Boiling the Frog

For over a year, people have taken to the streets across Britain to protest Israel’s genocide in Gaza.¹ These protests have been loud. They’ve been disruptive. They’ve blocked traffic, occupied public spaces, and refused to be ignored. Hundreds of thousands of people have marched through London, week after week, demanding that the British government stop arming and supporting a campaign that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, displaced millions, and reduced entire neighbourhoods to rubble.²

The protests have been loud because silence is complicity. They’ve been disruptive because polite petitions don’t stop bombs from falling. They’ve been sustained because the killing hasn’t stopped - and because the British government continues to sell arms to Israel, to defend its actions in international forums, to treat a genocide as a legitimate exercise in “self-defence.”

This is exactly the kind of protest that’s supposed to make people uncomfortable. It’s supposed to disrupt normal life, to force the issue into public consciousness, to make it impossible to ignore what’s being done in our name. The suffragettes smashed windows. Anti-apartheid protesters blockaded South African goods. The civil rights movement shut down buses and lunch counters. Effective protest has always been disruptive - that’s the point.³

And that’s precisely why the state wants to shut it down.

The Latest Crackdown

There’s a useful metaphor for understanding what’s happened to protest rights in Britain: boiling the frog. Drop a frog in boiling water and it’ll jump out. Put it in cool water and slowly turn up the heat, and it won’t notice until it’s too late. Over two centuries, the British state has been turning up the heat on our right to protest - gradually, incrementally, crisis by crisis - until what was once a fundamental democratic right has become a revocable privilege granted at police discretion.

Last Saturday, the water got a bit hotter. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced that police forces can now consider the “cumulative impact” of repeated protests when deciding whether to shut them down or force organisers to move location. You can now be arrested not for what your protest does, but because other people protested in the same place before you.

The announcement came after a weekend that saw nearly 500 arrests at pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Mahmood justified the new powers by claiming repeated large-scale protests had caused “considerable fear” for the Jewish community, framing this as a necessary balance between the right to protest and community safety.⁴

It’s a textbook example of the pattern that has repeated for centuries: governments exploit moments of tension to expand authoritarian powers. Take a specific incident, generate moral panic about it, then introduce sweeping legislation that applies to everyone. The powers aren’t limited to pro-Palestinian protests - they apply to any repeated demonstration. Climate activists blocking roads? Workers picketing the same factory for weeks? Regular anti-government protests in Parliament Square? The police can now tell you to move along and arrest you if you don’t comply.

And here’s the really insidious part: these powers will remain long after the current crisis has faded. They’ll be used against trade unionists, environmental campaigners, housing activists - anyone who dares to sustain a campaign of resistance. That’s how the ratchet works: each crisis expands state power, and that power never contracts.

This isn’t new. This is how it’s always worked.

Two Centuries of Turning Up The Heat

The brilliance of this approach - from the state’s perspective - is that no single step feels like a fundamental attack on liberty. Each new restriction is justified by the crisis of the moment, presented as a reasonable response to specific threats. But step back and look at the pattern across two centuries, and you see a relentless expansion of state power to suppress collective action.

The Origins: Vague Laws and Flexible Repression

The legal tools for criminalising protest go back centuries. In 1581, William Lambard codified the offences of riot, rout, and unlawful assembly - establishing the principle that gatherings of people could be inherently criminal, regardless of their actions.⁵

“Unlawful assembly” was deliberately vague, allowing authorities to prosecute peaceful gatherings of three or more people if they appeared “tumultuous.” Notice what’s happening here: the law doesn’t require actual violence or damage. The mere appearance of being potentially disruptive is enough. This vagueness wasn’t a bug - it was a feature, giving authorities maximum flexibility to suppress gatherings they didn’t like.

Originally, these charges were used against genuine public disorder. But legal tools rarely stay confined to their stated purpose. Once you create a mechanism for state power, it gets repurposed for whatever the state wants to control.

The Shift to Political Control

By the 18th and 19th centuries, political dissent was routinely prosecuted as seditious libel - essentially, any criticism of the Crown or government could land you in prison, even if what you said was true. The 1792 Libel Act, championed by Charles James Fox, gave juries more control over seditious libel cases, making these prosecutions harder to secure.⁶

So the state adapted. Authorities began using unlawful assembly and riot charges to suppress political meetings instead. After the Peterloo Massacre in 1819 - when cavalry charged into a peaceful crowd of 60,000 people demanding parliamentary reform, killing at least 15 - the government’s response wasn’t to prosecute the perpetrators but to pass the Six Acts, further restricting the right to assemble.⁷

The Chartists, campaigning for working-class suffrage in the 1840s, faced similar treatment. Peaceful political meetings were prosecuted as unlawful assemblies. The legal framework was the same - the same charges originally designed for riots and disorder - but the target had shifted. Political speech and organisation were being reframed as public dangers rather than legitimate democratic expression.⁸

This is the pattern that repeats throughout history: legal tools created for one purpose get weaponised against political dissent, and each expansion of state power gets justified as protecting public safety.

The 1930s: Fascism Provides the Excuse

The rise of fascist movements in the 1930s - particularly the British Union of Fascists with their provocative marches through Jewish areas of East London - created a genuine crisis. Something had to be done about paramilitaries in political uniforms terrorising communities.⁹

The Public Order Act 1936 was Parliament’s response. It banned political uniforms and paramilitary organisations - measures clearly targeted at the BUF. But buried in the Act was Section 5, which gave police sweeping powers to act against “threatening, abusive or insulting” behaviour in public.¹⁰

Again, notice the vagueness. “Insulting” is doing a lot of work there. What counts as insulting? Who decides? The police, naturally. And while the Act was sold as necessary to combat fascism, Section 5 became a key tool for policing all kinds of protest over the following decades - including, ironically, anti-fascist demonstrations.

This is the frog beginning to feel the heat. A law created to address a specific, genuine threat becomes a general expansion of police powers over public expression.

The 1980s: Making It Statutory

By the 1980s, during the upheaval of the Miners’ Strike and conflicts with New Age Travellers, the government decided the old common law framework wasn’t giving police enough power. The Public Order Act 1986 replaced centuries-old common law offences with statutory definitions and fixed sentences.

Section 5 was updated to criminalise speech or behaviour that was “abusive or insulting” if it caused someone “harassment, alarm or distress.” Read that carefully. You could be prosecuted not for threatening anyone, not for inciting violence, but for saying something insulting that caused someone distress.¹¹

This is the point where protest law fundamentally shifts from preventing violence to preventing discomfort. The threshold for criminalisation drops from actual harm to emotional reaction. And who decides what’s distressing? Again, the police get to make that call in the moment.

Section 14 gave police powers to impose conditions on static protests, including dispersing them entirely. Later amendments even allowed preventing journalists from attending protests - a direct attack on the accountability that press coverage provides.

The word “insulting” was eventually removed from Section 5 in 2013, after campaigns highlighted how it was being used against street preachers and protesters. But by then, the damage was done. The principle was established: the state can criminalise speech and assembly based on subjective assessments of potential offence or disruption.¹²

The Water’s Boiling Now

Which brings us to today. The Public Order Act 2022 introduced by the Conservatives created new offences of “locking on” and being equipped to lock on, effectively criminalising standard protest tactics used by climate activists. It gave police powers to impose noise limits on protests and to stop and search people near protests without suspicion.¹³

And now Labour’s latest measures add another turn of the heat: cumulative impact assessments that make repeated protest at the same location grounds for restriction or outright bans.

Each step, taken in isolation, gets justified by the specific crisis of its moment: fascist paramilitaries, industrial unrest, environmental activism, pro-Palestinian demonstrations. But the through-line is unmistakable. Over two centuries, the British state has progressively normalised the idea that political dissent is a form of disorder to be controlled, that protests causing “alarm” or “distress” should be restricted, that disruption - the very essence of effective protest - is grounds for criminalisation.

We’ve gone from a society where peaceful assembly was a common law right to one where protests exist only at the discretion of police, who can disperse them based on vague assessments of disruption, cumulative impact, or potential to cause distress. The frog is well and truly boiling.

The genius of this approach - and make no mistake, it’s a form of genius, even if a malevolent one - is that at no single point did the state announce “we’re abolishing the right to protest.” Instead, they chipped away at it, crisis by crisis, decade by decade, until what remains is a hollow shell. You have the right to protest, technically. You just need police permission, you can’t cause disruption or distress, you can’t use effective tactics, you can’t protest repeatedly at the same location, and the police can impose conditions or disperse you based on their subjective assessment of public order.

That’s not a right. That’s a revocable privilege. And that’s exactly where we are now.

The Bipartisan Assault

What makes this moment particularly revealing is how it exposes the bipartisan nature of the assault on protest rights. When the Conservatives introduced the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 with its expanded protest powers, Labour loudly opposed it. They warned about threats to civil liberties. They talked about the importance of protest in a democracy. They positioned themselves as defenders of fundamental rights.

Then they won power, and within months they’re not just maintaining those Tory powers but expanding them further.

When Suella Braverman introduced regulations in 2023 lowering the threshold for police to crack down on protests from “serious disruption” to “more than minor” disruption, the courts ruled it unlawful. Yvette Cooper, as Home Secretary earlier this year, initially appealed that ruling before eventually dropping the appeal in May. Now her successor Mahmood is introducing new restrictions that arguably go even further.¹⁴

This isn’t about Labour betraying its principles or the Conservatives being uniquely authoritarian. It’s about a cross-party consensus that has emerged over decades: protest is a problem to be managed rather than a democratic right to be protected.

Both major parties now accept the premise that protests causing “disruption” should be restricted, that police should have broad powers to impose conditions, that the state’s priority is maintaining order rather than enabling dissent. The differences are only in degree - how much disruption is too much, which protests get targeted first, how heavy-handed the enforcement should be. But the fundamental direction of travel is the same regardless of which party is in power: more restrictions, more police powers, less space for effective dissent.

This reflects a deeper truth about British politics: the system is comfortable with democracy as long as it doesn’t threaten anything important. You can vote every few years, you can write to your MP, you can sign petitions and attend approved rallies in designated zones. But sustained, disruptive protest that actually challenges power? That’s being systematically criminalised, and both major parties are complicit.

What Civil Society Says

The response from civil liberties organisations has been swift and damning. Liberty warned that police already have “huge powers to restrict protests” and that further restrictions would undermine rights while potentially fuelling tensions by removing legal ways for people to be heard.¹⁵

Amnesty International UK called the proposal “ludicrous,” asking if the government seriously believes people should only be allowed to protest its decisions a limited number of times. They’re right - it is ludicrous. But it’s also logical if you understand the government’s real priority: not protecting democratic rights, but preventing sustained opposition to its policies.¹⁶

Greenpeace UK’s co-executive director described it as “a dangerous step towards authoritarianism” and noted that the right to protest “has been corroded to the point of collapse.” Again - absolutely correct. We’ve moved from a country where protest was a protected right to one where it’s increasingly treated as a privilege that can be revoked if it becomes inconvenient.¹⁷

The activist group Defend Our Juries has announced plans for “mass civil disobedience” in response. Good. Because that’s what this situation demands - not polite objections or appeals to the government’s better nature, but direct resistance.¹⁸

The Death of Legitimate Opposition

Here’s what really worries me about this trajectory: we’re moving toward a model where the only legitimate political participation is voting every few years and occasionally signing petitions. Everything else - sustained campaigns, disruptive protest, mass mobilisation - is being gradually criminalised.

This is profoundly dangerous for democracy, but it’s especially dangerous for anyone challenging the status quo. The political and economic establishment can largely operate through institutional channels - they control the major parties, they have connections to media and business, they can advance their agenda through normal parliamentary processes. Those seeking fundamental change don’t have those advantages. We rely on extra-parliamentary pressure - trade unions, social movements, protest campaigns - to push politics in a different direction.

If you systematically dismantle the right to protest while leaving institutional power structures unchanged, you’re not creating a level playing field. You’re entrenching the power of those who already control the institutions. And that’s precisely the point.

What This Means For Movements

So what do we do about it?

First, we need to be absolutely clear that we can’t rely on either major party to defend civil liberties. Both have shown themselves willing to restrict the very rights that social movements depend on. When opposition parties criticise protest restrictions, it’s often tactical positioning rather than principled commitment - as Labour’s rapid U-turn in government demonstrates. We need to build power independently of the parliamentary system.

Second, we need to resist these measures through every avenue available. That means legal challenges, mass demonstrations (while we still can), sustained campaigning, and yes, civil disobedience when necessary. The suffragettes didn’t win votes for women by asking nicely. The civil rights movement didn’t end segregation through polite petitions. Social change requires disruption, and if disruption is criminalised, then sometimes breaking the law becomes a democratic necessity.

Third, we need to connect the dots between this and other authoritarian trends - the crackdown on trade union rights, the restrictions on asylum seekers, the expansion of surveillance powers, the attempts to limit judicial review. This isn’t isolated policy - it’s a pattern of restricting any form of effective opposition to the status quo, regardless of which party implements it.

And finally, we need to build the kind of mass movements that are too big to ignore and too determined to stop. Not cults of personality around individual leaders, but genuine grassroots organisations rooted in communities and workplaces. Because ultimately, rights aren’t granted from above - they’re won from below, through collective struggle.

A Line In The Sand

There’s a quote that keeps coming to mind, from the great socialist historian E.P. Thompson: “The notion of ‘indefinite progress’ is a Whig trick: we must attend to each historical moment, in its specificity.”¹⁹ Every generation faces moments where fundamental rights are under threat, where the gradual erosion of democracy accelerates, where the state becomes more authoritarian under the guise of maintaining order.

This is one of those moments. The right to protest - to assemble, to dissent, to collectively challenge power - is being dismantled piece by piece. The water has been heating for two centuries, and we’re approaching the boiling point.

We can’t allow this to become normalised. We can’t accept the premise that sustained protest is inherently illegitimate, that the state should have the power to shut down campaigns that become too effective, that democracy means voting every few years and then shutting up.

Every major social advance in British history was won through protest. The labour movement itself, the NHS, the welfare state, votes for women, anti-discrimination laws - none of these were granted voluntarily by enlightened elites. They were won through decades of sustained, often illegal, frequently disruptive protest by ordinary people who refused to accept the status quo.

If we lose the right to protest, we lose the mechanism through which all those victories were achieved. The bipartisan consensus on restricting protest isn’t about protecting communities - it’s about protecting power from democratic accountability.

It’s time to draw a line in the sand. Not in some future crisis, not when things get really bad - now, while we still can. Because once these powers are normalised, once we accept that repeated protest is grounds for state suppression, the window for effective resistance closes.

The state is betting that we’ll be too tired, too fragmented, too demoralised to fight back. The frog is supposed to just sit there as the water boils. Let’s prove them wrong.