When Rachel Reeves was heckled by a pro-Palestine protester during her party conference speech in September, she took the opportunity to make a statement — not about the tens of thousands of Gazans killed in the preceding year or the importance of strengthening the institutions of international law, but about the Labour Party. ‘This is a changed Labour Party,’ Reeves declared, as the protester was hauled out of the conference hall by a security guard with one hand around his throat, ‘a party that represents working people, not a party of protest.’

The same line was used to justify Labour’s cratered membership numbers while they were still in opposition. That Reeves stuck to it months and a landslide election victory later is an insight into the party’s view of protest itself. Protest, Reeves’ words imply, is the preserve of career antagonists focused on hijacking vulnerable political groups, not a means by which people trying to achieve change might target power — and therefore Labour, as, now, the government — in order to achieve it.

Mainstream political discourse on protest has been stuck on this notion for a long time now —  that the world is split between bad protesters who demonstrate simply for the love of chaos, and the good, normal general public who just want to get on with their lives. The Johnson and post-Johnson Tories fed this belief with their anti-protest laws, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Bill 2023, which, despite coming in for widespread condemnation by human rights organisations, have also been followed by efforts within the courts to undermine the right of protesters to a fair trial by jury.

The result is a state in which you face a potential ten-year prison stretch for partaking in an ‘annoying’ peaceful protest. (The longest sentence actually passed down under these laws so far is five years, which might not seem so lenient when you remember the average sentence for rape is between four and 19.) In the ensuing trial, you may be banned from mentioning the political or environmental factors that led to you taking action in your defence, and those who might dare to stand outside the court with signs reminding the jurors that they have the right to acquit you according to their consciences — a basic principle — may also be prosecuted for contempt.

Hundreds of thousands of people have marched in Britain in the last year, and this has obviously not been their experience in the most part. Still, the fact that the powers are there should worry us: sentences for protesters who are convicted are getting longer, and in some cases arrests are taking place en masse. At the same time, evidence is growing of intimacy between businesses, government, police, and prosecutors. Even before these acts passed, for example, Palestine Action were the subject of an effort by the government to influence policing in the name of ‘reassuring’ Elbit Systems, the Israeli weapons manufacturer the pro-Palestine group targets. The US fundraising arm of think tank Policy Exchange, whose research contributed in large part to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act often used to target Just Stop Oil, has financial ties to the fossil fuel industry. The think tank itself does not disclose its funding.

Opposition to this kind of coordinated repression would, you’d think, be a point on which a party claiming sense and reason would seek to distinguish itself. Labour is evidently capable of recognising Tory legislative excess: it is, for example, rolling back the Minimum Service Levels Act, which aimed to make effective strike action in the public sector impossible, and replacing it with the (albeit inadequate) Employment Rights Bill. But the party has yet to mention repealing the anti-protest laws. Worse, it’s continuing the attempt by the Conservatives to lower the threshold at which they apply, from ‘serious disruption’ to community life to ‘significant’ (subjective) and ‘prolonged’ to ‘more than minor’. According to human rights organisation Liberty, which is bringing the challenge, hundreds of people have already been arrested or convicted under these provisions even though the fact they were passed by statutory instrument rather than primary legislation makes them ‘undemocratic, unconstitutional and unacceptable’.

Given that Liberty is Keir Starmer’s former workplace, this case is ripe for biographical analysis. Starmer is clearly signalling continuity with the past self who advocated more ‘vigorous’ policing of protesters and whose proximity to aspects of the spy cops scandal has been questioned, rather than that which once asked, in Socialist Alternatives, ‘what role the police should play, if any, in civil society,’ and was himself a victim of police spying. But continuing to demonise protesters also probably seems, to Labour, like a strategic decision. In the face of a Trump victory and a British far right growing in influence, the alternative is too easily characterised as a capitulation to ‘woke nonsense’, an abandonment of exactly those normal voters whose lives evil demonstrators are desperate to make difficult.

The problem with that approach is that the causes being protested about most often are, ultimately, popular, even if the tactics and the individuals themselves are not. In the case of Palestine Action, most Britons support a ceasefire in Gaza and an arms embargo; in the case of Just Stop Oil, most support strong action on climate change. The government could win a double victory for both its beloved liberal common sense and populism by repealing the anti-protest laws and then taking the political action that would make such protests unnecessary. But that it won’t do the former can probably be read as a statement of intent not to do the latter.

This, I think, is key. The Tories were invested in suppressing protest both because it was disruptive to their big business backers and because they knew anger was proliferating in the face of their failure to improve the climate outlook, or living standards, or Britain’s position on global injustice. Labour now appears to be doing the same thing, preemptively insulating itself from the dissent it fears its (in)action is liable to cause.

We know, by now, how the historical trajectory of these kinds of protest movements develops. As Conor Gearty puts it, ‘every new group always gets a rough time from the police and the public until (if they win) they are retrospectively deified as constitutional treasures.’ Gabriel Winant makes the same case in his postmortem on the recent Democratic defeat, adding the point that attacks by liberals in particular make even less sense because they push liberal ends further away:

[V]irtually every historical moment of substantive liberal triumph has been made possible by social movements that imposed themselves from below, often over the protest of liberal policymakers and thinkers, registering their objection to the means despite their abstract support for the ends. Universal adult suffrage, the welfare state, equal protection under law — such is the story of each of these.

This time around, given the scale and complexity of the crises — climate, security, economic, democratic — at hand, there’s no time for reactionary posturing. Public opinion is already ahead, and political vapidity no longer plays; the trust lent to Labour in the face of Conservative collapse has already been rescinded. The riots this summer show how easily the far right is able to capitalise on disaffection and distrust of the political mainstream, the sense that politicians don’t want to hear what voters have to say. Despite all this, Labour appears to be declaring its allegiance to the status quo. It is that, not ‘woke’ protests, that will damn it in the years to come.