There are fears of a state-sanctioned police clampdown on street evangelists, now that the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 has come into effect.
The new laws give police greater powers to crack down on disruptive noisy protests, which could include a single person protest such as an open-air preacher. Officers now have the power to prevent protests or impose conditions on them if they reasonably believe the protest may cause serious disruption to or cause a significant impact (includes alarm or distress) on those nearby.
The government denies that the measures undermine freedom of expression and free speech, but police have already arrested and fined street preachers – such as Andrew Sathiyavan – even before the Act came into force.
Sathiyavan was fined for alleged Covid breaches in London on Easter Sunday in the first national lockdown and recently won his appeal. He argued that as a key worker providing physical and spiritual support to the homeless community, he was exempt from Covid restrictions.
The court acknowledged that he could not do his ministry indoors and ruled that he had reasonable excuse to be outside. The judge said: ‘We accepted that … the fact that there were few people on the High Street in Sutton was immaterial to Mr Sathiyavan for, as he told the court, if one person was “saved” that was sufficient as he would have done as Christ did, namely, to go in search of the one lost sheep.’
Angus Cameron, a pastor at Cumnock Baptist Church in Ayrshire, regularly preaches in the open air in Scotland and in England. He said: ‘The biggest issue is how the legislation is applied.’
He said: ‘There will be those who apply common sense and there will be the anti-Christian zealots looking for the tiniest excuse to harass street preachers. I have always insisted in my dealings with police that we are not protesting but preaching. Whether this would have any effect remains to be seen.’
However, Pastor Cameron is concerned that the legislation ‘will only be misused by those who don’t want to be offended and only add to an already overworked police force’.
He added: ‘I have found that the LGBT lobby and abortion lobby will use every dirty trick in the book to silence street preachers and it seems that this legislation will just be a useful tool in their armoury.’
