Human Rights Watch warn of risk of authoritarianism in the UK

November 2023

The latest Daily Brief from HRW warns of a deteriorating situation with regard to human rights in the UK which they say is ‘worsening’. The right to protest peacefully is under threat as we saw recently with the Palestinian march which the then Home Secretary was keen to ban. She attempted to force the police to ban the march which they declined to do.

They say that we are beginning to move towards a place where the government feels it can undermine the integrity of the judiciary, undermine or scrap human rights laws that don’t serve the current political agenda and to create new laws that do. It is ‘beginning to look very much like authoritarianism’.

A lot of this activity has been driven by two forces: the arrival of the ‘boat people’ across the Channel and the activities of climate protestors. The Palestine marches have recently reinforced this. In all cases, there has been a major outcry from the right wing media joined recently by Talk TV and GB News and this may have led the government to respond the way they have. There is an inherent dislike of protest and the publicity it is able to generate. Despite the march being largely peaceful, it did not stop them being described as ‘hate marchers’ by some. Members of the governing party, including the deputy chair, and soon Boris Johnson, have their own programmes on these channels to promote their views.

Danny Kruger, MP for Devizes in Wiltshire, is joint leader of the ‘New’ Conservatives pressing for the abolition of the HRA and for our departure from the European Convention.