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Latest updates: Tom Tugendhat, the security minister, says Public Order Act gives police commanders ‘powers they have asked for for many months’
Good morning. Tom Tugendhat, the security minister, was on the pitch for No 10 on the morning TV and radio programmes. He was there to talk about the prime minister’s new fraud strategy (fighting it, not perpetrating it), but inevitably he was asked about coronation security.
Today the Guardian is splashing on the revelation that new powers making it easier for the police to disrupt protests, which are in the Public Order Act, have been implemented about six weeks early so that they are available to officers this week, so that if people try to hold up coronation events they can be removed and arrested more easily than under previous public order legislation. The Home Office has even written to Republic, the group campaigning for Britain to become a republic which is organising coronation day protests, warning them what they are now up against.
They have the liberty that anybody in the United Kingdom has to protest.
What they don’t have the liberty to do is to disrupt others, and that’s where we’re drawing and making a difference. Because you saw ambulances in London only a few months ago unable to take patients to hospital because people were blocking roads. You’ve seen people, quite rightly, getting extremely frustrated when they’re unable to get to work or get to school in the morning because people from one pressure group or another have decided to put an obstacle in their road.
I’m not going to go through the details what you can or can’t do for fear of encouraging people to find loopholes in it, for very obvious reasons.
So look, operational decisions are quite rightly a matter for the police, and yyou wouldn’t expect me to second guess them on your programme.
What we’ve done is we’ve passed laws that give the operational police commanders the powers that they have been asking for for many, many months.
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