1986
Public Order Act 1986
Police gain the power to impose conditions on marches and assemblies. The baseline statute that nearly every later crackdown amends and extends.
StatuteEra I · 1986–2016
Laying the groundwork
Each power arrives with a reassurance: it will only be used against someone else. Each becomes the foundation the next one is built on.
1994
Criminal Justice and Public Order Act
"Aggravated trespass" is invented — protest on private land becomes a crime, not a civil matter. The right to silence is weakened. Even gatherings with "repetitive beats" are targeted.
Statute2000
Terrorism Act 2000, section 44
Suspicionless stop-and-search, justified by terrorism, used in practice against protesters and journalists for a decade.
Statute2010
Strasbourg strikes down s.44
The European Court of Human Rights rules the suspicionless search power unlawful (Gillan & Quinton v UK) — after roughly ten years of use. The pattern is set: the power operates first, the court arrives later.
Courts push back2005
Serious Organised Crime and Police Act
Unauthorised protest within one kilometre of Parliament becomes a criminal offence — legislation aimed substantially at a single man, Brian Haw, and his peace camp in Parliament Square.
Statute2012
LASPO: legal aid gutted, squatting criminalised
The ability of ordinary people to contest the state in court is quietly de-funded, while occupying an empty building becomes a crime.
Statute2016
Investigatory Powers Act — the "Snoopers' Charter"
Bulk interception, bulk hacking and bulk retention of communications data are written into law. The infrastructure of total visibility is now statutory.
StatuteEra II · 2019–2021
Testing the resistance
Mass civil disobedience returns to Britain's streets. The state probes how far existing powers stretch — and starts drafting new ones.
APR 2019
Extinction Rebellion holds central London
Over 1,100 arrests in ten days. Bridges and squares occupied by teachers, doctors, grandparents. The politics of protest policing changes overnight.
On the groundOCT 2019
The Met bans protest across all of London
A blanket section 14 order prohibits any Extinction Rebellion assembly anywhere in the capital. Hundreds are arrested under it.
On the groundNOV 2019
High Court: the London-wide ban was unlawful
The ban is quashed — but only after it has already done its work. Arrest first, litigate later.
Courts push backMAR 2021
The Clapham Common vigil
Women gathering to mourn Sarah Everard — killed by a serving police officer — are pinned to the ground and handcuffed by police. The following year the High Court finds the Met breached the organisers' rights.
On the ground2021
"Kill the Bill"
Protests erupt nationwide against the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. In Bristol, participants later receive some of the longest riot sentences in decades. The bill passes anyway.
On the groundEra III · 2022–2023
The ratchet, written into law
Two acts in two years transform the legal landscape of protest. What was a fine becomes a prison sentence; what was a tactic becomes an offence.
APR 2022
Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act
Protests can be restricted for being too noisy. Damaging a memorial: up to ten years. Wilful obstruction of the highway — for a century a matter of a small fine — now carries imprisonment. Even one-person protests can be conditioned.
StatuteOCT 2022
Two climbers on the Dartford Crossing
Morgan Trowland and Marcus Decker of Just Stop Oil scale the Queen Elizabeth II bridge, closing it for over a day. No one is hurt. Their sentences will set a new benchmark.
On the groundFEB 2023
Jailed for telling the jury why
Insulate Britain defendant David Nixon is imprisoned for eight weeks for contempt of court — his offence was explaining his climate motivation to the jury after Judge Silas Reid forbade it. Others follow him to the cells for the same words.
SentenceMAR 2023
Lawyers Are Responsible
More than one hundred lawyers — six King's Counsel among them — sign a Declaration of Conscience refusing to prosecute peaceful climate protesters, openly breaking the cab-rank rule. The revolt reaches the bar itself.
Courts push backMAY 2023
Public Order Act 2023
Measures the House of Lords threw out of the 2022 act are simply reintroduced and passed: criminal offences of "locking on" and tunnelling, Serious Disruption Prevention Orders — protest banning orders for individuals — and suspicionless stop-and-search, this time explicitly for protest. It comes into force days before the Coronation; the head of the anti-monarchy group Republic is arrested that morning, luggage straps in hand.
StatuteJUN 2023
"Serious disruption" redefined as "more than minor"
After Parliament rejects the change once, the government re-enacts it through secondary legislation — lowering the threshold at which police can shut a protest down to almost nothing.
StatuteOCT 2023
Online Safety Act
The censorship apparatus goes digital: sweeping duties over "harmful" content, and powers that put end-to-end encryption itself on notice. The same ratchet, applied to speech online.
StatuteMAY 2024
High Court: that regulation was unlawful
In a challenge brought by Liberty, the court finds the government acted outside its powers. The government's response is not repeal — it is appeal.
Courts push backEra IV · 2023–2024
Exemplary sentences
The courts begin handing down punishments designed to be heard about. The message is the sentence.
APR 2023
Three years for climbing a bridge
Trowland receives three years, Decker two years and seven months — at the time, the longest sentences for peaceful climate protest in modern British history. Decker, a long-settled European national, is then threatened with deportation; a tribunal later blocks it.
SentenceAPR 2024
The Trudi Warner case collapses
A retired social worker held a sign outside a courtroom stating a centuries-old principle: jurors may acquit according to their conscience. The Solicitor General sought to prosecute her for contempt. The High Court throws the case out as "fanciful". The state attempted to criminalise a sentence engraved at the Old Bailey.
Courts push backJUL 2024
Five years for a Zoom call
The "Whole Truth Five": Roger Hallam sentenced to five years, four others to four, for planning the M25 protests on a video call. The longest sentences ever imposed in Britain for peaceful protest organising. A UN special rapporteur attends the trial and calls the prosecutions something "not acceptable in a democracy". The Court of Appeal later trims some terms — and upholds the approach.
SentenceSEP 2024
Two years for soup on glass
Phoebe Plummer is sentenced to two years for throwing soup at Van Gogh's Sunflowers — a painting protected by glass and undamaged. Around the same courts, sentences for actual violence routinely run shorter.
SentenceHow it works
Nothing new had to be passed
Since 2000, the law has defined "terrorism" to include serious damage to property — no injury to any person required — where three tests are met:
- 1the act is designed to influence the government or intimidate the public;
- 2it is done to advance a political, religious or ideological cause;
- 3it involves serious violence, serious damage to property, or endangers life.
By this definition, a spray can wielded for a political cause has been chargeable as terrorism for twenty-five years. The gun was always loaded. What changed was the decision to fire it at protesters.
A precise point, because precision is the armour: no retroactive crime was invented — that would be unlawful. A past protest is simply charged now under a definition that applied all along. The escalation is not in the statute book. It is in the will to use it.
Era V · 2025
Protest becomes terrorism
The final turn of the ratchet: the machinery built for al-Qaeda is pointed at people holding cardboard signs.
JUN 2025
Paint on warplanes at Brize Norton
Palestine Action activists spray paint into the engines of RAF aircraft. Criminal damage, plainly — and the trigger for something without precedent.
On the groundJUL 2025
A protest group is proscribed as a terrorist organisation
Palestine Action is banned under the Terrorism Act 2000 — the first direct-action protest group listed alongside al-Qaeda and ISIS. Membership or expressing support: up to fourteen years in prison.
Statute2024–25
Property damage, tried as terrorism
Activists arrested under section 41 of the Terrorism Act over the 2024 break-in at Elbit Systems' Filton site in Bristol are prosecuted as terrorists — for spray paint and broken equipment, with no allegation that anyone was harmed. The trials run under heavy reporting restrictions: defendants say they cannot put their motivation, or Gaza, before the jury at all.
SentenceNOV 2025
The ban reaches court — and the judge is swapped
Huda Ammori, a Palestine Action co-founder, wins permission to judicially review the proscription — the first such challenge to a banned organisation. Days before the November 2025 hearing, the judge who granted permission is replaced by a three-judge panel. Campaigners, including Defend Our Juries, call it a "stitch-up". The hearing goes ahead, contested.
Courts push back2025 →
Mass arrests for holding a sign
Retirees, priests, veterans and carers are arrested in their thousands for signs reading "I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action." More than 2,200 are detained in the months after the ban — reportedly more arrests than the entire post-2000 "war on terror". The arrest queues become the protest. The state has finally built a law so broad that enforcing it manufactures dissidents faster than it can process them.
On the groundThe turn
It had to get this bad
Every clause created a constituency against it. Every exemplary sentence made an example — of the system. Grandmothers with signs, jurors with consciences, judges striking down regulations: the ratchet tightened until the handle snapped.
A system that must criminalise soup, placards and Zoom calls to survive is not strong. It is finished, and it knows.
None of this is hindsight. The warning was published in May 2023, while the ink on the Public Order Act was still wet. The timeline since has only confirmed it.
We are not asking the system to fix itself.
We are welcoming a better one.
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