The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 (SOCPA) was introduced by David Blunkett to get rid of Brian Haw, the peace campaigner from Parliament Square.
The Serious Organised Crime Agency, an FBI-like agency to tackle "serious organised crime", are now being asked by Gordon Brown to expand their powers of limiting the right to free speech and free protest around the Houses of Parliament, even though one of the first things Gordon Brown said in his premiership, was that he was about to scrap it!
SOCPA contravenes our basic rights of Free Speech and the right to Protest, as Alison Hannah of the Legal Action Group states, "The distinction between ‘arrestable’ and ‘serious arrestable’ offences has been abolished, and the power of arrest now applies to all offences, however minor."
OK, so this isn't necessarily the good news it may seem at first :-/
The gushing intro from home secretary Jacqui Smith(*1) on 'the importance on protest to democracy' might reassure many readers they need read no further, sadly this is not the case...
Here's a brief summary of what they say
- We want to tighten powers on peaceful assembly NATIONWIDE!
- Protesters are all thugs / scum who hate democracy
- Damn, we forgot to ban marches first time round!
- MPs need to get to work and hippies might get in the way
- We are scared of the 'terrorists' too
- We 'need to ensure that ALL groups have the proper opportunity to protest at the seat of the elected UK parliament', however...
- Parliament square is for tourists - not plebs like you!
- We have grounds to treat the 1km around it seperately from the rest of the country
- Having to apply for prior permission to protest isn't prohibited by the ECHR
- We might make an exemption for 'small' demonstrations, but then again there might be several simultaneous demos so they will have to be VERY small.
- We might just make the law the same for everywhere, because... (see 1)
- IF (and only if) you support the exclusion zone (and other parliament centric restrictions) please write and tell us where you would like to see protest restricted next
You can mail them at ProtestaroundParliament@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk
Consultation is open for the next 10 weeks
You can download a PDF of the paper here, or easier, here.
PDF is Crown Copyright - Used by kind permission of Liz Windsor, 1, The Palace, London.
PS: Anyone else notice they refer to it throughout as SOCAP?
[1] Jacqui Smith's frankly appaling voting record can be found here: http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/jacqui_smith/redditch
Thanks to Technical Bloke for the origional article
