In this article, the author provides a roundup of the UK Conservative government’s legislative programme in 2021, arguing that, in the service of an authoritarian agenda, it uses law to undermine the rule of law and executive accountability, and to criminalise marginalised and/or racialised groups, including asylum seekers and those helping them, black youth, protesters and human rights defenders, and Gypsies, Roma and Travellers. Through an analysis of various new bills that attack human and civil rights, including the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, the Nationality and Borders Bill, the Overseas Operations Act, the Elections Bill and the Judicial Review and Courts Bill, she demonstrates the cumulative impact of the legislative programme that has entrenched the demonisation of minorities and human rights defenders, whilst giving unprecedented powers to police, hobbling the courts, nobbling other regulators and blocking effective legal, political and public accountability for ministers. The result, she argues, is an erosion of human rights and the entrenchment of impunity for the government and its agencies.
An earlier version of this article appeared as a five-part series, ‘Impunity Entrenched’ on IRR News, 17 January 2022, available here: https://irr.org.uk/article/impunity-entrenched/. For a roundup of the raft of laws, Home Office measures and government proposals introduced in the UK in 2020, see Frances Webber, ‘Britain’s authoritarian turn’, Race & Class 64, no. 2 (2021).
A vigil took place in Clapham Common, South London, for Sarah Everard, a 33-year-old marketing executive who went missing on 3 March 2021 and whose body was found in Ashford, Kent on 10 March 2021. On 12 March, Wayne Couzens, a serving officer of the Metropolitan Police Service, was charged with the kidnap and murder of Everard. The APPG inquiry into police conduct at the Clapham vigil and Bristol protests against powers to restrict peaceful protests found significant failings in the police approach to both protests (https://www.icdr.co.uk/bristol-clapham-inquiry-home), but the Met was officially exonerated for its policing of the Clapham protest, see https://www.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/hmicfrs/news/news-feed/metropolitan-police-acted-appropriately-at-the-sarah-everard-vigil/.
The Prevent programme developed during the first decade of the century as part of the UK’s response to terrorism, designed to prevent children and young people from being drawn into terrorism, and in 2011 a statutory duty was imposed on teachers, youth workers and others working with young people to report ‘signs of extremism’ to police. See https://irr.org.uk/app/uploads/2016/01/IRR_Prevent_Submission.pdf.
The powers to intervene over noisy or disruptive protests were voted down in the House of Lords, but the minister said they would likely be reinstated in the Commons. See https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-60032465.
A jury decided to acquit four defendants, known as the ‘Colston 4’, accused of criminal damage over the toppling of the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston into Bristol pier during Black Lives Matter protests in June 2020, see: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-59727161.
The Windrush scandal of 2018 revealed that thousands of pensioners, in the UK since the 1950s and ’60s when they arrived as UK citizens, were treated as ‘illegal immigrants’ because, unaware of having lost UK citizenship on their colonies’ independence, they had no documents proving their right to be in the country and so lost jobs, homes and were in many cases detained and/or deported. For more information see Frances Webber, The Embedding of State Hostility: a background paper on the Windrush Scandal (London: Institute of Race Relations, 2018), access at: https://irr.org.uk/app/uploads/2018/11/Embedding-State-hostility-v4.pdf.
In November, the Information Commissioner told Clearview AI, whose facial recognition software is used by police forces, to stop processing UK personal data and delete any it has, because of breaches of privacy for which the company also faced a possible £17 million fine, see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-59466803.
For information on the nearly 300 border-related deaths in and around the English Channel since 1999, see Maël Galisson and Institute of Race Relations, Deadly Crossings and the Militarisation of Britain’s Borders (London: Institute of Race Relations, PPT London Steering Group, Gisti, 2020), https://irr.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Deadly-Crossings-Final.pdf.
See for example, Operation Sophia: a failed mission, House of Lords EU Committee 2nd report 2017–19, July 2017, access at: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201719/ldselect/ldeucom/5/502.htm, HL 5; Maël Galisson and Institute of Race Relations, Deadly Crossings and the Militarisation of Britain’s Borders.
In the immigration and asylum field, this kind of political interference has been going on for some time, as successive Acts have told judges how to interpret rights to respect for family and private life protected by Article 8 of the Human Rights Convention. The 2014 Immigration Act also contained a statutory declaration that the deportation of foreign national offenders ‘is in the public interest’, constraining judges’ power and duty to weigh the public interest factors for and against deportation in each case.
