MORE police power to block demonstrations and jail organisers have nothing to do with protecting worshippers and everything to do with suppressing protest rights.
Government amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill will see individuals who breach police conditions imposed on protests fined up to £2,500 and demo organisers facing jail sentences.
This shores up repressive measures already deployed by the police to shut down Britain’s huge Palestine solidarity movement. The Met cited the existence of synagogues “near” planned protest routes to deny them permission on January 18, and again on March 15.
In neither case were the synagogues on the route. In the latter the two cited were over 10 minutes’ walk away. In the centre of London or other cities, such sweeping effective exclusion zones could be used to ban almost any proposed route.
Not one of the protests for Palestine since October 2023 has disrupted worship at a synagogue. The Met acknowledges that there has not been a single reported threat to any place of worship connected to the demonstrations.
This is rather a political move intended to shield Israel and its ally, the British state, from criticism over occupation, war crimes and ethnic cleansing in Palestine. It is cheered on by highly partisan bodies such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which claims the protests cause “serious and unacceptable disruption to our communal life,” without specifying how.
The fact that marches may upset people who support or identify with the state of Israel is not intimidation. It is a disgraceful sleight of hand, and a serious threat to the right to free speech and assembly, to pretend it is.
The Starmer government decided in January to crush the mass protest movement where the Tories had tried and failed.
Hence the ban on marchers laying flowers in memory of Gaza’s murdered children at the BBC headquarters on January 18, and the entrapment of march leaders by police parting to allow them through their lines, followed by the violent arrest of chief steward Chris Nineham and over 70 others.
Nineham and Palestine Solidarity Campaign director Ben Jamal were charged with public order offences; over six weeks later, police “invited” a range of other leading peace campaigners, from Stop the War Coalition convener Lindsey German to Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament general secretary Sophie Bolt and the Morning Star’s own political reporter Andrew Murray, for interview. This is a bid to decapitate the movement and frighten protesters off the streets; the new amendments will give the state greater powers to punish those who remain defiant.
Nobody should be fooled by government references to the race riots of last August, and attacks on mosques, as part of its rationale. Those attacks were illegal under existing laws, the perpetrators liable for serious punishment already. Ministers are trying to distract us from their real motive, which is directed squarely at smashing the peace movement.
The Crime and Policing Bill itself follows a raft of repressive legislation giving ever greater power to the state to ban or shut down protest, including the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, the National Security Act and the Public Order Act.
Just as Rachel Reeves this week confirmed Labour is retaining and deepening Conservative austerity, Yvette Cooper shows it keeps to the same trajectory as the ousted Tory government in dismantling civil liberties.
It does so because the government serves the same ruling class, which faces the same crisis of legitimacy given falling living standards and growing opposition to war.
Unions and many MPs have begun to revolt at the government’s anti-working-class economic agenda. That needs to be extended to its assault on democratic rights.
As for the Palestine marches: Israel’s renewed war on Gaza makes them as important as ever, and it is their size which has so far prevented their suppression. We stay on the streets.
