‘Lawful protest and free speech are fundamental rights, but we cannot allow them to be abused to spread hate or cause disorder. The law must be fit for purpose and consistently applied.” So said the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, last year on appointing Lord MacDonald, the former director of public prosecutions, to lead a review of public order and hate-crime legislation. He will soon report. For all who prize the historic right to protest, as have so many generations before us, the omens aren’t good.
Laws govern the right to protest, but one of the lessons I learned from my time as the solicitor for the family of Stephen Lawrence is that the law is not, as Mahmood put it, “consistently applied”: it does not listen to everyone in the same way. The law was available, for example, to Stephen’s parents in theory, but in practice it did not respond to them as equal citizens.
