Abstract
Councils are handing over English city squares to private companies who are shutting down the right to protest, writes
The Bristol Alliance will then control not only the central shopping area, Cabot Circus – where it has a 250-year lease – but also the two main shopping streets, Horsefair and Broadmead. It will be impossible to protest in these areas without permission from the company. Mass demonstrations such as the Bristol Zombie Walk, which takes place around Halloween, are already forbidden to go through Cabot Circus. If they try they are stopped by security guards.
Antonia Layard, professor of law at Bristol University, is one of a growing band of law academics up and down the country concerned about this problem. She plays a video to her students of the walk being stopped by security guards as protesters try to get into the circus.
“It shows the line, not visible to the naked eye, where there are two sets of rules between public and private,” she said.
Sarah Blandy, professor of law at Sheffield University, whose research covers gated communities and property rights, puts it more bluntly: “The key is, in this country, property rights trump everything.”
That exercise of property rights means that political protests in Bristol, such as the anti-austerity march held in September 2017, might not be able to take place if the Bristol Alliance controls the Horsefair because protesters would be deemed to be trespassing on private land.
Other forms of free expression and privacy rights have already been under attack in this area.
For example, people who enter the Cabot Circus shopping centre are deemed to have agreed to have their mobile phones tracked, in order to “improve customer service”. A sign when entering the area reads: “Anonymous mobile phone surveying system in use at this site to improve our customer service. No personal data is captured.”
A sign telling shoppers their phones are being monitored in a shopping area of Bristol
CREDIT: Bristol Post
Coupled with sweeping public space protection order powers, which mean that local authorities are able to prohibit certain behaviours in certain areas, the council and private businesses will, fears local journalist Tristan Cork, even be able to stop people collecting signatures for a petition because it might distract shoppers.
In nearby Swindon, those powers are al ready being used, wrote Cork in an article for the Bristol Post newspaper.
“The other day, some campaigners [in Swindon] collecting signatures for a petition to support the NHS [National Health Service] were unceremoniously kicked out of the town centre. They hadn’t realised they had to ask permission from the ‘town centre managers’ to set up a table now, and they weren’t given it.”
AC Grayling, an English philosopher who has just published the book Democracy and Its Crisis, said there was increasing difficulty in organising protests in Parliament Square and Hyde Park in central London. He found the recent development in other cities also dismaying. For him, protests and demonstrations are “a really crucial, grassroots type of aspect to democracy”.
“If you were to squeeze out the possibility of people doing that altogether, that would be exactly what a tyranny does; exactly what despotism does,” he told Index.
Layard added that something else was happening. “It is all being constructed for consumption,” she said. “There are no playgrounds, there is no public seating. The aim is to keep footfall going. Our city centres are being designed and built to promote spending and consumption.”
Richard Sennett, centennial professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, reiterated this point in an interview with Index, saying: “The one thing we know about shopping centres is they are not spaces open for protesters or gatherings at all.”
Manchester, in the north of England, has a proud history of protest. It’s the setting of many English social movements and revolutions, from the Chartists – a 19th century movement for working-class democracy – to the campaign for women’s right to vote. Even here, large parts of the city are being bought up by private companies, with restrictions placed on people’s access and rights to assemble.
Piccadilly Gardens, in the centre of Manchester, is one of several places protesters can still gather, but not necessarily for long. It is now largely owned by Legal and General, who have a 150-year lease and are seeking, with support from the city council, to redevelop the shopping space there.
Beth Knowles, the Manchester City Council member representing the area, told Index that while it was still possible to protest in parts of the gardens near the statue of Queen Victoria, as well as in other squares in Manchester, she was worried about the encroaching privatisation.
“It is not just the private ownership, but the influence on the public element of the square,” she said. “If the whole of Piccadilly Gardens were privatised, and access for protest prevented, Manchester would kick up a bit of a fuss. But,” she joked, “I don’t know where they would go to do it.”
Knowles said that with enormous cuts in grants to local authorities, the council could not afford to keep the whole of the gardens in public hands or create new space. Public space, she said, had become “a luxury”. She believes the city is going to have to address the problem seriously in the future, because much of the new green space that will be created in the city centre over the next few years is private. She said local people were more worried about the right to eat their sandwiches in these new private spaces than their right to protest.
Police at a demonstration over tuition fees in central Bristol, 2010
CREDIT: Mark Cardy/Getty
“We know people have a right of freedom to express themselves, but you can’t look at history and say ‘we are proud of what we did’. You have to say we are proud of what we do now,” she said.
In London, the problem of public versus private space and the right to protest came to a head when London Assembly members, who monitor the Mayor of London’s budget and activities, found they were not allowed to demonstrate, or even give interviews, outside City Hall, where the Mayor of London has offices, because it was part of the More London estate (ultimately owned by the sovereign wealth fund of Kuwait). Many assembly members took part in a mass trespass outside their own building, and they have now called on the mayor to make sure private companies who run public areas are more transparent about “access”.
Layard said knowledge of the breadth of the problem was compounded because no maps were available to show what space was private or public in England, unlike in many other Western countries, and the nature of some land being leased further complicated the issue. She believes England has a lot to learn from Scotland, where there is a statutory right of responsible access to urban, as well as rural land.
Blandy looks to the USA, where many city centres are privately owned, but where areas that are open to the public largely guarantee freedom to protest under the law.
“The more that a private owner encourages public access and provides public facilities, the closer this is to actual public space and, therefore, constitutional rights such as the right to freedom of expression can be exercised in that space,” she said.
The Streets are Ours