“The arrests of thousands of citizens for holding signs and placards, stemming from the absurd decision to proscribe a direct-action protest organisation, is surely the nadir for the Labour Party’s record on civil liberties.”
Apsana Begum MP wrote a piece for the Socialist Campaign Group’s 2026 pamphlet ‘The Socialist Policies We Need’. You can read the pamphlet in full below.
Many in the Labour Party are yet to comprehend the true impact of the authoritarian streak that ran through national policymaking in the first two years of the Labour Government.
In large part, this has arisen from the Starmer Labour leadership’s inability to reckon with the daily crimes against humanity committed by Israel.
Faced with a massive groundswell of protest, from a true cross-section of British society outraged by this government’s complicity in crimes committed in Gaza, the government clamped down hard.
This has happened through restrictions on ‘repeat protests’, the outright banning of some protests and the introduction of face-covering bans.
In addition, the arrest of thousands of citizens for holding signs and placards, stemming from the absurd decision to proscribe a direct-action protest organisation, is surely the nadir for the Labour Party’s record on civil liberties.
It is worth noting that in the first full calendar year of this Labour government, arrests for ‘terrorism-related activity’ increased by over 1,000%.
All this has not been limited to the Palestine solidarity movement. There has been the massive rollout of facial recognition technology, Palantir’s greater role in UK government data, attempts to curtail jury trials and proposals to introduce Digital ID.
This disregard for human rights and civil liberties is bleeding into many of the policy areas that millions of people in our country feel most strongly about.
On immigration, the stripping away of rights enshrined through the European Convention on Human Rights and government proposals to increase the detention of migrant children are utterly shocking.
As attempts are made globally to roll back LGBTQ+ rights, Trans+ communities in this country increasingly feel that the Labour government is not on their side as they face unprecedented and brutal assaults while being deprived of basic decency, dignity and security.
Many members of the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs have challenged these acts by highlighting and rallying against the dangers of creating tools of surveillance and repression, while the threat of Reform UK forming a government looms. These risks are compounded by the fact that so many anti-protest measures passed under the last Conservative government still need to be repealed.
The truth is that the warning signs of repressive anti-protest measures, assaults on migrant rights and attacks on civil liberties have roots inside the Labour Party, where the Starmer leadership embarked on a campaign of clamping down on internal dissent.
For years now, democratic socialist Labour members, activists, candidates, councillors and MPs have been factionally targeted by those within the Labour Party leadership.
Many of these members were prevented from standing to represent the Labour Party in local and national elections. Others were deselected, and many had their membership revoked without due process.
I too have experience of this through the illegitimate trigger ballot process in Poplar and Limehouse in 2022, which was mired by allegations of data misuse, membership irregularities, harassment, and even allegations of fraud and bribery
This is the undemocratic environment that has resulted in Labour MPs being warned off from attending picket lines in solidarity with workers, and seven members of the Socialist Campaign Group being suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party for voting to scrap the two-child limit.
The policies aiming at a severe clampdown on civil liberties are being driven by the right-wing faction in the Labour Party that set out to destroy the left of the Labour Party.
The strategies that those at the very top of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party devised for flattening internal democracy in the Party spilt out onto the national stage in Labour’s policymaking.
These last two years of attacks on the civil liberties and human rights of millions of people in our country show us that the right of the Party is, in many ways, ideologically exhausted and unable to present the solutions to the crises people face.
When faced with questions that they struggle to answer – whether on Gaza, migration, LGBTQ+ rights or other issues – the instinct is instead to put forward measures that repress and censor.
The answer, surely, lies in truly socialist and progressive politics, where people’s rights and liberties are not treated as inconveniences.
I know that the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs was formed to put forward a democratic socialist vision with vigour and energy.
When a Labour government rolls back rights – with no clear indication that leadership changes will bring a change in these policies – we must hold it to account. Upholding our values is the least of what Labour members and, indeed, what the wider left movement expect from us.
- Apsana Begum is the Member of Parliament for Poplar and Limehouse – you can follow her on Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram and TikTok.
- You can read the SCG pamphlet ‘The Socialist Policies We Need’ in full here. The foreword says that “We hope this contributes to a debate across the Labour Party, trade unions and the wider movement about the political programme needed to deliver the change people voted for, to build a better future for our communities and to prevent the rise of a Trump-style government here in Britain.“
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