Supreme Court judges have been blamed for giving the green light to eco-zealots to cause mayhem on Britain’s roads as Just Stop Oil are understood to be exploiting an extraordinary 2021 legal ruling that protests can be a “lawful excuse” to block roads. The Mail has the story.
The ruling followed the prosecution of four anti-arms trade protesters who blocked a road leading to the ExCel Centre while it hosted an arms fair in September 2017.
In June 2021 the Supreme Court, established by Tony Blair’s Labour Government, reversed a High Court decision and overturned the protesters’ convictions.
It ruled that protesters can have a “lawful excuse” defence under the European Convention of Human Rights against the offence of obstructing a highway, even where they have used “deliberately physically obstructive conduct”.
The so-called “Ziegler” ruling, named after Nora Ziegler, one of the protesters, was hailed at the time by campaign group Extinction Rebellion.
It is understood that protesters are briefed about the ruling before they block motorways and trunk roads in a bid to cause traffic chaos.
Former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith told the Mail: “Clearly it’s an absurd judgment. They have a right to protest but they don’t have a right to cause such chaos that people are hurt and can’t get to hospitals. Whose rights are more important? The right of a protester or the right of somebody to go about their business? It’s time that this was resolved and resolved damn quickly by the courts. The Supreme Court now has got to start behaving in a way that represents the balance of rights.”
Surely the Government just needs to pass a law that states, for the avoidance of doubt, that protests may never be a lawful excuse to obstruct a highway. Since Parliament is sovereign, such a law would have to take precedence over any prior legal rulings interpreting general principles in a statement of human rights. It’s no good the Government blaming the courts when it has the power to pass laws that bind the courts.
Instead of such a simple remedial measure we have the new Public Order Bill, which, as Claire Fox explains in the Spectator, is introducing Serious Disruption Protection Orders (i.e., ‘protest-banning orders’) that cover an extraordinary range of offences.
These can be doled out to anyone who has been on more than one protest over the last five years. This includes any type of protest, not just XR-related activities. If issued with an SDPO, you can be banned from going to a particular place, associating with particular people, encouraging someone else to go on a demo or using the internet in a particular way. You can be punished by the state for retweeting an advert for a protest. You can also be issued with an electronic tag for up to 12 months, using GPS data technology that allows the police to monitor your whereabouts 24 hours a day. This extreme level of surveillance risks being used against innocent individuals who have not committed a crime.
All completely over the top, and made all the worse for coming from a Government and legislature that has spent the last three years imposing extreme restrictions on the population and responding so aggressively to protests against them.
Fox adds that the new Bill also, in Clause 9, criminalises “seeking to influence, advising or persuading, attempting to advise or persuade, or otherwise expressing an opinion” in the vicinity of medical facilities. The initial target is anti-abortion protestors, who for some reason are deemed to have fewer protest rights than others. But clearly it could be applied to any medical matter, such as gender reassignment treatment and vaccines. Yet more clamping down on peaceful protest, more constricting of the freedoms we once took for granted.
It’s not complicated. We want normal protests to be allowed, and violence, criminal damage and road-blocking to be banned. How do the politicians and courts manage to make something so simple appear so complicated?
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I was going to say “unbelievable!” – but unfortunately it’s only too believable.
My reaction was far harsher and very sweary. The bowdlerised version is: “You’ve got to be chuffing joking, all they’re doing is extracting the urine”.
Has anyone else clocked that Keir tweeted yesterday that he intends to make Britain grow by making it an investment hub for the world, citing as an example … Black Rock.
So now we can see farmers are intended to be taxed off the land, which is then sold to Black Rock at high prices (putting the remainder of farmers out of business) for housing, wind-farms or Big Food production.
Such corporations are, as we all know, leaders of innovation in enterprise almost as much as Collective Farms were. And so the country will grow, at least for the 0.1%.
Yes I saw that. The visit from Fink, the visit just before the budget was announced from Gates…and we know where Starmer’s allegiances lie anyways as he told us ages ago. The writing’s on the wall. He’s a duplicitous shyster, with no other intention then screwing over the British public in order to ingratiate himself to his overlords.
It’s the WEF plan.
Is there any legal way to call elections now?
And in response to Two Tier Free Gear Never Here call for growth it has now slumped to 0.1% with an expectation that in the last quarter the economy will shrink as the private sector responses to the Thieves tax theft and cost increases. With business sentiment in retreat since the election, reinforced by the budget, contraction of the economy in the first quarter of 2025 will deliver a recession. The May elections look more interesting by the week.
Apparently Black Rock via proxies is buying up large tracts of farming land in Ukraine since hostilities kicked off.
I wonder if Ukraine being reduced to rubble requiring inward investors to rebuild gives Black Rock an opportunity, heroically, to lead the investment surge and acquire more land, and that prolonging the conflict is good for business… as it were? Or am I being cynical?
Unbelievable.
Endless, massive, stupid, incompetent, incoherent, corrupt, grafting, grifting, money laundering government.
The lust for ever more state control ends up in such lunacy.
I am sure the Fake News media is all over this……
The Tories would not have gone down the IHT route to corporatise farming but they almost certainly would have knelt to the approaches of Blackrock in other ways.
I think Robert Jenrick needs to stfu and crawl back under a suitable rock. Look at the article, at least one of these appalling wastes of our money goes back to 2012. The Tories are mired in exactly the same filth as the current socialist scumbags. This is globalists trying to destroy our country and he was just as big a suck up to them as Cameron, May and Sunak
British Farmers Crushed Foreign Farmers Helped
This is yet more evidence that we don’t have a government of and for our people – we have a government of and for the globalists, on the one hand, and the anti-white madleft, on the other.
What they are doing is more or less what you’d do if your aim was to destroy this country – its culture, economy and people.
Yes, this is what “Stealth Genocide” looks like, and Ethnic Europeans are the target.
Why? Because White People are the only things standing in the way of the Globalist Enslavement of the Rest of Humanity.
If only the Rest of Humanity, now some 93% of all humans on the planet, would wake up and stop helping the Globalists exterminate us, the 7%.
It is a good method to find parity between certain amounts of money in order to understand what is really going on. For example in 2020 the average person lost or is in the process of losing about forty percent of what they have and the elite and enriched themselves to precisely the same amount. And that is on top of the enormous debt that we were all saddled with in 2008. Very difficult situation that cannot be resolved without the help of very disruptive circumstances.
Sir Steel Knarmer is playing a blinder , the freak thinks his Tri Lateral WEF Overlords will reserve a seat at their top table for him once he completes his given mission of reducing the UK to a mere emptied out shell ! Muppet !!!
Yes, Bunter is still waiting for his top table job for doing the globalists bidding. How on earth is the poor fellow going to pay for the upkeep of a ten bedroomed Cotswold Manor House ( where did that money come from) private school fees, luxury holidays, pony lessons etc from writing a column in the Daily Fail?
My goodness this I triggering me! It is such n unjust tax and then to hear our tax money is used to fund foreign farming.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7uBYCJlmtZ0
One report from the farmers’ protest.
I thought Rupert Lowe’s comments were spot on:
Reform UK lashes out at Labour’s ‘disgusting’ £500m foreign farmers’ stash – ‘A spit in the face!’
“Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe has lashed out at Labour’s “disgusting” £536million foreign aid stash for overseas farmers.
The Great Yarmouth MP, who has a farming background, reacted with fury after it was revealed Labour was splashing cash on farmers in Africa, Asia and South America.”
Lowe said: “Just when I think my disgust with this Government has peaked – £536 million being sent to foreign farmers, their assault on British farmers might raise £520million.”
“I could not care less about Brazilian and Rwanda farmers. Not our problem. A spit in the face for British farmers.”
He added: “Not a penny of British taxpayer money should be given to foreign farmers. It is not our problem.”
Lowe later confirmed he had penned a letter to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office “requesting that the minister takes steps to ensure foreign farmers do not receive a penny of British taxpayer money”.”
Somebody is going to get a PhD by making a study of Labour and how adept it is at making enemies of nearly every sector of society, by almost comical unenforced errors, own goals and shooting itself in the foot.