Hi, I'm Rachel, and on today's New Statesman podcast, I'm talking to Jody Beck,

Policy and Campaigns Officer at the Human Rights Organization Liberty,

about the public order bill currently making its way through Parliament.

Jody, thank you so much for coming on to chat to us about this.

Let's start with the context of the public order bill.

We heard a lot about the Police Crime Sentencing and Courts Bill last year

that sort of became law in April.

This is a new thing, this is a separate thing that seems to be doing

a very similar job of trying to restrict how people can protest,

who can protest and at what stage the police can get involved.

Absolutely, so the public order bill itself has an interesting relationship to the policing bill.

So we know that when the policing bill was being passed through the Lords,

the government very late on in the day wanted to add in a bunch of new measures

and those measures are the substance of this new public order bill.

So the House of Lords last January about a year ago rejected all of the last-minute measures

the government wanted to add into the policing bill on the basis

that the policing bill had already been through many of the different stages

of Parliamentary scrutiny.

And the measures were a severe escalation on the club dawn on protests,

which is what the public order bill exactly is now.

So within the public order bill we've got a new range of protest related offenses.

So that is anything from looking on.

...