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The last few years have seen a sustained effort on the part of the UK government to clamp down on protest labelled ‘disruptive’ and ‘illegal’. After the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act of 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023, we are now presented with John Woodcock’s ominously titled report Protecting our Democracy from Coercion. It targets not just certain activist groups but our understanding of democracy itself. Emphasising the ‘rule of law’, the report imagines a democracy reduced to a fixed set of rules and institutions insulated from popular control and contestation.

[…] [John Woodcock’s] 291-page report focuses particularly on non-violent activists on the left, such as climate and pro-Palestine groups, who employ strategies of disruption and lawbreaking. The threat of these, Woodcock claims, lies in the economic damage they may cause, in the draining of police resources, and in their potential ‘to undermine faith in our parliamentary democracy and the rule of law.’ Although recent changes in policy would suggest otherwise, he insists that these dangers have so far been overlooked and little understood. The recommendations of Woodcock’s report range from establishing channels for businesses to claim compensation from protest organisers, charging them for the cost of policing, and calling on governments and elected representatives not to engage with or consult any activists employing strategies of lawbreaking.

[…] Championing ‘the rule of law’, he writes ‘that if a movement advocates systematic law-breaking as the means for political change, then that organisation crosses a line for what is and is not acceptable.’ This disregards the fact that protests that involve lawbreaking and civil disobedience have a historical legacy of democratisation that extends from the suffragettes to the US civil rights movement — and are recognised as democratic practices by liberal democratic theorists such as John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas.

Woodcock, in contrast, insists that all this is obsolete because ‘the UK’s liberal democracy’ guarantees citizens’ right to vote. This reduces the people to an audience allowed to express their consent or disapproval every few years on the invitation of the government. It also disguises the reality of a corporate lobby drowning out electoral voice. The ‘independent advisor’ Woodcock is himself a case in point: it is difficult to believe that his activity as a paid lobbyist for arms manufacturers and fossil fuel companies did not affect his report’s recommendations to constrain climate and pro-Palestine activist groups in particular. Making acts of popular protest more and more difficult ultimately also makes it easier for corporate power to shape government policy in its interest.