I want to speak to Clause 29 in the hope that the sponsors of the Bill will agree to withdraw the clause. I am amazed by what I have heard from Tory Members. It seems that they want organised demonstrations which are not spontaneous. They want spontaneous demonstrations which are not organised. They do not want spontaneous demonstrations which are organised, which would seem to be far more sensible in terms of maintaining law and order than spontaneous demonstrations which are not organised. Next they will be saying that they want spontaneous demonstrations with seven days' notice. The sponsors of the Bill have not thought out what clause 29 means.

Conservative Members believe that the clause allows for spontaneous demonstration when it obviously does not. I suggest that they read the clause carefully and recognise that it will take away the freedom of people to demonstrate spontaneously, in a way that they have been able to do in this country for many years. This is a basic freedom which should not be lightly thrown away—in Cheshire or anywhere else.

It is also being said that the police will not use the clause. My hon. Friend the Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Mr. Mikardo) has said that this is sinister and I agree. One of the reasons why the police have not used such a power in the past in places where such a provision has been in force is that it is unenforceable.

It is not possible to enact a law to prevent people from demonstrating spontaneously in certain circumstances. One of the tests of good legislation is whether it is enforceable. This legislation is not enforceable unless there are to be major conflicts between the police and those who seek to exercise a democratic right to demonstrate peacefully because they feel angry or concerned about something and wish to demonstrate that at short notice. The clause will not work, and that is why in the past the police have on many occasions been reluctant to use such a power.

I am sorry that the hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Griffiths) is not present now, because I have a question to put. I am concerned about the question to whom we would be giving the power if the clause were enacted. It would not be so bad if, when we passed legislation giving power to police forces, we gave the power to the police authority rather than to the chief constable, to the people democratically elected in the area rather than to the executive, to those who have to carry out what is required.

I am concerned that we are constantly being asked to give more power to chief constables to take decisions which ought to be taken by the people democratically elected either to this place or to local authorities. It is difficult at present, with the way that our police forces are organised and power is vested in chief constables instead of in police authorities, to get any democratic discussion about decisions taken, for example, to ban marches or to prosecute people who break provisions such as clause 29. It is difficult to have proper discussion in democratically elected bodies such as police authorities.

The hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds said that the police were the best guardians of freedom that we had. I wonder whether he really believes that. It is certainly not true in a lot of countries that the police are the best guardians of freedom. One of the reasons why in many other countries the police are the ones who interfere with people's freedoms—the term "Police State" is familiar to us all—is that more and more power is given to the police and is taken away from democratic institutions such as local authorities, police authorities and Parliament.

If we continue to take away basic freedoms, allowing decisions about whether people should march, about whether a march is spontaneous or about whether people taking part in a spontaneous march should be prosecuted, and if we vest those decisions in chief constables and the police forces, we shall find that the police are not the best guardians of freedom. Quite the opposite will be true. I am sure that the police themselves do not want it, but they will come to be seen as the people who restrict freedom, who are seen to be controlling citizens' democratic rights in a way which must be totally unacceptable.

It should be remembered that there is a strange aspect to this matter in another respect. In metropolitan counties and non-metropolitan counties, the police authority is the county. It is a county council function exercised through the committee of the police authority. What little power there is to debate and control police matters vests in that authority. But under the Public Order Act the local authority that is consulted about whether a march should be banned is the district authority, and the existence of this situation creates great problems.

I was a councillor in Manchester in 1977 when the local authority, which has a right to be consulted by the police about whether marches should be banned, was totally ignored by the chief constable of Greater Manchester, who then, in his words, connived with the National Front, which planned the route of a National Front march through the most sensitive areas of Manchester, where the immigrant communities live. He did that without consulting the district authority, allowing the National Front to trespass on land owned by the then city of Manchester, again without consulting the local authority.

The hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds said that one of the problems about these marches was that the police were taken away from other duties which were of importance. Literally thousands of policemen were guarding that march, protecting the National Front, a march which was planned by the police. It cost the ratepayers of the city of Manchester and Greater Manchester thousands and thousands of pounds, but they were not even consulted. Such a thing could do nothing but harm to the image of the police, and in that situation they are seen to be not the best guardians of freedom but quite the opposite.

I believe that one reason why we have clause 29 in this form in the Bill is the same as the reason why it was in the Merseyside Bill and is in the Greater Manchester Bill. It is there—this is sinister, too—because chief constables are getting together. They are deciding what local authorities should put in their legislation. They are beginning to influence legislation in a way that is totally unacceptable. That is not their job, and they should be kept well away from legislation.

I represent Bootle, which had its own police force before local government reorganisation. The chief constable was a local man who grew up in Bootle and married the local sergeant's daughter. Everybody knew him. Before the reorganisation there were many chief constables. Now the whole of urban Britain is controlled by six police forces and the Metropolitan police in London. There are six men with a great deal of power outside London. They are policemen who meet together to decide policy. Seemingly they are accountable to no one. They are not accountable to Parliament, the Home Secretary, or even their police authority on such matters. Some of the chief constables, including the chief constable of Manchester, Mr. Anderton, have made political speeches, become cult figures of the Right, and attacked our democratic freedoms and rights.

Clause 29 is part of that campaign. We must vote against it. If Conservative Members really believe in the concept of freedom—and they use that word so often that it is losing its value and changing its meaning—they will vote with my hon. Friends and me against the clause. That will ensure that we take a step towards more freedom, towards maintaining and protecting freedom, and towards stopping chief constables from deciding what the Laws should be. The House should decide those laws.

People should have the right to demonstrate when they feel the need to go out into the streets and do so. I cite three examples of spontaneous demonstrations. I was personally involved in two of them. My first political memory is of the Suez crisis, when I took part in a spontaneous demonstration. If the clause had been in force then, that would have been illegal.

Again in my youth I took part in a demonstration about the Cuban crisis. There were demonstrations then throughout the country that would have been illegal if the clause had been in force.

There was a recent spontaneous demonstration following the execution of Bhutto. If Conservative hon. Members who are fighting for the restoration of the death penalty want to ban the right to demonstrate spontaneously when a decision is taken elsewhere that someone who is under sentence of death by hanging is not to be reprieved, that is an extremely dangerous course to advocate.

Clause 29 is far more significant than at first appears. It is important that it be removed from the Bill or defeated. If the clause is not removed or defeated, it will become a major step towards giving the police far more power than is right, just and sensible if we wish to maintain good relations between the police and the public and the democratic institutions of which we are proud.