Ian Dunt commented in IT News that the Home Secretary had been carving, without hyperbole or caveat, a piece of law which would sit more easily in a dictatorship than a democracy.
The Government waited until the final stages of a bill’s legislative process and then suddenly proposed a series of amendments, leaving reporters and human rights groups very little time to raise the alarm.
The mechanism she used is the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which first went before the Commons in March for its initial debate, and is now being turned into something even more alarming in the House of Lords.
The bill was already a stunningly draconian piece of legislation. One of its chief provisions was to allow police to impose severe restrictions on protests on the basis of noise.
The Home Secretary’s provisions, he wrote, were “carte blanche for invasive police action against activists”.
Source: Priti Patel has quietly been stuffing even more punitive anti-protest powers into the policing bill
