After a roundtable with police chiefs yesterday, Home Secretary James Cleverly announced a £31m spend to protect the UK’s democratic processes from disruption and provide security provisions to elected representatives over the next year.
James Cleverly said: “The Government will take every possible step to safeguard the people, processes and institutions upon which our democracy relies. I take the safety and security of all members of the House with the utmost seriousness. None of us should have to accept that enduring hate crimes, harassment, or threats is part of the job. I will continue to work closely with my police counterparts to provide elected representatives with the support they need.”
And Security Minister at the Home Office Tom Tugendhat said: “Over the past few weeks we’ve seen disgraceful attempts to intimidate MPs and undermine our democratic processes. That behaviour is a threat to our democracy, and toxic for our society. We will do whatever is necessary to protect those who’ve been elected to represent their local communities, and to defend our democratic freedoms.”
The Home Office said that a communities fund will be set up to support the deployment of additional police patrols each week in England and Wales, in response to increased community tensions.
Meanwhile the Home Affairs Select Committee of MPs in a recent report on the policing of protests, spoke of concerns about the impact on the staff who work in MPs’ offices, ‘who are facing intimidation and violent attacks’.
The committee also aired concern about a rise in reported hate crimes and reported terrorist offences since October 2023, the outbreak of war between Hamas and Israel in Gaza. The committee report described it as ‘worrying that the Government’s plan to tackle hate crime has not been updated since 2020’. The MPs noted ‘complex areas of law where the right to freedom of speech intersects with the need for all communities to feel safe as they go about their daily lives. The Government have rightly commissioned reviews on these subjects, such as Dame Sara Khan’s reviews into hateful extremism, and there have been calls to amend legislation further. Given the pressing need for robust evidence in this complex area, we are surprised that the Government is yet to respond to these reports. Having commissioned those reports using public money, we would expect the Government to publish a response to demonstrate that it has taken account of that evidence.”
The MPs urged the Government to respond to Dame Sara Khan’s report Operating with Impunity (published in 2021), and called for a response to the ‘timely’ review of political violence and disruption by Lord Walney (the former Labour MP John Woodcock), announced by the Government in November 2020 and yet to be published.
