Walking down Broad Street on a sunny afternoon last week I was heartened to come across banners left outside our MP Jesse Norman’s office in Broad Street drawing attention to the threat to our civil liberties of the Police and Crime Bill.

Peaceful Protest is still alive and kicking in Hereford then! The Bill proposes to give the police broad-ranging powers to determine whether or not a protest is creating ‘a public nuisance’ and to intervene to stop it.

One of the banners particularly caught my attention, it pointed out:‘Countries which suppress peaceful protest: Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, China, Venezuela, Russia, UK(?)’.

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Do we really want the UK to join the ranks of authoritarian states the world over and go further down the slippery slope to increasingly repressive centralised government?

It is an interesting fact that one of the first things Boris Johnson did when he became Mayor of London was to buy a set of secondhand water cannons from Germany. In the horrifying news footage recently from Hong Kong and Myanmar we’ve seen how repression of peaceful protest can end up.

Do we fondly imagine it couldn’t happen here? In the 1930s Germany was apparently a civilised cultured nation until the Nazis gradually took power.

Please think about it – our right to peaceful protest is precious and if it is not carefully protected we may all live to suffer the consequences.

Wendy Harvey

Hereford

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