Britain’s protest crackdown is producing political prisoners

England and Wales are jailing protesters at a rate not seen in living memory. New research shows conscience being treated as a sentencing aggravant.

The numbers

The figures are not ambiguous. The number of people imprisoned for protest-related offences has risen sharply over the past three years, driven by prosecutions under legislation passed or extended since 2022: the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act and the Public Order Act. Both were designed, their architects said, to address “serious disruption”. Both are being used against people whose conduct, in any prior decade, would have produced a fine or a caution at most.

Palestine Action activists have received sentences running to years, not months, for direct action against arms-industry premises. Just Stop Oil supporters who glued themselves to roads or entered motorways have been jailed for terms that exceed those handed down for a range of violent offences. The pattern is not coincidental. It is the product of a deliberate legislative choice, made in Parliament and extended by a prosecutorial culture that has absorbed the message.

What changed, and when

The 2022 Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act gave police new powers to impose conditions on protests deemed to cause “noise” or “serious annoyance”. The 2023 Public Order Act went further: it created new offences of “locking on” and “tunnelling”, introduced serious disruption prevention orders that can be imposed on people who have not been convicted of any offence, and extended stop-and-search powers. Both acts were opposed by civil liberties organisations, by the Law Society, and by UN special rapporteurs who wrote to the UK government warning that the legislation breached international human rights standards.

Labour, in opposition, voted against parts of both bills. In government, it has not repealed a word.

The result is a legal framework in which a person who sits in a road to protest the killing of civilians in Gaza can receive a longer custodial sentence than a person convicted of assault. That is not a rhetorical point. It is what the sentencing records show.

The political prisoner question

The phrase “political prisoner” carries weight and should. It is not applied lightly. The working definition used by human rights organisations requires that detention is imposed because of political, religious, or ideological activity; that the detention is disproportionate to any legitimate aim; and that the process was not conducted fairly.

On those criteria, a growing number of people now imprisoned in England and Wales meet the threshold. They have not harmed anyone. They have not committed fraud or violence. They have acted on conscience, publicly, in daylight, and they are serving sentences that would attract international condemnation if handed down in a country the Foreign Office had already decided to criticise.

The Home Office does not use the phrase. It does not need to.

Who benefits from the silence

The arms companies whose premises Palestine Action targeted are continuing to operate without interruption. The contracts are intact. The export licences, suspended briefly and partially by the Starmer government under legal pressure, cover a fraction of what flows to Israel through British supply chains. The activists in prison did not stop a single shipment. The law has been considerably more effective at stopping them.

That is the function the legislation is performing. Not the protection of public order in any neutral sense. The protection of a specific economic and political order, against people willing to physically obstruct it.

A government that jails its citizens for opposing a war it will not name as a war, in defence of an arms trade it will not defend in public, has made its priorities clear. The sentences are the policy.

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