The Guardian view on the right to march: protest must be beyond price Editorial Police efforts to charge protest groups before they can demonstrate are an affront to freedom and civil liberty. They should be disowned and abandoned

The massive demonstration against war in Iraq, February 2003. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features

Ask almost anyone in this country to name some of their basic civil liberties and it won’t be too long before somebody mentions the right to protest. They are right to do so. The right of assembly in a public place is truly one of the cornerstones of liberty – a right to bear witness and bring peaceful pressure to bear on rulers and the public in support of a cause. Article 11 of the European convention on human rights, now embodied in the Human Rights Act, is very clear: “Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and to freedom of association with others.”

Not in London, they don’t. In London, by virtue of a decision by the Metropolitan police, the right of assembly now comes at a price – sometimes an impossibly high price – which means in effect that citizens have to pay to protest. Groups planning marches in the nation’s capital city have recently been informed by Scotland Yard that they must fund the traffic management – road closures, barriers, diversion signs and the stewards to carry it out – that is deemed necessary for their proposed march.

The Campaign Against Climate Change, for example, which is planning a 7 March demonstration in London in support of stronger global action against fossil fuels, is expecting 20,000 marchers. The campaign has been told that the police will not manage the traffic unless organisers pay a bill of thousands of pounds, without which Westminster council will not allow the march to go ahead. Organisers ofthe Million Women Rise march in London against male violence, also planned for 7 March, have been given the same message. They have been told they will not be allowed to march unless they hire a private traffic management company to provide specialist stewards on the day at £120 per steward. Estimates put the total cost to the women’s campaign at £10,000.

At a time of tight public budgets, many police forces, not just in London, are depicting public order policing as a burden on the community which diverts resources away from crime-fighting. Some forces produce very extreme and tendentious estimates of such costs, hoping that the publicity will increase pressure for further restrictions of rights. Sussex police, for example, claimed that anti-fracking protests in 2013 cost them no less than £4m. The Met has sometimes put its protest policing expenditure, always likely to be the largest in the country, at upwards of £30m a year.

Thus far, the rights have survived, in spite of such pressure. They must continue to do so. Peaceful protest is a fundamental civil liberty and police should accept the costs that go with the responsibility to keep the peace. That means accepting the cost of any consequential traffic management. This is already recognised, and has been upheld by the courts, in the way that many other public events are policed, for instance in the streets around football grounds. The Met has no right to deny a fundamental freedom in this way. It should stop this sneaky subversion of rights of assembly immediately. If the police want to get the law changed, they can try to do so. Until then, their duty is to uphold the public’s rights, not to conspire against them.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/10/guardian-view-right-to-march-protest-must-be-beyond-price?CMP=share_btn_fb