In today's newsletter: New home secretary Shabana Mahmood has announced proposals to further curtail pro-Palestine Action protests - but what do they mean, and will they work?
Good morning. In 2014, a backbench Labour MP named Shabana Mahmood lay on the floor of her local Sainsbury's in protest against the sale of products made in illegal Israeli settlements. A week later, she spoke to crowds at a Free Palestine protest in Hyde Park, of the "compassion and humanity expressed for the people of Gaza ... from every race and every religion."
Compare and contrast with the 2025 Shabana Mahmood, now home secretary, whose new policies could see people arrested for the very same actions. She has just announced a fresh tranche of anti-protest policies that would allow police to re-route, and potentially shut down protests which repeatedly take place in the same area because of their cumulative impact.
So which Mahmood is in the right? Do these new proposals change anything, and if so, will they apply just to pro-Palestine marches or to far-right groups, too? To answer those questions, I spoke to Dr Richard Martin, an expert in the policing of protest at the London School of Economics. That's after the headlines.
The context for this weekend's announcement is obvious: on Thursday, a horrific attack took place at a synagogue in Manchester, on the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, claiming the lives of two people. It was one of the worst acts of antisemitic terrorism in modern British history.
Rather than focusing on what could be done to protect the Jewish community from such violence, or what may have gone wrong that allowed the perpetrator to be unknown to the Prevent programme, the government immediately took aim at pro-Palestine protesters, who have been marching regularly since the escalation of the war in Gaza, asking protesters instead to "respect the grief of British Jews". Mahmood called the decision to go ahead with another pro-Palestine protest "fundamentally un-British" and "dishonourable".
The protests over the weekend saw almost 500 of those protesting against the proscription of Palestine Action arrested (of those only four were for unrelated charges, such as common assault), and in response, the government put out an announcement on Sunday, saying it would amend sections 12 and 14 of the Public Order Act 1986 to further impose conditions on public protests and assemblies.
The changes to the law would allow police officers to consider the cumulative impact of protest when deciding whether or not they are lawful, meaning they could potentially re-route or totally shut down protest they believe could cause serious disruption to local communities. The changes are supposed to reference and respond to the real anxiety felt by many British Jews as a result of the antisemitism that can sometimes infect anti-Israel movements.
In the statement, the government made clear its intention for the changes: "Large, repeated protests can leave sections of our country, particularly religious communities, feeling unsafe, intimidated and scared to leave their homes. This has been particularly evident in relation to the considerable fear within the Jewish community ... These changes mark an important step in ensuring we protect the right to protest while ensuring all feel safe in this country."
We've been here before
Dr Richard Martin points out that two years ago a different home secretary, the Conservative Suella Braverman, made a very similar announcement, only at that time in relation to the environmental protest group Extinction Rebellion. "I think you could find exactly the same [sentiment] if you just replaced 'religious communities' with 'law-abiding people'," he explained.
When Braverman announced this two years ago, the Tories were looking at bringing in new powers under law to account for - you guessed it - the cumulative impact of regular protest. But crucially, they failed. The human rights organisation Liberty won an initial judicial review against the Home Office in May 2024, with the court deciding that its threshold for what constitutes "serious disruption" was too low. This year, a subsequent appeal against that judgment was brought under Keir Starmer's government, which lost again in May this year.
So although the Labour party has given the Manchester attack as the reason for this announcement, it pertains to a longstanding Conservative policy the Labour government has sought to push through.
There are two key differences to how Labour will institute the change this time around, which Martin thinks makes it more likely to succeed. The first, he explained, is that it seems Labour won't use the same low threshold of "more than minor" disruption that was ruled unlawful by the courts; and secondly, they won't try to slip the change in through regulations, but instead by amending the 1986 act - which will include greater parliamentary involvement and scrutiny but also makes it harder to subsequently amend.
The mood music
If you've been at any protest in the past few decades, you'll know that police often reroute protesters, restrict them through kettling, or tell them to move on and protest elsewhere. Do these new laws really represent a serious difference?
Martin thinks they do - but more as a vibe shift than anything else. "Crucially, the government is trying to send a signal to the police: to get tougher, less tolerant and to put more weight on the other side of the scales," he said. "What happens next depends on how susceptible senior police officers are to the mood music."
There is an excellent quote from Gordon Brown, who was in opposition when the Public Order Act was passed, which Martin references: "there are as many views as there are policemen as to what constitutes serious disruption to the life of the community". As Martin explained: "It's such a wide term - if the police wanted to, I am quite sure they could [enforce this] already."
But it's not a given that they will be susceptible to the government's song. In recent weeks, the images coming out of the protests over Palestine Action - a blind man in his 60s being walked out by a procession of officers; everyone from a Catholic priest to an 81-year-old woman with an OBE being arrested for quietly holding placards - have posed a serious legitimacy problem for the police. "Getting arrested for the cause is part of the tactic," explained Martin. "And the broader question of whether the police want to be seen every weekend making these mass arrests is a real issue for them." After all, the Met is hardly free from reputational issues at the moment.
The death of a cause
Ultimately, it's not clear protesters have any intention of slowing down, and since police officers will be able to interpret these law changes as they wish, this could all still be seriously bad news for those who take to the street.
"The key problem is, if the police get it wrong and they impose restrictions that are disproportionate, you're not going to find out about that until long after the offence, and [even then a protester would need] the power, money and clout to challenge that through a judicial review," explained Martin.
In recent years, protesters have sought to justify their actions in court with a defence that they had a "reasonable" or "lawful" excuse if they had broken the law, in effect, requiring the prosecution to justify why a conviction outweighs the right to peaceful protest. For the public order offences Labour are seeking to attach cumulative impact to, the courts have held firm that there will be no allowance for such a defence.
I ask Martin why these same laws aren't being suggested to police far-right rallies, particularly given the government justification of wanting to make sure that communities feel protected and free from intimidation.
"I think we need to be upfront about what's prompted this," he said. "It's not far-right rallies. The target to begin with was Extinction Rebellion, and now it's Palestine Action." He thinks that it is the shared tactic of these two groups - which he defined as "a campaign of attrition where you keep protesting to effectively exhaust the police, to fill the custody suites" - that the government legislation is actually targeted at.
"Their approach ... will potentially be met by police gradually breaking that technique down," Martin explained. "It will mean there may be a greater number of arrests; stakes for those arrested will be higher; we may well see less protest."