UK's Scotland Yard objects to government's ban on pro-Palestinian demonstration
While Home Secretary Suella Braverman described the demonstrations supporting Gaza as 'hate marches,' London's Metropolitan Police said it had no legal grounds to ban the rally.
The London Palestinian solidarity protest scheduled for Saturday, November 11, is set to go ahead after all. After ten days of intense controversy, the Metropolitan Police (Scotland Yard) didn't give in. Chief Constable Mark Rowley, a specialist in counter-terrorism, refused to ban the event despite pressure from the Conservative government, which considered its timing to coincide with Remembrance Sunday, the commemoration of the armistice of the First World War, to be "disrespectful."
This unprecedented tug-of-war between the police and the executive says a lot about the independence of police forces in the UK and their liberal approach to demonstrations, but also about the tendency to use the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a political tool.
It all began with a provocative statement by Suella Braverman, the home secretary, who has become notorious for making inflammatory comments to attract media attention, there being little doubt in Westminster about her ambition to one day replace Rishi Sunak as leader of the Conservative Party. On October 30, this politician, who is married to a British Jew, described the pro-Palestinian demonstrations that have taken place every Saturday in London since the Hamas massacre in Israel on October 7 as "hate marches." On November 8, she doubled down in an opinion column in the Times, accusing the police of being more lenient with left-wing demonstrations than right-wing ones.
Peaceful demonstrations
Bringing together up to 100,000 people on October 21 and tens of thousands on October 28, the London marches resulted in 188 arrests according to the police, but were for the most part peaceful, with demonstrators holding up "Free Palestine" signs or calling for "a ceasefire." Among those arrested on suspicion of inciting racial hatred were two women wearing stickers showing the image of paragliders used by Hamas to infiltrate Israel, and some carrying black flags calling for jihad. The police kept a low profile, deploying mounted officers only where tensions were most likely to emerge, namely near Downing Street.
The protest organizers, including PSC (Palestine Solidarity Campaign), played by the rules, avoiding passing under the windows of the Israeli embassy or pitching a tent opposite the Cenotaph, the monument to the dead of the two world wars on Whitehall, as they had done at the October 14 demonstration.
Braverman nevertheless called for a more heavy-handed approach, arguing that the slogan "From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free" chanted by demonstrators was "a staple of antisemitic discourse" as it was "widely understood as a demand for the destruction of Israel." Ade Adelekan, an assistant to Chief Commissioner Rowley, replied that the slogan has been heard "frequently" at pro-Palestine "demonstrations for many years," and that while "we are well aware of the strength of feeling in relation to it," it would only lead to arrests if uttered in a specific context – namely an incitement of hatred against Israel or support for Hamas.
Police were also criticized for failing to arrest demonstrators shouting "jihad," including those gathered in front of the Egyptian embassy in support of the Islamist party Hizb ut-Tahrir. The police issued a statement saying that "the word 'jihad' has a number of meanings, but we know the public will most commonly associate it with terrorism. We have specialist counter-terrorism officers here (...) [who] have assessed [the] video filmed at the Hizb ut-Tahrir protest in central London (...), and have not identified any offenses arising from the specific clip."
Regaining Britons' trust
In order for the police to be more repressive, the Greater London Police chief commissioner insisted, the law on incitement to racial hatred would have to change. "We can't enforce taste or decency – but we can enforce the law," he argued. Rowley took over as head of Scotland Yard in 2022 to overhaul the UK's foremost police force, which fell under disrepute after the 2021 murder of a young woman, Sarah Everard, by one of its officers. Rowley wants to regain the trust of the British people by persuading them once again that the primary role of the police is to protect them. In the past, the Metropolitan Police has also drawn plenty of scorn from the media when it has been too heavy-handed, for example when it arrested members of the anti-monarchy group Republic before they had even demonstrated, during Charles III's coronation in May. Or in March 2022, with the heavy-handed arrest of women who had gathered to honor the memory of Sarah Everard.
The pressure on Rowley increased further when Sunak and Braverman asked the organizers to abandon the November 11 event, deemed too close to Remembrance Sunday (which falls on November 12 this year). This date is undoubtedly the most important in the national commemorative calendar, with the monarch and the government paying their respects at the Cenotaph, and many Britons showing their respect for the British Army by wearing a poppy in their lapel.
Nevertheless, it is not up to the Home Office but the police to decide whether to ban a demonstration, and such decisions are rare in a country where freedom of _expression_ is celebrated as a core value. On October 7, Rowley explained that he could not legally justify banning the November 11 marches, as the risk to public order was not, as it stood, sufficient. Sunak reluctantly conceded, warning that Rowley would be "held accountable" if anything went wrong.
Braverman, for her part, showed no sign of backing down, stating that the police have double standards: an extremely serious accusation, especially from a sitting home secretary, which left the media actively speculating about her resignation on Thursday. The government "needs to be very careful to make sure they do not look as if they are playing politics (...) I would caution the government to be very cautious about eroding freedoms," blasted former Conservative MP Nicholas Soames, grandson of Winston Churchill, considered a moral compass of the British right.