An armoured police vehicle in Paris on the 15th of December

On the 6th of February the Stanstead 15, the activists convicted under anti-terror legislation for a protest which blocked a deportation flight, were sentenced. No one will be serving jail time, they were given community service and suspended sentences, but the use of anti-terrorism laws to charge these activists, and the fact that one can be charged for peaceful protest at all, opens up questions about how the state uses its power when people contradict its will. The immigration removal charter flight that they stopped was the real-world impact of the hostile environment policy which resulted in the Windrush scandal, a policy disaster that caused such a public uproar that it resulted in Amber Rudd’s resignation as home secretary. There is little evidence to suggest the people support this cruelty, in fact there’s evidence to the contrary. Yet when activists protest the mindless, and lets be frank, racist misanthropy of the government with popular will behind them, they are repressed. It is a question worth asking whether their sentence would have been as lenient if the backlash against the Windrush scandal hadn’t occurred and if there hadn’t been such an outpouring of public support for the Stansted 15. People shouldn’t receive judicial sentences for peaceful protest against such an unpopular policy, and the interpretation of anti-terror laws designed after the Lockerbie bombing in this way is particularly troubling.

The UK is not the only notionally liberal country misusing its anti-terror laws. Across the channel the Gilet Jaune movement has met with a shocking level of arbitrary repression. Exceptional powers granted under the state of emergency which lasted for two years in France after the 2015 attacks were essentially transposed into law in late 2017. This means that the French police now, in the name of anti-terror, act with a much lower level of judicial oversight, and the burden of actually providing evidence for their actions has been greatly lifted. What this, among other bad decisions like allowing officers without adequate training to police crowds of protesters, has translated into is a disturbing level of violence against protesters. At least 14 protesters have lost an eye and 144 have been severely injured. To add insult to the many serious injuries, the French government has just passed an “anti-casseur” law. Casseur is the name given to the rioters that caused the infamous images of burning cars and graffiti on the Champs Elysee. Whatever your thoughts about the democratic legitimacy of destruction of property (most people would agree the casseurs attacking cars and small businesses obviously went too far) it is clear that casseurs are only a minority of this movement, which at its peak compromised hundreds of thousands of people. This law impose sdesignated protest zones (which will severely hamper the ability of movements like the Gilets Jaunes to do mass demos), bans people who present a threat of a “certain severity to public order” from protesting (the ambiguity of this statement is almost certainly designed to allow a range of interpretations) and the law prevents anyone at protests covering their face with helmets, masks or even scarfs. These proposals and others under the auspice of the anti-casseur law seem engineered to restrict people’s ability to protest.

Politicians in both England and France frequently pay lip-service to the values of liberal democracy (of which a key one is the right to free assembly and ability to protest) and lament the global slide towards authoritarianism. I’m not suggesting the measures taken against the Stansted 15 and the Gilets Jaunes mark an overnight transition of England and France to a Putin or Orban style authoritarian regime, far from it. But, next time these supposedly liberal politicians fret about the erosion of democratic norms, they should reflect carefully and think about the fact that the call might be coming from inside the house.