You don't get better public order or nicer cities with authoritarian controls

Bans on silent prayer join a host of other social controls in place to try and manage our rude and unpleasant society. They don't work.

Yesterday the House of Commons began debating the Public Order Bill and the focus was on an amendment to exempt ‘prayer and consensual conversation’ from rules about US-style exclusion zones around abortion clinics. The amendment was defeated as expected but a series of MPs made an impassioned defence of people’s right to stand silently in thoughtful prayer in a public place. Labour’s authoritarians like Stella Creasy joined their Tory comrades to say that what was once the precious right to protest doesn’t apply to religious groups wanting to raise their concerns about abortion.

The Public Order Bill now enshrines a ‘buffer zone’ around clinics meant to prevent the sort of actions that we saw from Isabel Vaughan-Spruce who was arrested for standing silently near an abortion clinic in Ealing, West London. What interests me, as someone who would vote against the entire Public Order Bill, are two issues - how police were able to make arrests even without this new and draconian piece of social control and the inconsistency, especially on the left, as to what is acceptable protest.

Once we took free speech and free association as central elements of our essentially liberal culture. The right to challenge by our physical presence the consequences of government’s laws or regulations was only questioned by the most reactionary elements within politics, the blazered, saloon bar, hang ‘em and flog ‘em brigade. Today the preference for social control extends right across politics, from anti-catholic campaigners like Stella Creasey to erstwhile trendy lefties leading inner city local councils and managerialist centrists like Penny Mordaunt, Theresa May and Yvette Cooper.

Much of the Public Order Act is concerned with giving the police new powers (never a good idea) to manage the sort of protests we’ve seen from Extinction Rebellion and its assorted spin-off groups. None of this is necessary since all the laws already exist to deal with people who damage property, block the highway and prevent people from going about their daily lives without interference. From injunctions to making arrests under assorted criminal laws, those who take protest too far can be dealt with, the Public Order Bill is unnecessary.

But authoritarian social controls are popular. When the Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO) was created under Blair, it set in motion an authoritarian process whereby actions that are not, in themselves, illegal can be made illegal by the issuing of an order. These orders were seen as a critical tool to deal with rising levels of bad behaviour that plagued society and especially urban society. I wrote about this bad behaviour recently, over 20 years since ASBOs were invented, and it is clear the system doesn’t work;

“The rest of us slink by, give no challenge to the people who contribute so much to making the places we live so unpleasant. We, probably rightly, criticise the council for cutting litter picking and street cleaning, and we can point to how the disaster that is local government funding doesn’t help. But this doesn’t get us away from how messy we have all become, how tolerant of poor behaviour, and fearful of challenging the noisy, the rude and the dirty.”

Because ASBOs didn’t work, police and councils again demanded more powers to deal with anti-social behaviour with the result that a new sort of order was invented, the Public Space Protection Order (PSPO). At first these orders were presented as a way to stop things like street drinking or prostitution by giving councils the ability to create zones where police could treat legal things like having an open can of lager as criminal, could seize goods without requiring a warrant or reasonable suspicion of ill-intent, and ultimately make people who have committed no crime into criminals.

While PSPOs were just used to target drunks and prostitutes (while we do nothing much to help either the drunks or prostitutes) people were happy. Then the mission creep began as councils realised they could use PSPOs and ASBOs to target behaviours which they had either a political objection to or else where they saw political advantage. So Ealing Council enacted a PSPO around the abortion clinic because they had a political objection to christians praying or holding vigils in the vicinity. Isabel Vaughan-Spruce can therefore be arrested despite praying in public being entirely legal and even when the abortion clinic in question is not open. As a test of the authoritarian nature of the PSPO system, a police officer asking a person standing silently what they are thinking represents a triumph.

Meanwhile in Bradford the police and council came up with a brilliant wheeze supposedly to deal with what they called ‘anti-social driving’. Across most of the inner city they would impose a huge PSPO that would introduce controls over people and cars. Now given that Bradford, notoriously, has some of the country’s least safe roads and worst drivers this was cheered to the rafters by all the politicians, the local newspaper and local forums of one sort of another. No question that the rhetoric around the PSPO was political gold dust, at last the council and police were doing something about anti-social driving. All the excess speeds, dangerous manoeuvres, loud exhausts and crazy drivers would be dealt with? Sadly not.

The PSPO regulations could not include moving offences like speeding and driving dangerously. Nor could they respond to loud engines, wheelies from motorbikes or quad bikes mounting pavements. The PSPO regulations could only deal with people and cars while stationery. When the proposals came to committee during my final year as a councillor, I listened agog as one problem after another was excluded leaving just mundane and unthreatening behaviours like three people sitting in or near a car listening to music. It was clear that the police intended to use the powers to harass and annoy people, mostly young Pakistani heritage men, who were indulging in that terrible and anti-social behaviour of sitting with some mates in a car chatting and listening to music. I was, however, the only councillor to vote against the new PSPO.

The Public Order Bill will join existing ASBO and PCSO powers in seeking to criminalise activities (drinking, sitting in a car, jumping into a river, gathering with your friends in a park) that are not in normal circumstances criminal. The police and many urban councils also look to extend their use of cameras as part of social control activities. British public spaces are among the most spied on places on the planet with only mainland China having more draconian surveillance. Yet the police still want wider powers and especially powers that do not require them to seek democratic or judicial endorsement.

I wrote recently about smart cities and authoritarian governments. The furore around ‘15-minute cities’ illustrates the manner in which social control measures are now portrayed as a good thing: ‘don’t you want vital services within 15 minutes?’ is the cry. Well yes I do, I think that is a great idea but I don’t want you to then try and enforce it using surveillance cameras and fines when I make a different choice to the one you have decided I should make. And smart cities aren’t really about building places where streets are safer and services are nearby because doing that doesn’t require a single camera let alone strict control orders like PSPOs or the new provisions proposed in the Public Order Bill.

Smart cities are about public authorities - council, police, health services - collecting information, (much of it via surveillance but also via intrusive questioning and service gatekeeping) to inform public policy making and, in doing so, exercise social controls. There is a great deal of talk about using data to design better services but very little about the intrusive nature of data collection by the government. Bear in mind that you did consent to Facebook using the information you freely post on Meta’s platform but you did not consent to the government filming you as you walk along the High Street.

We think of these measures as being effective responses to the plague of bad behaviour, the littering, spitting, swearing, pushing and shoving that we encounter every day. But the evidence from the ASBO is that this sort of intrusive, often aggressive, intervention simply doesn’t work. There isn’t less littering, less vulgarity and more politeness than there was before the ASBO. All we’ve done is criminalise some of this bad behaviour and granted police powers to hassle and bother ordinary people in their lives. Bradford Council celebrates 600 fines issued for littering from cars but the streets are still filled with litter, every hedge and verge is cluttered with cans and polystyrene trays. And Bradford’s drivers are still zooming around like entitled idiots.

I began with the debate about abortion clinics and whether prayers and vigils are things we should criminalise. I don’t believe we should, the so-called buffer zone doesn’t really protect the vulnerable but will be chalked up by campaigners as a victory in a tedious culture war imported from the USA. A little chunk more of our civil liberties is torn away in the search for an essentially chimeric public order and will be joined by a bunch of new orders and controls on protest and public behaviour. Nothing targeted here is about the daily trashing of good order by entitled kidults, there is nobody saying that we should be bringing up people to be polite, well-mannered and respectful. Instead we’ll respond to the police and councils for whom every problem is a nail requiring just a bigger hammer.