Details here:
"The demonstrators who have halted the construction of the new animal testing labs in Oxford command little public sympathy. Their arguments are often woolly and poorly-presented. Among them is a small number of dangerous and deeply unpleasant characters, who appear to respect the rights of every mammal except Homo sapiens. This unpopularity is a gift to the state. For fear of being seen to sympathise with dangerous nutters, hardly anyone dares to speak out against the repressive laws with which the government intends to restrain them.
"It is not as if the state is without the means of handling violent extremists. Murder, arson, assault, threatening behaviour and intimidation are already illegal in the United Kingdom. Instead, it has seized the opportunity provided by the violent activists to criminalise peaceful dissent.
"The Home Office proposes 'to make it an offence to protest outside homes in such a way that causes harassment, alarm or distress to residents.' This sounds reasonable enough, until you realise that the police can define 'harassment, alarm or distress' however they wish. All protest in residential areas, in other words, could now be treated as a criminal offence.
"The new measures, if they are passed, will also ensure that most protesters can be charged with stalking: they need only to appear outside a premises once to be prosecuted under the 1997 Protection from Harrassment Act. The government will also seek to "suggest remedies" for websites which 'include material deemed to cause concern or needless anxiety to others.' As my site has already been blacklisted by at least one public body, I have reason to fear this proposal, alongside every online dissident in Britain.
"If all this goes ahead, in other words, legal protest will be confined to writing letters to your MP. Or perhaps even that could be deemed to cause 'concern or needless anxiety' to the honourable member."
I suppose the author is just another "airy-fairy civil libertarian," like the Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford.
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