Authoritarianism with a dash of identity politics: the crime and policing bill

Shanice McBean explains that minority groups are being given crumbs to build consent for Labour’s authoritarian Crime & Policing Bill; meanwhile left media outlets like Novara, trade unions, and left wing MPs are silent.

This article first appeared on Shanice’s blog On Revolution. Shanice is the author, with Aviah Sarah Day, of Abolition Revolution from Pluto Press.

The Crime and Policing Bill currently making its way through parliament is a draconian and frankly terrifying piece of legislation. It will introduce a suite of new police and state powers that will fundamentally limit our human rights; including the right to protest, our right to safety in our homes, and the right to privacy from the state. This Bill builds on its recent predecessors – the Public Order Act 2023 and the Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts Act 2022 – designed to support the neoliberalisation of social, political, and economic life.

Neoliberalism operates on the logic of disinvestment: the destruction of the welfare state, fracturing of public infrastructure, and the disarming and disassembling of communal, working class organisation. Concomitant to this is the rise of poverty, insecurity, and downwards mobility as a fact of modern life. In order to manage and normalise the crisis disinvestment (or more accurately, organised destruction) creates we are treated to a vast expansion of the boundaries of permissible state violence: a dual strategy of criminalising the symptoms of poverty, and criminalising the activity of dissent.

A draconian Bill

No hyperbole or lyricism is needed to illustrate the authoritarianism at the core of this Bill; have a look at it for yourself:

1.    Concealing identity at a protest: protecting your identity at a protest will be an arrestable offence. You may be able to level a defence related to religious or health reasons, but this defence can be only be made after you’ve been charged: it won’t protect you from arrest. 

2.    Pyrotechnics at protests: simply possessing pyrotechnics – broadly defined – at a protest will be an arrestable offence. I can imagine a scenario where lighting candles at tactical locations – like the Israeli embassy or a politician’s home – will be criminalised using this new law.

3.    Protesting near a place of worship: police will be able to shut down, put conditions on, and criminalise a protest if it is in the vicinity of a place of worship. This is a direct attempt to criminalise Palestine solidarity marches and solidify Jews as the ideological buffer used to clamp down on protest and demonise Muslims, but will also prevent sexual abuse survivors from protesting outside of churches, for example.

4.    Climbing on memorials: it will be a criminal offence to climb on a memorial of any kind: something often done at protests to hold up flags or placards, and make speeches. This throws a bone to the right-wing culture warriors aggrieved by the toppling of slave trafficker Edward Colston’s statue during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, and responds to the acquittal of the activists who acquainted Colston with the waters of Bristol harbour. 

5.    Police will be able to deport people with valid limited leave to remain: this expands existing powers that currently only apply to people with no leave to remain. This new power would mean, for example, migrants who receive a conditional caution for protest activity will be made to leave the country by the police if they have limited leave to remain. This is eerily reminiscent of Trump’s proto-fascist use of ICE to kidnap and deport migrants who protest in solidarity with Palestine. 

6.    Facial recognition powers: all police forces, the National Crime Agency, and Independent Office for Police Conduct will be given access to DVLA driving licence records, including facial images which can be used for facial recognition searches. 

7.    Warrantless home searches: police will be able to search someone’s home for certain stolen goods without a warrant. It is clear to anyone with sense that this will be massively abused by police who will use the pretence of ‘stolen goods’ to conduct warrantless searches, as they already use the pretence of ‘smell of cannabis’ or ‘reports of someone matching your description’ to harass Black and working class communities with stop and search. 

8.    Respect Orders: a rebrand of ASBOs – which failed because they were never intended to address the economic, political, social, health, and spatial root causes of ‘anti-social’ behaviour. Police will be able to apply to the courts to restrict someone’s movement, or require them to do certain activities (such as attending an alcohol awareness course). Breaching a Respect Order will be a criminal offence. 

9.    Expansion of Prevent style laws: Youth Diversion Orders will be introduced that will put restrictions on young people deemed at risk of radicalisation. Given the move to proscribe Palestine Action as a ‘terrorist’ organisation, and the construction of Just Stop Oil as ‘extremist’, it is evident that youth social justice activism will be targeted. 

10.  Retail crime: all shop thefts will be triable either way regardless of the value of the items, or the reason for their appropriation. This will end the deprioritisation of thefts under £200 and expose people to harsher penalties; including possible prison time. This is a clear attempt to criminalise poverty and destitution. 

One amendment includes the expansion of Assault on Emergency Worker (AEW) laws which already have a lower threshold of evidence for charge than serious assault offences. Over four years this is has led to 1486 of domestic violence survivors facing prison sentences after calling the police for help. Violent and sexist police behaviour – such as siding with the perpetrator or physically restraining survivors – triggers a trauma response which ends in survivors being arrested using AEW laws: while the perpetrator laughs on.

A deafening silence

There is a deafening silence from NGOs, trade unions, left politicians, and left media on this Bill; the reasons are slightly different in each case, but they’re all connected. NGOs – including the better ones such as Amnesty and Liberty who were extremely vocal against the Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts Act – are more cautious campaigning against a Labour government. Their theory of change assumes they have greater political leverage under a Labour government, compared to a Tory government, and so they choose not to be seen to antagonise the very people who may throw them a bone.

This creates a passivity that alters the facts on the ground: there is less scrutiny and challenge, therefore less data and noise; activist groups are largely ignorant of what’s happening, and so left MPs – in the context of existing marginalisation and suppression of the parliamentary left – feel little pressure from the grassroots to level an organised and co-ordinated response. Some left MPs have been abstaining on some of the worst measures of the Bill, and others have tabled amendments challenging the government but have not turned up to the debate! Labour, meanwhile, are able to drive through more authoritarian measures than their Tory colleagues, and do it largely unopposed. 

Labour have been tactically leveraging liberal identity politics – channelling this exclusively through the lens of criminalisation and law and order – to build consent by giving different groups crumbs to sing and dance about. They allow some NGOs or interest groups to garner small wins, or perceptions of small wins, through amendments. These amendments then generate support for the Bill in its entirety: after all, the whole Bill needs to pass in order for the amendment to become law. Simultaneously, this props up one of the state’s core ideological containment strategies: creating the belief criminalisation and policing can effectively respond to social and political oppression. 

Some might argue that given Labour’s parliamentary majority and the inevitability of the Bill passing, why not tack on a few improvements? But the silence this strategy requires shows exactly what the problem is: silence creates permission for the creep of authoritarianism. Each new draconian law that goes unchallenged broadens the permissibility of state violence and intervention in our lives – and that is a much greater win for the state and police than any amendment is for us.

True, the amendment and vote on abortion is a partial win for women: it will mean some women won’t face prosecution, though it keeps abortion within the purview of criminal law which means access to safe abortions is no easier. This pyrrhic improvement on the current legal landscape for women means feminist groups are rallying behind a Bill that expands laws already leading to hundreds of vulnerable women and domestic abuse survivors being criminalised and imprisoned: significantly underpinning the stark rise in women’s incarceration over recent years.

Stonewall – an organisation named after a queer insurrectionary protest against police violence – are celebrating the Bill because it expands hate crime legislation. And while the government are impoverishing disabled people and the entire working class by decimating the welfare state, they’re assuaging disability NGOs and trade unions (where the latter are already pacified waiting for the repeal of anti-trade union legislation) by expanding disability hate crime laws, and introducing new assault offences backed by the trade unions like RMT, including assault on retail and public transport workers. This is especially depressing given the reality that hate crime laws don’t stop discriminatory violence; making the support of these amendments futile and hollow.

A different strategy

In this quite bleak context, unlike the Kill the Bill movement grassroots organisations won’t be able to rely on a coalition of trade unions and NGOs to build mass support, pool resources, and conduct research. There are also few signs of life from left wing media outlets like Novara and the pundits in their orbit – judging by their collective silence this Bill may as well not exist. Until we create significant pressure from below it appears they will all remain asleep at the wheel and out for the count.

This means any resistance movement will need to be quite different to the Kill the Bill:

• We will need to develop our own investigative media, and savvy social media strategies, to raise consciousness around the Bill.
• We will need to build new, and develop existing, relationships with radical lawyers who can help level the legal challenges NGOs would usually invest in.
• We will need to get back to the basics of community organising and mass movement building, and not assume we can rely on activating existing mass organisations.
• Probably most importantly, we will need to learn, develop, and disseminate resistance tactics so social justice movements don’t collapse under the weight of state authoritarianism. We need to think through how we resist the use of facial recognition technology; develop more effective protest defense and offense strategies; and build our rudimentary arrestee support infrastructure.

There is a lot to do. But you knew that already.