In the last couple of years we have witnessed an unprecedented assault on our democracy. Not from any hostile foreign power, but from our own government. Our rights and freedoms are coming under sustained attack as Boris Johnson’s government literally rewrites the law to make it harder for us to hold them to account.
This hasn't happened overnight and none of this is accidental. While we are bombarded with Breaking News, it's hard to keep track of the detail, or make sense of the bigger picture. We have been Keeping the Receipts, an ongoing log of assaults on our democracy. We can see how these parliamentary bills are a nothing short of a power grab.
We need your help to Stop the Slide. We want to provide simple analysis of the key issues buried in the legal jargon, work with campaign groups and experts to get their messages, petitions, and legal actions out to the wider media, and help spread the word about what is at stake.
In the last six months alone, new legislation has been passed which:
- Takes away our right to peaceful protest (Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022)
- Introduces mandatory ID checks for voters (Elections Act 2022)
- Criminalises asylum seekers arriving by means deemed to be ‘illegal’ (Nationality and Borders Act 2022)
- Allows British nationals to be stripped of their citizenship without warning (Nationality and Borders Act 2022)
- Makes it harder for people to hold the government to account in court (Judicial Review and Courts Act 2022)
- Paves the way for privatisation of the NHS (Health and Care Act 2022)
And there’s much more to come…
In the Queen’s Speech in May the government announced 38 new parliamentary bills, which could eventually become law. These include:
- A Public Order Bill which gives the police sweeping new powers over protests
- A Data Reform Bill which will scrap EU rules on data protection and allow our personal data to be sold to the highest bidder.
- A Media Bill which will enable the privatisation of Channel 4
- A Brexit Freedoms Bill which will give the government new powers to amend or repeal retained EU law, with the minimum of parliamentary scrutiny
- And a new Bill of Rights which will replace the Human Rights Act under British law
This government is chipping away at the very building blocks of our democracy and weakening the institutions which are supposed to hold it to account - the media, the judiciary, the Electoral Commission. Meanwhile, the NHS, our data and even our human rights are all up for grabs.
But in the never-ending barrage of lies and scandals surrounding Number 10, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s at stake. What we are witnessing is an unprecedented power grab by the state. Boris Johnson stands accused by members of his own party of “governing like a medieval monarch”, while the Institute for Government, in its most recent Parliamentary monitoring report, warned against this government’s “frequent sidelining of parliament” and “dismissive approach to scrutiny”.
What we intend to do:
Parliamentary bills have to pass through various stages of scrutiny in the House of Commons and House of Lords before they can be voted into law. This process enables problems to be spotted or objections to be raised. However, the sheer number of bills passing through parliament and the speed at which they are being pushed through is making proper scrutiny impossible.
A report published by the House of Lords Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee in November 2021, highlighted “a disturbing trend in the way in which bills are framed with the effect that they often limit or even avoid appropriate legislative scrutiny.” It concluded that addressing this balance of power was now a “matter of urgency”.
We intend to scrutinise the latest raft of bills as they move through parliament, to bring together expert analysis of the rights and freedoms we stand to lose, and to spread the word about what exactly is at stake. Our democracy.
We will do this by making a series of short films which cut through the noise and jargon to bring a clear explanation of what each bill is proposing. We will work with under resourced, yet tenacious democracy defence groups to help get their messages into the wide stream media.
But we can’t do this without your support. Please help us to hold this government to account.
Who are the Citizens?
The Citizens is a non-profit organisation that holds power to account through investigation, innovative storytelling, creative activations and litigation.
We're the team behind:
The Real Facebook Oversight Board
We need your support to carry on with this vital work. Your funds will amplify the voices of real experts who know what these new bills mean for our democracy & support our small team of freelancers and volunteers.