Chris Nineham discusses how to assess and how to resist the growing attacks on the right to protest  

The Metropolitan police’s recent smash and grab of Youth Demand activists at a London Quaker Meeting House confirms that we are in new territory when it comes to civil liberties. More than twenty uniformed police, some equipped with tasers, forced their way into the Westminster meeting house and arrested six young activists at what was apparently a welcome meeting for the group. 

This was a particularly brutal and public attack, but not unique. The Palestine movement has suffered sustained police intimidation ever since October 2023. The Met has imposed unprecedented restrictions on marches, mobilised absurd numbers of officers, publicly attempted to criminalise the movement and snatched protestors for the wrong placard, t-shirt, slogan or pamphlet, literally assuming the role of thought police. 

Bloggers and journalist like Asa Winstanley, Richard Medhurst and Sarah Wilkinson have had their homes raided, been arrested and harassed. Up and down the country activists, including the Filton 18, have been arrested, charged, absurdly often under terrorism law, and in some cases kept in prison to await trial. 

The authorities moved up a gear on January 18 when they imposed a static demo on the National March organisers, arrested the largest number of protestors yet and targeted some of the movement’s leaders and supporters including two MPs, John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn. A total of thirteen members of the leadership and prominent supporters have now been arrested, charged or called in for police interview. 

The main justification for the attacks on the demos is that pro-Palestine protests are making the streets unsafe for Jewish people and in particular effecting Jewish people’s ability to worship. The government is proposing an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill to further restrict the right to protest to protect places of religious worship. The often-unstated subtext is that the whole movement against genocide is anti-Semitic by nature.  

Managements of companies and institutions across society have reproduced this kind of authoritarianism. Workers in banking have been told not to go on Gaza demonstrations, the Muslim Civil Servants’ Network has been closed down, doctors have been threatened with being struck off by the General Medical Council for posting about Palestine and students and staff have faced disciplinary action over Palestine in at least 28 universities. 

All this has been met with a chilling silence from most of the so-called liberal commentariat. One of the things the whole terrible episode has done is exposed the hollowness of a liberalism deeply embedded in the establishment. Many senior journalists are just too close to centres of power to dissent with key British foreign policy priorities. As former journalist Omar El Akkad has pointed out the result has been ‘a fracture, a breaking away of the notion that the polite, Western liberal ever stood for anything at all’.  

Even the journalists’ collective failure of nerve is however partly a product of coercion. Judging by anonymous letters of protest from BBC journalists and reports of secret meetings of concerned senior figures in the media, journalists’ compliance is being policed by threats to career and reputation.  

The causes of the clampdown 

The Palestine issue itself is a key driver here. The British ruling class has a problem over Palestine. Next to the US, Britain is Israel’s most important Western backer. Support for Israel is non-negotiable across the political spectrum. This is not mainly because of the Israel lobby. The British were in at the start of the Zionist project in the Middle East and have been supporters of Israel ever since because Israel is the most loyal defender of western interests in the oil rich middle East. 

The establishment’s problem is that popular support for the Palestinian cause has been growing in Britain ever since the emergence of mass anti-war sentiment at the start of the century. By 2019, polls suggested more than twice as many people sympathised with the Palestinians than with the Israelis. The majority remained neutral or uncertain, but for a country with (however unreal) great power pretensions, desperate to stay close to Washington, such opposition to a central foreign policy plank is a big worry for our rulers. 

Israel’s current genocidal assault has widened and deepened popular support for the Palestinians. By 2024, three fifths of the population thought Israel had gone too far. Even amongst Tory voters, twice as many disapproved as approved of Israel’s actions.  

Clearly the police and other institutions are under pressure from pro-Israel organisations and leaders, including the Board of Deputies of British Jews. The Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mervis, came out publicly against the Palestine demonstrations last December, just before the tough new police approach kicked in. Sir Mark Rowley meets with the Board of Deputies regularly and told them proudly at a public meeting the day after the 18 January march that he had used police powers ‘more than ever before’ on the demo. Other pro-Israel organisations like the Campaign against Antisemitism and the UK Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists regularly pile pressure on people who have the nerve to speak up against genocide. 

There is, however, no way this level of harassment could take place without government approval. The recent moves against the demonstration organisers and MPs after 18 January march must have been signed off by the Home Secretary. More generally, the pro-Israeli organisations’ bullying and smearing only has authority because it has the backing of the powers-that-be. 

The current Labour leadership has form after all. They cut their teeth attacking Corbyn and the left in the Labour party, largely using spurious claims of anti-Semitism. Both those claims of anti-Semitism and the lobbyists that drive them are useful for the British establishment in creating the ideological weather in which their clampdown on dissent can be justified. 

Despite all this, the attacks on protestors as terrorist supporting hate marchers have had limited success at best. For all the campaigning and demonisation by the police and the media, by mid-2024 more Londoners approved of the demonstrations (46%) than disapproved (36%). What is left is the claim that the movement is a threat to Jewish people’s rights backed up with police threats and, more and more, truncheons.  

If increased authoritarianism is partly a response to worries about opinion over Palestine, there is clearly a broader context. Governments in the UK have been strengthening laws against protest since at least the 1986 Public Order act, a trend that has accelerated over the last decade which has seen new laws toughening police powers almost every year. As well as the Palestine movement, new legislation has enabled vicious attacks on activists from Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil and the Republic movement. Shockingly, there are now at least forty political prisoners in British jails.   

It is true that the authorities are rattled by the amount of support there is for the Palestinians. But they also calculate that false claims of anti-Semitism provide a useful excuse for a clampdown and that Palestine is an issue on which they can isolate activists and the left in general.  

US commentator, Ben Ehrenreich, recently argued in the Nation that repression of the Palestine movement was the portal through which Trump, and – in his view – fascism, is being introduced in the US. The situation is much more advanced in the US, though I would disagree that it can plausibly be described as fascist. The point that repression of the Palestine movement is a threat to everyone who values free speech and freedom of assembly is a crucial one. The conclusion must be that there is no way to head off the new authoritarianism without confronting the issues thrown up by the Palestinians’ struggle. 

The wider authoritarian trend is not surprising. The last forty-five years of free market policies have brought falling living standards, spiralling inequality and the sell off or hollowing out of the democratic and welfare institutions that secure some consent in society. This has been accompanied by open collusion between political leaders and the rich. As a 2020 US security report points out, the result has been a growing loss of trust in key institutions in society and a level of mass protest around the world that is ‘historically unprecedented in frequency, scope, and size.’

The trend has been supercharged by Donald Trump. In the first weeks of his term the new president has made a virtue of ignoring due process and the rule of law and using arbitrary arrest and assault to intimidate protestors and silence dissent. We are not at US levels of harassment or repression here, but given Starmer’s clear attraction to all things Trumpian, and the relative lack of liberal pushback against the attacks on the Palestine movement, there is no room for any complacency. 

Nor however is there anything inevitable about the advance of the authoritarians. As the Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci pointed out, ‘in the now classical terrain of the parliamentary regime’, state coercion is normally carefully balanced with consent. The moment when that balance breaks down is a moment of danger for any regime.   

Responding to repression 

What happens will of course depend on what the left and the movement does. Three things seem particularly important. First, given the centrality of the issue, we must take the arguments used against the Palestine movement head on. The main claim now is that the movement is a threat to the Jewish community. But there are hundreds of Jewish people on all the demonstrations and when asked the police cannot give a single example of any Jewish bystander actually being threatened. 

Instead, they fall back on the argument that feeling threatened is enough to prove intimidation, whether there is any real basis for it or not. In any sensible world there is no way that the law can operate on such a subjective basis. The police’s newfound sensitivity to hurt or offence is of course highly selective. Sir Mark Rowley refuses to meet with leaders of or the Palestine community or the movement and yet he boasts of meeting regularly with the Jewish board of deputies. What’s more while pro-Palestine protests are being banned from anywhere in the vicinity of synagogues, pro-Israel activists are allowed to protest within metres of the marches.  

The emphasis on Jewish people’s right to worship is so strong that the police have been suggesting they might not let the movement march anywhere in London on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath.  

As well as pointing out the problems with these arguments we need to make the case that this approach is a danger to all protestors. The vague and general notion of ‘threat,’ the creeping criminalisation of ‘more than minor disruption’ can and will be wielded against anyone who wants to take to the streets in anger.  

Size matters 

The second thing we need to do is to maximise the turn out for the Palestine movement. The Met and their political masters have almost certainly been calculating that the movement is in decline.  The recent short-lived ceasefire started on 15 January, days before the demonstration that was attacked. In an interesting piece in the Guardian last December, Sir Hugh Orde, a former Met commissioner, claimed that the decision not to ban the protests last year and what he laughingly suggests was the lenient policing of the Palestine demonstrations, was driven by the scale of the marches: 

It was to do with the size of the crowd. If you want to ban and then police a ban on a far-right march, that is quite simple as they are small. The pro-Palestine marches were huge, and you would create a riot by storming in.” 

Whatever we may think of his suggestions of two-tier policing, this is very telling. The article reports that sources close to Sir Mark Rowley agreed that the size of the marches were the main reason they hadn’t been banned up to that point. Early this year the authorities obviously took a gamble on attacking what they predicted would be a movement in decline. 

These calculations have been thrown into doubt by Israel going back on the offensive and escalating from the level of a genocide. The staying power of the movement has been impressive. But we need to prove in practice locally and nationally that people are not intimidated by police threats and that the Met’s calculation that the movement is in decline is wishful thinking. 

Finally, we need to take advantage of the government’s wider problems. These are serious. Starmer has been tanking in the polls for months. By combining attacks on disabled people with increases in the military budget, he and Rachel Reeves have cemented their unpopularity and popularised the slogan ‘welfare not warfare’ in one stroke. It is hard to see them ever recovering from this spring budget blunder.  If we can build a mass movement against austerity and war in parallel with the Palestine protests, it may well be the government’s ability to govern, not our right to protest, that will be in question.