Friday, January 16, 2026
Another move by Labour towards suppressing free speech
The paper says that advocates for free speech and animal rights have warned that the move by home secretary Shabana Mahmood sets a dangerous precedent towards clamping down on basic freedoms, while activists staging round-the-clock vigils at a Cambridgeshire site breeding beagles for laboratory tests have vowed to risk arrest to continue protesting:
In a change to the law that was not part of a Bill before Parliament, Labour has amended the Public Order Act to categorise animal-testing facilities, including universities and laboratories, as “key infrastructure”, alongside airports, power stations and motorways.
Police will have stronger powers to stop protests, with penalties of up to a year in jail or an unlimited fine.
It means “Camp Beagle” demonstrators holding up placards outside a centre near Huntingdon that breeds dogs for laboratory testing could be prosecuted.
Anyone breaching the new ban may now face prison or an unlimited fine.
Cruelty Free International, which campaigns to end animal testing, branded the move “illiberal, draconian, unnecessary and almost certainly unlawful” and called on the Lords to reject it.
“This measure is an unjustified attack on democratic rights, and risks setting a dangerous precedent towards an ever-growing restriction of peaceful protest,” a spokesman said.
John Curtin, an organiser at Camp Beagle, told The Independent he and fellow members were prepared to be arrested.
“I’m not going to change my my actions one little bit, and we’ll just wait for the police to come along,” he said.
“They’re changing the law because we operate legally and peacefully.
“We’ve said the camp’s not going until this place is shut down. It’s business as usual. This is a disgusting act by the Labour Party who promised to get rid of animal testing. They’ll never live this down.”
Tens of thousands of people wrote to their MPs and members of the House of Lords to express their anger at the proposal before the vote.
But the government managed to pass the amendment by 301 votes to 110 after the Tories appeared to abstain on the issue, having previously tried to introduce the same measure before the election.
Nevertheless, 26 Labour MPs rebelled in another challenge to prime minister Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership.
One rebel MP pointed out: “We voted against this as the Labour Party when the Tories tried to do this in government; now our leadership is doing the same as the Tories.”
Labour MP Neil Duncan-Jordan is quite right when he warned of a slide against “the right to free assembly that began under the last government”:
“Shielding the powerful from dissent only strengthens our opponents. By curtailing the right to protest, we risk laying the foundations for a more authoritarian and less democratic state. That’s not the job of the Labour Party,”
I wonder if Labour ministers have thought that one of the reasons for the backlog of cases in the courts is because they keep prosceuting people for expressing their democratic opinion.
