The New Dark Age

Here’s a Christmas round-up of our work over the past few months. Wishing you a very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year – may freedom flourish in 2020….

British towns and cities have traditionally been a place for leafleting, petitioning and campaigning.

A Manifesto Club report finds that new council policies make it harder than ever for people to advertise local events or to campaign for a political, religious or charitable cause. 81% of councils restrict political campaigning, and nearly half took a ‘zero tolerance’ approach to all community posters. In the past year, councils have taken down posters for hospice charity events, election events, and lost cats and dogs notices.

Read the report, The Silencing of Public Space.

The report was covered in an exclusive in the Mail on Sunday, as well as Localgovand local papers.

We are calling on councils to remove restrictions on free speech and to tolerate public leafleting, community posters and political campaigning.

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We published a report about councils’ use of new-style ASBOs (called CPNs, or Community Protection Notices).

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RED TAPE STOPS VOLUNTEERS SITTING WITH THE DYING IN HOSPITAL

For many years we have campaigned against vetting and other red tape for volunteers. Now volunteers are being asked not only for criminal records checks, but also for references, health and safety training and lengthy child protection course

We published a blog post by former Magistrate Linda Hughes, who offered to volunteer in hospitals to sit with people who were dying. Although she is criminal records checked, a former NHS employee and a long-time volunteer, she was asked to go through expensive procedures that would take 3-6 months.

Read Linda’s blog post here. The blog was covered in the Daily Telegraph.

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A Manifesto Club report exposes the rise of litter fines being issued by private security guards on commission.

These fines have now reached 200,000 in one year, and cover 85% of all fines issued.

We are arguing that this leads to an inevitable corruption of punishment, with aggressive and duplicitous behaviour, including hiding in bushes or around corners, harassing and following people, issuing fines for items dropped by accident, or even falsely accusing people of dropping litter.

Recent cases include a man fined for temporarily putting some shopping down next to his car, and another person fined for leaving a receipt in the supermarket trolley.

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OTHER NEWS…

• See the latest on Southend’s crackdown on the homeless before Christmas.
• 40 years of the hyper-regulation of smokers – a report for Forest.
• The Manifesto Club responded to Manchester Council’s plan to ban protests and prayer outside an abortion clinic. Read our response.
• Blog posts – Why we need informal events, by James Woudhuysen; PSPOs and the ‘Preventative State’ by Dr Ben Stanford.