Thread by @GeorgeMonbiot

This should be all over the front pages. The government's terminating our right to protest, through amendments sneaked into the Police Bill at the last minute.
It's the biggest assault on democracy in 70+ years, and hardly anyone seems to know.
My column
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

Obviously, the Free Speech Union and all the other Freedom Warriors of the right are up in arms about this massive truncation of our liberties.

It's amazing isn't it, that they get so wound up about what students say, or about having to wear face masks, but say nothing about the biggest attack on civil liberties in the UK for at least 70 years. You could almost imagine that the only freedoms they believe in are their own

Good grief. This afternoon, the Home Office just slipped even more amendments into the Police Bill - too late for proper parliamentary scrutiny. They include this one, clearly aimed at @XRebellionUK.
They are shutting down our freedoms, in batches.

You need to understand what this means. It means criminalising all effective protests, or pickets, or any other kind of action, on roads, railways, ports, airports, oil refineries, printing presses and other such, unspecified "key infrastructure". These are dictators' powers.

The scale of what we're on the brink of losing is scarcely imaginable. Priti Patel proposes to remove freedoms we have taken for granted for generations. Freedoms that are the wellspring of democracy.
First they came for the greens ....

Follow @killthebill_1 and find out when new protests are planned. If we don't protest before this bill is passed, we'll be hard-put to do so afterwards.

Where's the bloody media?
BBC?
Anyone?
Are you just going to sit this one out?

Where's the Labour Party?
Why aren't they shouting from the rooftops about this?

The government is deliberately slipping this under the radar. It's attempting to avoid parliamentary and media scrutiny by dropping amendments into the bill AFTER it has been debated. Not just any amendments: the biggest truncations of our freedoms in living memory.

This afternoon saw the second batch of amendments sneaked into the bill, and they include arguably the worst yet: the sweeping shutdown of protest where it counts most.
Parliament should be in uproar.
The press should be in uproar.
We should be in uproar.

You know all those documentaries you've watched about a dictator's path to power?
You know there's always the bit where you think: "Why didn't people do something? They could have stopped him while there was still time"?
That's the bit we're at.

Here's @libertyhq's petition. I know the power of signing petitions is limited, but if we can get millions, it might help:
action.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/page/78339/pet…

Protest while you still can. There's a #KilltheBill demo in London on December 8th:

https://twitter.com/killthebill_1/status/1465624446690078725

At the beginning of any slide towards authoritarianism, you'll see justifications like this. Demonise an outgroup, pretend the new laws will apply only to them, portray the measures as necessary to clean up society.