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| - After a petition asking the U.K. government to call a new general election went viral, claims began circulate that Prime Minister Keir Starmer, of the Labour Party, threatened to have petitioners arrested. For example, on Nov. 25, 2024, a woman posted a video on TikTok making this claim (archived):
Good morning, guys. Well, Keir Starmer is apparently threatening to give everybody a respect order that has signed the petition. Now I've just looked up what a respect order is, and I'm going to read it to you:
"A respect order is meeting a manifesto pledge to crack down on all antisocial behavior. The new respect order will give the police and local councils the power to ban prospective offenders from town centers, drinking in public spots such as high streets and local parks, and it will also stop perpetrators from" … what is it? … "undertake positive rehabilitation and failure to comply with the respect order will be a criminal offense. Police will have the ability to immediately arrest anyone who is breaching the respect order."
So in other words, he's saying that we're being antisocial by signing a petition, and if we all carry on signing the petition, we can be arrested because it's antisocial.
The video had garnered more than 41,000 likes and 7,000 comments as of this writing, along with 1 million views. Some people seemed to believe the claim. "He is in full dictatorship he must go now," one commenter wrote.
On the same day, the same claim appeared on X. One post included the TikTok video, adding "Listen to this apparently we can get arrested for anti-social behaviour and if we keep signing a petition against labour." Another post repeated the claim without including the video. A third said the same thing in Spanish.
While it is true that a petition went viral and that so-called respect orders were a campaign promise of the Labour Party, there is no evidence that Starmer threatened to slap one on the petition's signatories. We have therefore deemed the claim unfounded.
The Petition
The petition launched on Nov. 20, 2024, and was started by a pub owner in the Black Country — an industrial area of the Midlands region of England that earned its moniker because of landscape coated in coal pollution. The man, Michael Westwood, told the BBC that he was a Conservative voter and was already disappointed with the left-leaning Labour government, elected on July 4, 2024, after 14 years of Conservative rule. Labour won a "super-majority" in Parliament, with 411 seats out of the 650 available.
As of this writing, the petition was less than 100,000 signatures short of 3 million:
(screen capture/parliament.uk)
Petitions on the U.K. government stay active for six months. The rules state that at 10,000 signatures, a petition on the government gets considered for debate. At 100,000, it gets a government response. The petition benefited from a boost when X owner Elon Musk, who lives in the U.S., posted about it, sharing a post from a user who claimed to be based in Scandinavia (archived):
"The people of Britain have had enough of a tyrannical police state," Musk wrote.
The original post read "BREAKING: The petition calling for a new general election in Britain has reached 1 million signatures. People are tired of Socialist tyranny police state."
Respect Orders
As the woman in the video said, respect orders are a campaign promise of the Labour Party. According to the Labour manifesto (as political programs of British political parties are known), their goal is to curb "antisocial" behavior:
Antisocial behaviour is not merely a "low-level" nuisance. It hits the poorest communities hardest and, if left unchecked, leads to more serious offending. Yet, the Conservatives weakened enforcement powers. Labour will fix this by introducing new Respect Orders — powers to ban persistent adult offenders from town centres, which will stamp out issues such as public drinking and drug use. Fly-tippers [people who illegally dump garbage on roads, rivers and other public places] and vandals will also be forced to clean up the mess they have created.
Starmer's government made good on this promise when the Home Office announced on Nov. 22, 2024, the implementation of said respect orders. This appears to be the announcement the woman in the video was reading from:
Meeting a manifesto pledge to crack down on anti-social behaviour, the new Respect Orders will give the police and local councils powers to ban persistent offenders from town centres or from drinking in public spots such as high streets and local parks, where they have caused misery to local people. These will be piloted prior to national rollout to make sure they are as effective as possible.
Perpetrators can also be required to address the root cause of their behaviour by being mandated to undertake positive rehabilitation, such as attending drug or alcohol treatment services, or an anger management course to address the underlying causes of their behaviour.
Respect orders seemed to be a new version of "Asbos" (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders)— a Tony Blair-era law-enforcement device designed to prevent the same types of behaviors. Long criticized for being too bureaucratic, Asbos were repealed in 2012 by the Conservative government.
Respect Orders Against Petitioners?
As the timing of the petition and government's announcement of respect orders coincided, the woman in the video claimed Starmer would use the orders against people who signed the petition. However, there was no evidence that this was true. No news outlet of repute had reported on such a story, either.
Instead, the woman may have seemingly conflated the two events. Her video appeared on TikTok after Starmer appeared on the morning talk show "This Morning" on ITV, in which he provided more context for the decision to implement respect orders. In the same interview, the presenters asked him to comment on the petition (the segment starts at 8:10):
"Look, I remind myself that very many people didn't vote Labour at the last election," Starmer said. "I'm not surprised that many of them want a rerun. That isn't how our system works."
Regardless, Parliament scheduled a debate on the petition for Jan. 6, 2025.
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