Woman With “Peace” Written in Icing on Cake Threatened with Arrest Outside British Parliament

August 8th, 2009

Via: Guardian:

The summer holidays provide the government with plenty of good days to bury bad news. Folks head off on holiday and journos head into the silly season, making it a perfect time to quietly lift the sluice gates of the pools of political sewage. This year is no exception. The government announced its proposed changes to the laws controlling protest around parliament, commonly known as the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 or Socpa.

There is little public support and considerable antipathy towards this totemic law seen by many as a symbol of Labour’s contempt of liberty, but I am running ahead of myself, so let us recap.

The first clue as to this law’s nature is that it was introduced by David Blunkett with the specific aim of removing the peace protester Brian Haw from his vigil in Parliament Square. Blunkett went on record as saying it was a “sledgehammer to crack a nut and this is a tough nut” It is not often that a law introduced to punish one individual serves any great purpose and so it was for Socpa.

The act makes it illegal for a protest in a designated area of up to a 1km radius of parliament without seeking written authorisation from the police six days in advance. As there is no strict legal definition of what constitutes a demonstration it means that one person wearing a stop the war badge and standing by Westminster tube station could be arrested for demonstrating without authorisation. “Ah,” you may cry, “this is merely legalistic supposition.” Not so, a friend of mine was threatened with arrest for having a picnic in Parliament Square, her offence was the pink icing on her cake which spelt the word “peace”. This was the same law that saw Maya Evans and Milan Rai arrested and convicted for reading the names of the British and Iraqi war dead by the Cenotaph.

The law enables the police to place conditions on a demonstration in the area, restricting how many people attend the demonstration, where it can be held, how long it can be held for and “the number and size of banners used”.

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One Response to “Woman With “Peace” Written in Icing on Cake Threatened with Arrest Outside British Parliament”

  1. AHuxley says:
    August 9, 2009 at 4:28 am

    Lucky it was not a Forward Intelligence Team, they would have been forced to the ground and restrained. The cake made safe.

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