It’s not hard to spot the extremists inflaming public passions in Britain and disrupting our lives. They play an active role in politics, and sometimes claim to be running the country. But I’m not sure many people have understood just how far they are prepared to go.

The new report by the government’s “independent adviser on political violence” and crossbench peer, John Woodcock (Lord Walney), is bad enough: horrifying in fact. It proposes that the government should restrict the ability of protest groups “to organise or fundraise”, tighten the laws against protest even further and, driving what could be a final nail, permit any businesses targeted by protesters, or people disrupted by them, to pursue them for financial damages.

It was going to be even worse. The report was widely trailed – including by Woodcock himself – as treating the non-violent campaigns Just Stop Oil and Palestine Action as if they were terrorist groups, and proposing they should be banned. But last week, Woodcock was interviewed on the News Agents podcast, and it all fell apart. He seemed incapable of answering or, in some cases, even understanding the questions. Though he has had three years in which to compile this report, it was as if he had never been challenged on these issues before, or thought about them in any depth.

My guess is that someone in government realised that what Woodcock was proposing was about to run headlong into reality. I can picture days of frantic editing to avoid a total fiasco. Among the proposals that survived the cull was Woodcock’s call for “protective buffer zones” around “defence companies and energy providers”. It happens that Woodcock works for lobby groups that represent both arms manufacturers and........

© The Guardian