Imagine a movement arising in this country that seeks to overthrow established power. Imagine that it begins with a series of rebellions, in Scotland and south Wales perhaps, that shut down workplaces, confront police and soldiers (sometimes peaceably, sometimes with crude weapons), set up roadblocks and lay siege to the places where fellow protesters are imprisoned and government officials are meeting.

Imagine that this movement goes on to smash or disable machinery across the country. Imagine that it organises a general strike, nixing much of the UK’s economic activity for three months. Imagine that it keeps protesting in the same places by the same means, gradually eroding the resistance of the state.

Keir Starmer’s Labour government would doubtless do everything in its power not just to stop these individual actions but to prohibit the movement. What am I describing? The origins and development of the Labour party.

The Labour party arose from a long wave of protests by workers against capital, calling for workers’ rights and for sweeping democratic reforms. These protests and their organisers came to be known as the labour movement. Its early actions included the radical war in Scotland, the Merthyr and Newport risings in south Wales, the Swing riots in England and the General Strike of 1842. No such protests would have meant no such movement. No such movement would have meant no such party.

Yet somehow, the party that arose from protest has formed, in terms of our rights to free expression and democratic challenge, the most illiberal government the UK has suffered since the second word war. This Labour government would have banned the labour movement.

Over 40 years, starting with the Public Order Act 1986, our rights to assemble and challenge power have been severely curtailed. That act was followed by the Trade Union Act 1992, the Criminal Justice Act 1994, the Terrorism Act 2000, the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023. Between them, they have largely bound and gagged effective protest.

Any government that fails to contest and reverse this trend, even if it did nothing to add to this bleak legacy, sides with illiberalism. Far from doing so, Starmer’s has already gone further than the Conservatives dared, by classifying a civil disobedience group – Palestine Action – as a terrorist organisation and banning it. It has also (so far with remarkably little resistance) inserted a clause into its crime and policing bill enabling the police to stop demonstrations “in the vicinity of a place of worship”. As our towns and cities are so richly endowed with religious buildings, that means almost any urban area.

But its latest proposal is even worse. The home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has announced that the police should be able to stop protests that have a “cumulative impact”, by recurring in the same place. She will also consider “powers to ban protests outright”.

Mahmood has sought to justify these measures with the claim that repeated protests can leave religious groups, especially the Jewish community, feeling unsafe. It is worth noting that a Conservative home secretary, Suella Braverman, forced a very similar measure through parliament in 2023 (which was later struck down by the courts) using an entirely different argument: that repeated environmental protests were causing disruption to businesses and travellers. Illiberal people seek to stop protest. They will seize on any argument that justifies this urge.

It is essential that Jews in Britain are fiercely protected against antisemitic hate and antisemitic attacks. We must be perpetually vigilant against anyone who uses the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza as an excuse for antisemitism. This hate crime must be prosecuted, wherever it arises. But linking this disgusting crime to the act of protesting against the genocide, however peacefully and respectfully, as the government has explicitly done, triggers two grim thoughts.

The first is that it is using the horrific terrorism in Manchester last week as a good moment for shutting down dissent. The second is that it treats protests against Israeli government actions as protests against the Jewish community in Britain. Otherwise, it’s hard to understand why Mahmood and the prime minister should have called for only one thing to be cancelled the following day to respect the grief of British Jews: not football matches, concerts, car boot sales and protests, but solely the silent and peaceful Palestine protest in London. Jewish people in this country have repeatedly warned against such conflations, which can themselves constitute antisemitism.

Mahmood’s proposals, as well as being profoundly illiberal in their own right, add a new storey to the tower of authoritarian measures in whose shadow we live. We suffer the “cumulative impact” of a long succession of anti-protest laws. Labour is waging a concerted attack on the thing that made it.

skip past newsletter promotion

after newsletter promotion

But it’s not like the 1830s, is it? Thanks to the protests of the past, we’ve overthrown the corrupt old elites and achieved democracy. Well, I hope one day our descendants will look back on our system and wonder how it could ever have passed for democracy, and why we tolerated it for so long.

First-past-the-post elections delivering a massive majority on 34% of the vote? One second’s participation in decision-making every five years? Presumed consent in between? Governments claiming to represent us, but responding instead to press barons and corporations? Politics on sale to the highest bidder, through political donations and paid lobbying? This is democracy? This is a system that requires no challenge?

Those who opposed the labour movement two centuries ago also believed their political system was unimprovable. In 1830, when a tiny minority was allowed to vote and entire cities were unrepresented, the prime minister, the Duke of Wellington, told parliament that neither he nor the leader of the opposition could see any means by which “the state of the representation could be improved”. The existing system deservedly “possessed the full and entire confidence of the country”.

Our political ancestors knew that to be effective you have to keep coming back. You have to turn up where it counts. You have to make a nuisance of yourself. You must be noisy, obstructive, annoying. One by one, all these rights have been struck down. Now the last remaining attribute of effective dissent – persistence – is also to be banned. Protest is allowed, as long as it’s invisible, transient and useless. But the moment protest ceases to be effective is the moment democracy dies.