Police batons bludgeon a centuries old legacy

Police are punishing all protesters for the actions of a violent few during demonstrations against university fee increases. Picture / AP

Protesters have won countless rights for Britons - now authorities are stifling their voices when they most need to be heard.

So now we know. When our politicians in Britain complained over the past few decades, in a low, sad tone, that young people were "too apathetic" and "disengaged", they didn't mean it.

A great flaring re-engagement of the young has taken place this year. With overwhelmingly peaceful tactics, they are demanding policies supported by the majority of the British people - and our rulers are trying to truncheon, kettle and intimidate them back into apathy.

Nicky Wishart is a 12-year-old self-described "maths geek" who lives in the heart of Prime Minister David Cameron's constituency.

He was gutted when he found out his youth club was being shut down as part of the Government's spending cuts - there's nowhere else to hang out in his village. He was particularly outraged when he discovered online that Cameron had said before the election that he was "committed" to keeping youth clubs open.

So he did the right thing. Through Facebook, he organised a totally peaceful protest outside Cameron's constituency surgery.

A few days later, the police arrived at his school. They hauled him out of his lessons, told him the anti-terrorism squad was monitoring him and threatened him with arrest. They also told him his family would be charged for "damage" caused by the protest.

The message to Nicky Wishart and his generation is very clear - don't get any fancy ideas about being an engaged citizen. Go back to your X-Box and X Factor, and leave politics to the millionaires in charge.

This slow constriction of the right to protest has been happening for decades.

Under New Labour, protesters outside Parliament started to have to ask permission and found themselves prosecuted for "anti-social behaviour".

Last year a peaceful protester died after being attacked by a police officer on the streets of London, and nobody has ever been punished.

Now the Metropolitan Police's instinctive response to any group of protesters is to surround them and "kettle" - arbitrarily imprison - them for up to 10 hours in the freezing cold, with no food, water, or toilets. It doesn't matter how peaceful you are. You are trapped.

Now the head of the Met, Sir Paul Stephenson, says a ban on protests by students is "one of the tactics we will look at".

These protesters are not defying the will of the British people; they are expressing it. Look at their two great causes: opposing £27,000-a-degree fees for university students, and making the super-rich pay the £120 billion in tax they currently avoid.

Opponents of top-up fees outnumber supporters by 10 per cent, while 77 per cent of us support a crackdown on people who live here but do not pay taxes here.

This isn't an attack on democracy, it's a demand for it. It's a refusal to be part of the silent majority any more. When politicians are defying the will of the people - and breaking the "solemn pledges" on which they took our votes - protest is necessary.

Making violent attacks on people is never justified in a democracy. Anybody who throws a fire extinguisher off a roof, or throws fire crackers and snooker balls at police officers, should be arrested and charged. It's morally wrong, and tactically idiotic: it puts people off the protesters' just cause.

That's why, whenever it has happened, the protesters themselves have immediately turned on the violent fringe and made them stop.

Yet the Government is claiming that to deal with this tiny number of people - a few dozen - it is necessary to restrict basic rights to free assembly won over centuries.

These excessive policing tactics are provoking more violent protest than they prevent. It's enraging to turn up to peacefully express your views outside Parliament and find yourself imprisoned by police officers who won't even let you go to the toilet.

Today, when I suggest to friends that they come to protest against a policy they passionately think will harm Britain, they have started to say something they never said before: I'm too frightened to go.

For example, a group of disabled people I know is terrified by the Government's abolition of the independent living allowance, which makes it possible for them to keep living in their own homes.

The Sunday Telegraph quotes a Government insider admitting "it is quite possible there will be cases of suicide" as a result.

But after seeing how the police threw a fragile disabled man with cerebral palsy out of his wheelchair and on to the street at the protests last week, they are too scared to protest. They are forced to watch, helpless as their support is taken away.

There is a cost to this chilling of protest. Every British citizen is the beneficiary of a long line of protesters stretching through the centuries.

Every woman can vote and open her own bank account and choose her own husband and have a career because protesters fought for it.

Every worker gets at least £5.93 an hour, and paid holidays and sick leave, because protesters fought for it. Every pensioner gets enough to survive because protesters fought for it.

What would life be like if all those protesters through all those years had been frightened into inactivity? If you block the right to protest, you block the path to progress.

In Britain, we are not suffering from an excess of civil disobedience. We are suffering from an excess of civil obedience.

Our Government is pursuing dozens of policies we know to be immoral - from bombing civilians in Afghanistan to kicking away the ladder that lets hard-working poor children stay on at school.

We aren't wrong when we challenge these injustices. We are wrong when we stay silent.

As Oscar Wilde said: "Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion."

Now imagine living in a country where this didn't happen. Imagine a Britain where a Cabinet of millionaires could exempt the super-rich from tax while taking away the £30 a week that keeps hard-working poor kids at school - only for the streets to stay silent and supine.

If we don't defend our right to protest, we may well end up living on that cowed and chilly island.

- Independent