David Davis has “skin in the game” on the right to peaceful protest. “My grandfather was arrested for leading a demonstration,” the former Conservative cabinet minister told me, before proudly recounting the story: a march in North Shields in the 1930s to demand more support for the unemployed; the police charging at the crowd; the arrest of the activists deemed “responsible”. His grandfather was given a choice between promising not to make any “inflammatory speeches” in the next six months or a prison sentence. He chose prison.
This family connection might help to explain why Davis, 74, has made civil liberties the cornerstone of his political career. In 2008 he resigned not only as shadow home secretary but as an MP, forcing a by-election in his constituency of Haltemprice and Howden, which he won. The trigger was the narrow passing of New Labour’s counterterrorism bill, which sought to allow the detention of terrorist suspects for 42 days without charge. But his shock resignation was also a more general protest against the creeping authoritarianism of the state under Tony Blair – the bid for mandatory ID cards, heavy-handed public order legislation, increased surveillance – which Davis called “the slow strangulation of fundamental British freedoms by this government”.
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