The UK Government’s decision to give the police new powers to relocate serial protests is a welcome development, albeit one that is long overdue. Under new plans announced by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, chief constables will be able to consider the “cumulative impact” of repeat demonstrations when assessing whether to give the go-ahead to the next one, and will have powers to instruct the organisers to move it to a new location.

Perhaps the most striking thing about this proposal is how redolent it seems of the fraught politics of policing in Northern Ireland, where the police are constantly drawn into rows between loyalists and republicans about the routes of marches. It isn’t a dynamic one would expect to see on the mainland, and it says nothing good that it’s started to emerge in England.

Nonetheless, it is better that the Home Secretary acted rather than tried to stick her head in the sand, as is too often the establishment response to unwelcome evidence that modern Britain might not be the tolerant utopia it was promised to be.

Whether or not this approach will work is a different matter entirely. For instance, we have already seen hundreds of people arrested for defying the Government’s proscription of Palestine Action. Supporting a proscribed organisation is a criminal offence which carries a serious risk of a prison sentence; presumably, defying a chief constable’s relocation order will not carry the same penalties, so we could well see more people do it.

If so, that would further undermine the public image of the police, which would need to use these new powers carefully. The reputation of many forces, especially the Metropolitan Police, has already been severely damaged by perceptions of two-tier policing.

Now those in operational command of policing protests have their reasons, or at least their excuses. The default modus operandi of today’s police is to capture wrongdoing on camera and go and arrest miscreants later, rather than risk confrontation by trying to arrest people on the day if they think it will cause trouble.

But however sensible this might sound on one level, it does have the de facto effect of ceding the streets to any mass of people sufficiently determined to cause trouble. And when the police are willing to intervene in other circumstances, as with the recent case of an officer in Newcastle filmed confiscating a Union Jack from a teenage girl at a demonstration, it creates a toxic image.

Thus, while these new powers are potentially a useful tool for preventing the immiseration of neighbourhoods exposed to weekly marches, they are also another means by which some forces might end up operating a double standard. Either way, this will surely not be the last time Mahmood has to tighten the policing of protests. This country has historically had generous rules governing demonstrations, and has taken pride in a policing tradition very different to the more martial approaches taken by near neighbours such as France.

Yet policing norms must reflect the society which is being policed. Historically, Britain has not been plagued by serial demonstrations at the pace it is witnessing today, and even mass protests tended to be mostly well-ordered, as was the case during the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament era. They also, crucially, weren’t deeply threatening to this country’s Jewish community. French policing evolved in a society where the police needed to contend regularly with an organised, determined, and often violent minority for control of the streets. If that need emerges in Britain, we’ll have to stop looking down on the French and start asking them for lessons instead.

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Henry Hill is Deputy Editor of ConservativeHome.

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