SATURDAY must have been a good day to be a criminal on the streets of London.

Because a very sizeable chunk of the police was focused on their main mission — upholding the social order, in this case by criminalising protest against a British-supported genocide.

Supported by the British state that is, not by the people. Telling that truth outside the headquarters of the state broadcaster is now a truth that can’t be handled.

It was ironic that Sadiq Khan chose that day to warn of the threats to democracy, which he located several thousand miles away in Washington DC, rather than nearer to home and from a police force under his nominal supervision.

Of course, it is childish to pretend we are on the threshold of dictatorship. If you want to see the full-fat open terrorist rule of the bourgeoisie, occupied Palestine would be a place to start.

Still, better to sound the alarm before the fire has taken hold. And the attempted suppression of the Palestinian demonstration, including the violent arrest of chief steward Chris Nineham and subsequent charging of both him and Palestine Solidarity Campaign director Ben Jamal, as well as police interviews with Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell constitute a burning ember at least.

Sometimes life’s lessons come at you hard and fast. Here are three arising from these events: support for imperialism and its wars leads ineluctably to support for authoritarianism “at home;” legalism is a tactic for socialists, not an unvarying principle; and social democracy is not our friend.

Israel’s most aggressive supporters in this country have championed the clamping down on solidarity protests from the start of the Gaza conflict.

They have done so because of the sustained scale and anger of the demonstrations, and because they know they have lost public opinion on this issue by an overwhelming margin.

A cast of unsavoury characters have tried to put the cork in the bottle — Suella Braverman, Lord Walney, Gideon Falter and more.

On this occasion, the drive to stop a protest forming up outside the BBC headquarters, where they could protest over the broadcaster’s continual distortions of the news in Israel’s favour — as attested to by many BBC journalists — was led by the official bourgeois leadership of the Jewish community in Britain.

We are discussing the Board of Deputies, Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis and the Community Security Trust (CST).

Their last major intrusion into political life was working to stop Corbyn from becoming prime minister, although the CST as a registered charity had to tread carefully. Mirvis, for one, did not.

They are expert in mobilising real concerns about anti-semitism in support of Israel’s interests. The understandable anxieties of Jewish people regarding racism are twisted to defend Israel’s depredations or, in this case, curb the activities of Israel’s critics.

A number of arguments have been tried and failed to stop the demonstrations. This time it was the proximity of a synagogue to the assembly point — not on the route of the march, however. Let us consider the arguments.

The first is that the presence of a large number of critics of Israel nearby would prevent the synagogue from functioning normally, and might even constitute a threat to worshippers.

This is entirely bogus. In 15 months of pro-Palestinian national protests, there have been precisely zero attacks on synagogues, or harassment of worshippers going to or from their services. Yes, there has been an awful increase in anti-semitic incidents since October 2023, but no violence or threats of it have been associated with the marches for Palestine, which have included inter alia thousands of Jewish citizens.

Most of the people on the Palestine solidarity marches would, I believe, if necessary stand between a synagogue and anyone attempting to attack it.

Maybe so, the zionists reply, but the frequency of the demonstrations has a cumulative effect. So let’s allow here that having a very large demonstration form up in your area every single week could have an enervating impact.

Yet, in fact, over those 15 months, the national demonstrations have gathered outside the BBC just twice. So on two Sabbaths out of around 65 over this period those attending Central Synagogue might have heard in the distance, or perhaps seen on their way in or out, the expression of views they disagree with, perhaps passionately so.

This is where the “no right not to be offended” brigade is struck dumb. There are around 450 synagogues across Britain. Is it to be the case that all protests about anything are to be banned on Saturdays in their vicinity?

This would not only protect the BBC from popular recrimination for ever more. It would stymie democratic activity across the country.

Of course, the preposterous official leadership of the Jewish community are not that preposterous. They only want to ban marches which are critical of Israel.

Leading the charge was the rabbi of Central Synagogue Barry Lerer — “compassionate, non-judgmental, innovative, and welcoming” according to his own website. Lerer is a militant supporter of Israel and an opponent of the solidarity marches, so other adjectives are available.

Lerer apparently went so far as to quote, in a sermon recently removed from that website after an inquiry from Novara Media, Golda Meir’s racist trope about Palestinians hating Israelis more than they love their own children.

That a purported man of God could regurgitate this poisonous rhetoric after seeing footage of hundreds and thousands of Palestinian parents mourning their slaughtered children speaks to the corrosive ethical effect Israeli terror has on its supporters — a pit of moral bankruptcy into which Lerer is far from the first to plunge.

He will land atop Chief Rabbi Mirvis who set the tone last year, saying of the Gaza war: “Israel is doing is the most outstanding possible thing that a decent, responsible country can do.”

It must be stated at this point that there are of course many other, and better, rabbis; and moreover that Judaism is not the only religion which has adherents perverting its principles in the interests of ethno-nationalist chauvinism, as a glance at the world from Poland to Burma to India and the US might indicate.

Indeed, if you wanted to rank religions in their connections to war over history, Judaism would not be placed for a medal. But here we are.

More than ever it seems vital to support those brave Jewish men and women who have protested against the undemocratic abuse of their ethnic and religious identity to attack the rights of all. Hopefully, those who have signed the public letter of protest can go on to form some sort of an organisation able to challenge the reactionary leadership of the Board of Deputies.

Anyway, the existing Jewish communal leadership carried the day with the police — it seems with a helping hand from the government. Justice Minister Sarah Sackman intervened with the Met encouraging the blocking of the march, and that is only what we know about.

Still, even an organisation as lacking in self-awareness as the Met might care to consider the optics of negotiating the route of a pro-Palestinian march with anti-Palestinian organisations and then having Commissioner Mark Rowley publicly reporting back to the Board of Deputies the day after the denouement.

That the movement against Israel’s genocide should require a licence from the board to proceed is pushing irony, and legality, to its limits.

Those limits were dramatised when I stood a few feet from half a dozen pumped-up cops seizing and grappling Nineham to the ground as he tried to negotiate the concluding phase of the day’s events — a small delegation walking to the BBC.

Nineham — comrade and friend for many years — has acted as chief steward and main police liaison with the Met since 2003 at the largest demonstrations this country has ever seen against the Iraq aggression, and at all the 24 national protests for Palestine these last 15 months.

He has organised them peacefully and effectively because that is what the millions who have attended such marches want.

A Met with as many brains as boots would prize that relationship. The decision to arrest Nineham and menace Corbyn and McDonnell is likely to betoken a clampdown which could only have been ordered higher up the food chain than the plods doing the manhandling.

It is good to recognise the new normal before it becomes … normalised. Thus we can avoid the fate of the biblical foolish virgins or the German social democrats who passively accepted the dissolution of their Prussian government in 1932 in the interests of legality. Choose your own analogy, but they all end in darkness.

Obey the law or not when it restricts basic rights peacefully exercised? The answer must be somewhat contingent. The matter is in the end decided by the numbers that can be mobilised and the energy of public opinion.

A police source recently told the Guardian: “If you want to ban a far-right march, that’s quite simple as they are small. The pro-Palestinian marches were huge, and you would create a riot by storming in.” The lesson is obvious.

Concern about escalating authoritarianism has focused on the menace from Reform UK and hard-right Tories rather than Labour. That is perhaps a mistake — this drama has occurred on Starmer’s watch.

No surprise. First, as he has proved ad nauseam, Keir Starmer is a man of the state, not so much First Lord of the Treasury, as it says on his Downing Street door, but First Cop whose instinctive reflex in dealing with social problems is coercive. In any case, if the bond market says “no carrots” the stick is all he has.

Second, it is Labour’s “actually existing” electoral base that is threatened by the mass movement for Palestine, as the last general election established fairly clearly. Push it off the streets and any number of threatened Labour MPs — step forward Wes Streeting — will breathe a sigh of relief.

Third, Starmer is under some pressure from the fascist-saluting Elon Musk, whose menace derives less from his extreme wealth, and still less from his political intelligence, than his intimacy, however fleeting, with President Trump.

Musk’s tirades against Starmer kicked off when fascist hooligans started getting banged up after last summer’s racist riots. What better way to balance accounts and get X off your back than to clamp down, visibly and hard, on Corbyn(ism)? “Two-tier Keir” no more.

Fourth, the discrepancy in Starmer’s rhetoric when he speaks of Israeli hostages and of massacred Palestinians — the difference between reading a poem to a lover and ordering a cup of coffee — suggests that he is not as far away from the racists as he would pretend.

The Prime Minister and Farage are both grappling with a world order that is disintegrating and a socioeconomic model that is creaking under the strains of its own failure.

So worse things lie ahead than occurred on Saturday before we get through, for sure. But if the days when you could be sure of getting home for tea after a demo are drawing to an end, we still ask less of ourselves in the global struggle against imperialism than is supplied day in, day out by the glorious Palestinian people, proud and undefeated.