SUELLA Braverman has called for the UK Government to be given yet more draconian powers to crack down on protests.
The former home secretary – who pushed through a law which gave police sweeping powers to squash disruptive protests – has claimed Britain’s streets are being filled with “outpourings of vicious bigotry” during anti-Israel protests over the war in Gaza.
The Tory MP proposed a raft of reforms she said would tackle the “phenomenon of mass extremism on our streets”, in a piece for The Telegraph.
She called for the bar to be lowered on laws prohibiting the expression of support for extremist groups.
“The bar is set too high, so prosecutions are typically not sought,” Braverman wrote.
Calling for a change to the Terrorism Act, to enable arrests even if those expressing support did not seek to encourage or incite terrorism, she added: “Surely any expression of support of terrorism, whether it galvanises emulation or not, should have no place in our society?”
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Braverman also said the UK Government should bring in laws to create an easily changeable list of “threatening, abusive or insulting” conduct – which she said would make it easy to ban phrases like “from the river, to the sea”.
Some pro-Israel commentators view the phrase as antisemitic because they believe it expresses support for the end of the Jewish state.
Braverman also called for groups such as Palestine Action, Friends of Al Aqsa or the Palestinian Forum in Britain to be banned which she said “may not be involved in terrorism but which cause significant damage to our communities and disrupt public order”.
And she called for the home secretary to be given powers to prevent a protest from going ahead.
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She said: “Ministers, answerable to the public, are powerless while the police are the ones who technically possess the legal power to initiate a ban of a march.
“This doesn’t strike the right balance and so a power should be taken, as in France, to enable ministers to make the decision when it is believed violence may occur or a protest is causing ongoing distress to a community.”
Braverman insisted she was “fiercely” defensive of the right to protest. She added: “We need to win this fight and reclaim our streets. If we don’t, we could find ourselves living in a very different country.”
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