Corbyn is being smeared again – this time to stop protests against genocide

I was an eyewitness to events on Saturday. The Metropolitan police are lying when they claim the ex-Labour leader and MP John McDonnell forced their way through a police cordon

The Metropolitan police, with the assistance of obedient media like the Guardian and BBC, are trying to frame as lawbreakers the organisers of the latest London rally, held this Saturday, against Israel’s genocide in Gaza and Britain’s complicity in it.

Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell – both leftwing MPs who have found themselves politically homeless since Labour came under the authoritarian leadership of Keir Starmer – were issued cautions by the Met and interviewed on Sunday. Dozens of protesters have been arrested.

The Met has suggested that Corbyn, McDonnell and others broke through a police cordon to make their way from Whitehall into Trafalgar Square, supposedly breaching arbitrary conditions placed on the rally at short notice.

According to Adam Slonecki, who led the policing operation: “This was a serious escalation in criminality and one which we are taking incredibly seriously.”

The original aim of the protest was not to rally in Whitehall, but to mass outside the BBC’s offices, some distance away, to protest its consistently biased coverage favouring Israel, its downplaying of the slaughter of innocents in Gaza and its obscuring of the British government’s complicity in what the International Court of Justice ruled a year ago was a “plausible” genocide there.

After negotiations with the organisers, the police agreed months ago to the timing and route of Saturday’s march.

But the Met reneged on that agreement at the last moment, declaring a no-go zone around the BBC, which is funded by British taxpayers through a compulsory licence fee.

The specific purpose of Saturday’s peaceful protest – to highlight the institutional failings of the BBC in its reporting on Israel’s genocide – and the more general aim of opposing the British government’s collusion in the genocide have now been completely overshadowed by the police’s confected furore about the rally.

That will be a major relief to both the government and the BBC. Starmer would doubtless love to see the back of these regular protests, which have attracted hundreds of thousands of demonstrators and kept the spotlight on his government’s complicity, chiefly though arms sales and by providing Israel with intelligence and diplomatic cover.

What is clear is that the police account of Saturday’s events is a lie. I know that firsthand because I was there – and saw exactly what happened from up close.

Fortunately for us, and unfortunately for the police, the video evidence confirms that the Met is lying. The videos show that, far from breaking through police lines, the police voluntarily opened the cordon at the top of Whitehall to let protesters into the square.

The question is why are the police smearing Corbyn and McDonnell, and why are they seeking to imply that the peaceful protesters were disorderly, violent lawbreakers.

There is an unmistakable pattern to the police’s recent behaviour.

Throughout this affair, the Met has consistently acted in bad faith. One of the march organisers, Ben Jamal, of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, sets out the games the police have been playing over this Saturday’s march in detail here:

It is worth noting, as Jamal explains, that the objections to the march raised by the police, citing the concerns of the rabbi of a synagogue hundreds of metres from the BBC, are entirely bogus.

The original route of the march – the one the police belatedly banned – did not pass near the synagogue. There is also zero evidence that Jews have faced any form of intimidation from the demonstrations. That should hardly be surprising, given that there is a large and very visible Jewish contingent at every single march. One of the main speakers on Saturday was Stephen Kapos, an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor. Notably, he received the biggest cheer of the day from the tens of thousands of demonstrators in Whitehall.

Let us note too that the rabbi’s concerns about the march are not rooted in any realistic risk to himself or his congregants. His public utterances make clear that he holds deeply racist views about the Palestinian people, whom he does not see as properly human. He wanted the march banned, it seems, because he approves of Israel’s genocidal actions. The marchers’ opposition to the genocide offends his twisted political worldview.

After the police revoked permission for the Saturday march at the last minute, the organisers bent over backwards to accommodate the police and the rabbi’s professed concerns. They reversed the order of the march so it would end at the BBC late in the day, and long after the synagogue’s Sabbath service had ended.

Still, the police refused to allow a march that went anywhere near the BBC.

After Saturday’s events, it is clear that the police’s aim all along was to frustrate the march. The plan was to constantly impose new, unreasonable “conditions” – restrictions intended to underscore to the demonstrators that the right to protest is no longer a foundational democratic right in Britain.

It has been turned into a privilege the police may nor may not concede, with the state able to nullify that right not on genuine public order grounds but for self-serving political reasons. That signifies we are already some way down the slippery slope towards a police state.

Further, the Met has been making it ever clearer that the route and the timing of the protests are no longer a negotiation between the march organisers and the police to ensure the safety of everyone involved. The Met now issues diktats, and ones that visibly serve the interests of Britain’s genocide-colluding government, its complicit national institutions like the BBC, and the Israel lobby, whose very purpose is to act as apologists for the Gaza genocide.

The Met’s statement on the march is revealing: “Conditions were put in place after taking into account the cumulative impact of the prolonged period of protest on Jewish Londoners, particularly when protests are in the vicinity of synagogues often on Saturdays, the Jewish holy day.”

The Met’s deeply racist statement assumes all “Jewish Londoners” are in favour of Israel’s genocide and that all of them find protests against it offensive. In doing so, the police choose to ignore the many thousands of Jews who regularly turn out at the protests to say Israel’s genocide is not being conducted in their name.

The Met’s message to those Jews is this: “No, the slaughter is in your name, whether you like it or not, because we and Israel say it is.”

The police also ignore, of course, the cumulative impact on British Palestinians of having to watch the slaughter of their families for 15 months, and on all people of good conscience in the UK whose mental and spiritual health has been damaged by the parade of crushed children’s bodies on our screens week after week, month after month.

The statement indicates something else too. That the negotiations over the right to demonstrate against Israel’s genocide now occur out of view, between the police and the Israel lobby, and over the heads of the protest organisers.

It is the same decades-old, western colonial script that has always treated the Palestinians as invisible in their own story. It echoes the way Washington and Israel negotiate between themselves on the fate of the Palestinians in their own homeland.

Now the British police and Israel lobby are doing the same: negotiating over the heads of the protesters on whether an anti-genocide rally will or will not be allowed to take place, and, if it will, where it can be held.

Freedom of assembly, and the right to demonstrate, are being shredded before our eyes. To insist on these foundational rights being upheld, as Corbyn and McDonnell have now discovered, is to have oneself turned into a pariah, into a “lawbreaker”.

The police have a clear game plan. Letting those who support a genocide decide whether those who oppose it are allowed to express their opposition is a surefire recipe for stirring up tensions, frustrations and anger.

The goal is both to overturn long-cherished rights fundamental to the idea of British democracy and to pitch the protesters into a direct confrontation with the police, and thereby craft a bogus narrative that the demonstrations are violent and criminal, as well as “antisemitic”.

We will see the clamour for banning the marches grow volubly. And no one will be more delighted than Starmer. The last thing he needs is for these protests to be highlighting his utter complicity in the slaughter of children in Gaza.

There is an issue here bigger even than the Gaza genocide. Are we going to resign ourselves to living in an authoritarian state, one where the police serve their political masters in deciding which rights we are permitted, and whether we are allowed to engage in any kind of meaningful protest against our government?

Corbyn, McDonnell and the march organisers had told the police precisely what they intended to do. They would march as far as the police allowed towards the BBC, and then, when the police blocked their way, they would lay down flowers, in memory of the slaughtered children in Gaza and in protest at the silencing of the demonstration. Then they would disperse. That is precisely what they did.

Now they are being portrayed by the police and by the establishment media as criminals. Meanwhile, the real villains – British leaders who have actively conspired in Israel’s genocide, and a media that has shielded those leaders from accountability – have licence to carry on with their crimes.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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