Public Order
Debate between Kieran Mullan and Alison Thewliss(10 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Alison Thewliss
No, the right hon. Member has been extremely obnoxious to me many times in the past, so I will not take his intervention.
Groups, including Liberty, have pointed out that these are not insignificant changes. Liberty says that the Government’s attempt to redefine serious disruption from “significant and prolonged” to “more than minor” is
“effectively an attempt to divorce words from their ordinary meaning in ways that will have significant implications for our civil liberties.”
The statutory instrument refers to
“the prevention of, or a hindrance that is more than minor to, the carrying out of day-to-day activities (including in particular the making of a journey)”,
but what is “minor”? We do not know. Is a couple of minutes late “minor”? What is “more than minor”? Is that 10 minutes late rather than five minutes late? There is nothing in these regulations to say. They will give significant discretion to the police to figure out exactly what is “minor” and what is “more than minor”, because nobody can really tell us.
Dr Mullan
There is an offence called “drunk and disorderly”. Disorderly can have any number of meanings. The common law legal system over time has sought to define it more narrowly and the police operationalise that. Why does the hon. Lady not think that that could be done in exactly the same way with this offence?
Alison Thewliss
Because the regulations are extremely unclear and extremely discretionary. [Interruption.] It is not clear at all in the regulations what is “minor” and what is “more than minor”, and neither of those things seem to me to be serious disruption. “More than minor” is not the same as serious disruption.
The regulations also refer to a “community”, which
“in relation to a public procession in England and Wales, means any group of persons that may be affected by the procession, whether or not all or any of those persons live or work in the vicinity of the procession.”
What does “affected” mean? Does that mean people saw it on the TV and they were upset by it? How are they “affected”? Again, that is unclear in the regulations, which will give police officers a huge amount of discretion to carry out the enforcement of this pretty lousy legislation.