The way protest is treated by the law is one of those legal topics where everyone has a view.

The four- and five-year sentences handed down to Just Stop Oil activists who caused mass disruption to motorways in 2022, Jonathan Goldsmith reflects (page 11), are ‘a headache for Labour’. A UN special rapporteur called the sentences ‘a dark day’. An alternative view came from Observer columnist Sonia Sodha: ‘To suggest that freedom of conscience creates an unlimited right to cause other citizens harm is to fail to engage with the nature of their offence.’ Demonstrable harm was caused to ordinary, innocent citizens.

Supporters of the right to disruptive protest reference the Suffragettes, whose tactics, alongside peaceful marches, included arson, window smashing, incendiary devices in postboxes and mass disruption of speeches by anti-suffragist politicians, including Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George. In turn, Suffragettes were subjected to state-sanctioned violence.

Diane Atkinson’s Rise Up Women! The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes concludes with accounts of what the women did next. Christabel Pankhurst was made a dame and preached on the Second Coming. Another married an accountant. Alongside communists and socialists, you find business owners, Conservatives, councillors and magistrates. Transitions to respectability would be harder with today’s punitive laws on protest.

But as we debate what we think the just treatment in law of disruptive protest should be, if the Suffragettes are a test of acceptability for supporters of disruptive protest rights, it is worth asking who their ‘heirs’ are.

This week, four Greenpeace volunteers began their court case for ‘criminal damage’. In 2023 they climbed on the roof of Rishi Sunak’s mansion in Yorkshire and covered one side of it in black fabric, in a specific protest at his decision to license hundreds more oil and gas drill sites in the North Sea. Sunak and family were on holiday.

It was a targeted, personalised protest. As were most Suffragette targets. Lloyd George’s speeches were disrupted, Suffragettes reasoned, because he would not give the movement’s leaders an audience. Many smashed windows were just as carefully chosen.

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