PEACE campaigners vowed to “break the climate of fear” fed by intensified police repression in a weekend rally to defend protest rights.

Hundreds gathered in Bethnal Green’s Atrium to discuss the Metropolitan Police’s mass detentions of marchers, including the violent arrest of chief steward Chris Nineham, at a Palestine solidarity demonstration on January 18, and the subsequent decision to charge Mr Nineham, Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) director Ben Jamal and others with public order offences.

Mr Jamal said the policing that day was “an escalation of repression by the state against our movement.

“Very clearly in my view, the police sought to provoke scenes of disorder on the streets. They began arresting people very early for the crime of standing in the wrong bit of Whitehall at the wrong moment. They brought empty coaches to transport to police stations those they intended to arrest… despite the fact that every single one of our protests has been peaceful and has had a low rate of arrest.”

The PSC leader said police intended to create “a scene of chaos and disorder that would create the political climate to enable [Home Secretary] Yvette Cooper to go into Parliament and announce she was banning all future marches.

“They did not succeed… [because] this is a peaceful and disciplined movement.”

The Metropolitan Police deny having tried to provoke disorder and referred the Morning Star to a previous statement accusing marchers of “a deliberate effort, involving organisers of the demonstration,” to breach the conditions they had imposed on the march, which included blocking a protest outside the BBC.

Stop the War Coalition national officer Mr Nineham said police would not succeed in demobilising the “most sustained protest movement in British history.

“In their Alice in Wonderland world those protesting against the mass killing of children, the flattening of hospitals, the burning of refugee camps are denounced as hate marchers by people who actually support the genocide” in Gaza, he charged.

The political elite was seeking to create “a new McCarthyism. But we are here to say, ‘We are going to break that climate of fear’.”

Law lecturer Dr Daniella Lock of King’s College, London, detailed the way protest rights have been eroded by recent laws, including the Police, Crime, Sentencing & Courts Act 2022 and Public Order Act 2023, which she said were incompatible with the right to peaceful protest recognised in the Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights.

The point was reinforced by former Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament general secretary Kate Hudson, who pointed to the hefty jail sentences being handed out to climate protesters for peaceful direct action. 

Referencing the way Labour MPs were whipped last week to sink a Bill seeking to make emissions reduction targets legally binding, she declared: “It’s not the Climate and Nature Bill that needs to be sunk, it’s the Public Order Act. That Act has ushered in a dark new era for protest rights in the UK. The police have been given a licence to close down any protest they wish.”

Police justified their decision to block the proposed protest route on January 18 on the grounds it might disturb worship at a synagogue half a mile away, though they were unable to cite any examples of previous marches doing so.

Eighty-seven-year-old Holocaust survivor Stephen Kapos, who was among those prevented by police from laying flowers in memory of Gaza’s dead children, said together with a small group of Holocaust survivors and descendants he had stood with each national demonstration.

“We want to prove by our presence that it is not true these demonstrations are unsafe places for Jews,” he said.

Public and Commercial Services union general secretary Fran Heathcote said the police decision to interview two sitting MPs — John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn — about the protest was ominous.

She called for unity in the struggle for peace, warning within her own union factional opponents had tried to censure her for signing a Stop the War Coalition statement calling for a ceasefire in Ukraine.

Speakers, who ranged from Ilford North’s almost-MP Leanne Mohamed through former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to journalist Owen Jones and representatives of Muslim organisations, drew attention to Israel’s multiple breaches of the Gaza ceasefire, as well as the increased violence it is meting out in the occupied West Bank, vowing to keep marching until Palestine is free.

Organisers called for a huge turnout at next Saturday’s counter-demonstration against the far right, and for protests outside Westminster Magistrates’ Court at 12.30pm on Thursday February 13 when Mr Nineham faces his first hearing.