The Labour Party has a problem with animal rights campaigners. During the Blair Government, Labour famously wrestled frequently with finding the balance between the freedom of activists to voice their concerns with animal testing and the economic investment brought by the pharmaceutical industry (often favouring the latter). The current Labour Government has inherited this aversion to animal rights protesters, but has done away with all pretence of seeking to facilitate protest. Against the background of extending the Conservative Government’s anti-protest legislation, Kier Starmer’s Government now represents the greatest challenge to the freedom of assembly yet.
On 14 January 2026, the Commons voted to approve an amendment which would restrict protests outside “life sciences infrastructure”, including specifically infrastructure used for animal testing. The amendment was introduced on 27 November 2025 by the Minister for Policing and Crime, Sarah Jones. It sought to classify “life science infrastructure” as a “key national infrastructure” under section 7 of the Public Order Act 2023.
Section 7 criminalises the “interference with use or operation”, defined broadly as preventing the infrastructure from being used or operated to any extent for any of its intended purposes, of a list of now ten “key national infrastructures”. The maximum sentence for contravening section 7 is twelve months’ imprisonment, a fine, or both. Since section 7(7) of the Public Order Act 2023 allows the Secretary of State to add a new kind of key national infrastructure using secondary legislation, the Government has avoided full parliamentary scrutiny of its legislative amendment.
The motivations behind the amendment
Sarah Jones presented the amendment as necessary to aid police in responding to “disruptive protest activity that is undermining our national health resilience”, highlighting the Government’s goal for the UK to become a “global beacon for scientific discovery”.
According to Jones, the life science industry informed the Government that it cannot currently function in some cases due to protests. Jones’ defence of the amendment was concerning. Jones did not use a single example of a recent animal rights protest which had actually impacted an animal testing facility, merely pointing out that at the 135 facilities which are licensed to do animal testing, there is only “potentially”the possibility of “protests of different degrees”.
In any case, her justification that such measures must be taken to ensure vaccines can be produced in the event of a pandemic fall flat since many of these facilities have absolutely nothing to do with vaccine production.
The only current animal rights protest campaign targeting animal testing seems to be “Camp Beagle“, a protest camp stationed in Cambridgeshire outside MBR Acres, a company which breeds up to 2000 beagles a year for animal testing. Camp Beagle has been established since June 2021 and grew after the Daily Mirror had published photographs of poor conditions at the premises.
Just two days before the Commons voted to approve the amendment, a jury at Cambridge Crown Court acquitted four protesters for burglary after they had broken into MBR acres to rescue beagle puppies in December 2022. To classify MBR acres as a ‘key infrastructure’ is significant overreach; in the words of Labour MP Kerry McCarthy, “I do not think that the country will grind to a halt if MBR Acres is occasionally obstructed from supplying beagles to laboratories for testing”.
Déjà vu? The Blair years
On 11 November 2025, the Government introduced its road map to phase out animal testing in line with its manifesto commitment. The first act of the Government in 2026, however, has been to criminalise protests outside animal testing facilities. There is an element of déjà vu here. Before the 1997 election, Tony Blair promised a Royal Commission to examine animal testing and possible alternatives. After elected as Prime Minister, Blair, whose premiership oversaw a heightened period of animal rights protests, instead decided the way forward was to clamp down on animal rights activists.
The most significant campaign during this period was by Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC). SHAC was formed as a direct action group which aimed to shut down Huntington Life Science, an animal testing facility based in Cambridgeshire. Members became well known for their method of intimidatory “home visits“, where activists would target the homes of scientists and staff of HLS and particularly their suppliers, shareholders and customers, with the aim of isolating HLS economically.
The growth of the animal rights movement in the early 2000s meant that by 2004, CEOs of major Japanese pharmaceutical companies based in the UK put increasing pressure on the UK Government to deal with protests under the threat that they would exit the country, leaving a £18.5 billion black hole in the economy in their wake.
In response, the Government legislated for section 145 (offence of “interference with contractual relationships so as to harm animal research organisations (AROs)”) and section 146 (“threatening someone that they will be the victim of a crime or tortious act causing loss or damage, because they are linked to an ARO”) of the Serious Organised Crime Act (SOCA) 2005. Both offences have a maximum term of imprisonment of five years.
The SOCA also added Section 42A to the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001 which created a free-standing offence of harassing someone in the vicinity of their home. These legislative amendments, in addition to a ramped up police response, of which particularly encouraged pharmaceutical companies to use civil injunctions against protesters, led to a dramatic decline of animal rights activity by the end of the 2000s.
Lowering the threshold of acceptable protest
During the debate on the amendment in December 2025, Matt Vickers MP mentioned that accompanying documents to the draft regulations held that police had requested more powers because sections 145 and 146 SOCA did not go far enough to deal with current animal rights protests. The police had not explained why.
The simple matter is that current animal rights protesters, such as those at “Camp Beagle” do not engage anymore with those controversial tactics covered by those offences. Instead of recognising this, and maintaining space for peaceful protest, the Government, potentially unnerved by a recent string of life science industry disinvestments in the UK totalling £1 billion (down to domestic economic malaise, Brexit and US policies, not protests), has decided to dramatically lower the threshold of acceptable dissent, and criminalise peaceful protest.
Labour has put aside its previous concerns with the anti-protest legislation ushered in by previous Conservative Governments. Sarah Jones has gone from criticising the Conservative legislation provisions as “draconian” and “disproportionate” to a position of using them in full force against peaceful protesters now she is in government.
The move to criminalise animal rights protests takes place against the background of a concerted effort to micromanage and curtail protest. Beyond animal rights protests, Labour have pushed further in legislating for more protest-related restrictions in the Crime and Policing Bill which is currently passing through the House of Lords.
Worryingly, on 15 January 2025, the Lords agreed an amendment to the Bill put forward by the Government which would allow police to consider the cumulative impact of frequent protests when imposing conditions. This represents the greatest threat yet to the freedom of assembly. In effect, police will be able to introduce conditions on protests if they deem protesters have had sufficient opportunity to voice their concerns.
The amendment, in fact, had been repackaged from secondary legislation introduced by the former Home Secretary Suella Braverman in 2023 which was ruled subsequently unlawful by the Court of Appeal.
Clearly, notwithstanding the change in government, the zeal to limit peaceful protest persists. At this current pace, this begs the question: what will remain of the freedom of assembly at the end of this Labour Government?
This article originally published on LSE Blogs is reproduced under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY 4.0). Read the original here.
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