London’s Metropolitan Police refused to bow down to government pressure to ban the weekend’s pro-Palestine protests. But advisors are now telling the government to change the law so the threshold for stopping such demonstrations before they’ve had a chance to begin can be much lower.
By all official accounts, the Armistice Day protest, in which up to 300,000 people reportedly took part, was for the most part peaceful, with the exception of a very few counter-demonstrators.
That’s not to say that the message of many ‘for Palestine’ marchers was peaceful. Many of the messages were chilling and hateful. Some wore headbands understood to imitate those worn by Hamas terrorists, while others chanted that “Muhammad’s army will return” and bring “death to all the Jews.”
Despite the minimal physical violence on Saturday, the slogans and messages prompted officials to consider changes to protest-banning laws. Lord Walney, the Government’s independent adviser on political violence, told The Sunday Telegraph that he is “hugely sympathetic” to the view that a protest could be banned if it was considered “at the very least a factor in raising tension, increasing the number of antisemitic attacks and the culture of fear and intimidation to which Jewish people are being subjected.”
Police already have the power to request a protest ban if they believe it is going to cause “serious public disorder” on the day, and incitement to violence—antisemitic or otherwise—is already against the law. Which raises the question of just how much the government is being urged to shift the goalposts, and how police might define the risk of “raising tension.” Perhaps, were this suggestion to be implemented, it could be argued that an individual praying silently outside an abortion clinic was raising tension. It is completely unclear how and where the line would be drawn.
As Mick Hume wrote for The European Conservative ahead of the weekend’s disruption:
It might be good to imagine that we could simply ask the authorities to wave a public order law or a policeman’s riot baton and make all the hatred and political poison go away. But in reality, there are both principled and practical reasons why we should not immediately turn to state censorship as a solution, even when faced with stomach-churning public celebrations of Jew-hatred.
All this talk of protests has inevitably diverted attention away from the whole point of Armistice Day; although polling has revealed that for far too many, this point was already lost.
A new Ipsos survey suggests that only one-third of millennials, born between 1981 and 1996, and ‘Gen Zers,’ born between 1997 and 2012, know that Remembrance Day commemorates the First World War Armistice. While the government is spending its time consulting on how schools should approach sex education and the transgender question more broadly, it is surely worth asking whether successive governments have been focussing on boosting the wrong areas for all this time.
