sequence and content of this legislation makes plain, the policy itself. And a Labour government that came to power on the strength of progressive votes and a promise of democratic renewal has a specific responsibility to say so — and to act accordingly.

The right to dissent is not a gift from the state to be rationed according to the government's tolerance for inconvenience — it is the foundation on which every other democratic right rests, and its quiet demolition brick by brick should alarm every person who believes that power must remain answerable to the people it governs.