Cat Knight: Protest is under attack, but repression is not inevitable

Dancing to the beat of House Against Hate in Trafalgar Square on Saturday, I was full of joy and hope. Half a million of us showed up to defy the far right on the Together Alliance march. It was a moment of respite from the repression and division handed out by a government a few hundred yards away in Whitehall. Over the years, I’ve marched countless miles in protest. And my right to protest is enshrined in the Human Rights Act. But that moment of unity is all the more essential because attending a protest now feels like a risk.

Last week, the police monitoring group Netpol released a report that shows how “repression has become routine”. New laws and the rise of an approach based on security have “normalised surveillance, heavy-handed policing, and punishment, with harm concentrated on marginalised groups”. Instead of a protected expression of our democratic rights, protest is policed “as a matter of threat management”.

Netpol found that the police are using powers which have been struck down by the courts. Regulations introduced by Suella Braverman to restrict protests because of their “cumulative impact” were declared unlawful by the High Court in 2025. The government is still considering whether to reintroduce them with the Crime and Policing Bill which is currently working its way through parliament. But the Met Police have blocked the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network in Swiss Cottage and forced the Palestine Solidarity Coalition to change the route of their march, citing the “cumulative impact” of these protests both times.

According to Netpol, the use of powers to restrict assemblies rose by 230% between 2024 and 2025. This is not just in central London, but across the whole of Britain, including protests outside weapons factories. With the government now classifying challenges to corporate interests as “state threats”, protesters who take on a company like Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, Elbit Systems, can be criminalised as a matter of “national security”. 

The report shows how the police’s “expanded and overlapping” powers combine with their “ever-broadening discretion” to make a landscape so inconsistent and confusing that it has a chilling effect. As one legal observer put it, the police “can demand your identity, make you leave, arrest you, and… do it again and again – even if you haven’t done anything illegal”. Netpol document how – as ever – the burden falls most on overpoliced groups such as racialised people, migrants, trans and disabled people, and how peaceful campaigns “can very easily be reclassified as extremist or even terrorist in nature”.

The government’s pursuit of Palestine Action is the starkest example. When activists broke into Elbit Systems in August 2024 to protest against the genocide in Gaza, prosecutors said they had a “terrorist connection” and charged them with aggravated burglary – an offence that carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. Their defence team compared them with the suffragettes – another group “denounced as extremists and terrorists” – and in February prosecutors dropped the charges after a jury cleared six of them.

The Filton 24 are still facing a range of other charges, and Palestine Action are still proscribed under the Terrorism Act. Last month, the High Court found that this proscription was unlawful because it interfered with Article 10 and 11 rights to expression and free assembly. In deciding whether to give permission to hear the case, the court said that its “chilling effect” could deter people from exercising their democratic right to protest – an effect that is particularly powerful for those at the margins of society – and this proscription remains in place while the Home Secretary appeals.

Good Law Project are working with activists linked to the wider Palestine Action movement, who the criminal justice system have treated harshly for selfless actions fighting against the genocide in Gaza. They also happen to be Black. Last week, one of them reminded me that we all have our individual roles to play in the struggle for freedom, whether that means going on hunger strike or heading out on to the streets to protest. We will come back stronger than ever. The government tries to make protesters the villains, but movements grow and resistance builds. People show up in their thousands even though they know they will be arrested as “terrorists”. But when we protest, when we dance in the streets, we feel more alive, more fired up than ever. You can’t make solidarity a criminal offence – the government’s attempts to crack down on protest only make it clear how desperate they are to shut down dissent. But repression is not inevitable.