Nothing the Met says about the Palestine Action demo should be trusted

Why's the Met blaming protesters for 'wasting' its resources on arresting 'terrorist' pensioners? There’s a proper address for its grievances: Starmer's authoritarian, genocide-complicit government

There are several points that urgently need making about yesterday’s Palestine Action protest, which led to some 890 demonstrators being arrested – most of them on terrorism charges for silently holding a sign saying: “I support Palestine Action.”

Police disinformation

1. The Metropolitan Police hope to trade on misguided trust from the British public when claiming they were forced to make 17 arrests – possibly with more to come – after officers were allegedly “subjected to an exceptional level of abuse including punches, kicks, spitting and objects being thrown, in addition to verbal abuse”.

https://x.com/metpoliceuk/status/1964369692379742519

I was at the protest from its start till 5.20pm, about the time this claim was issued by the police. For much of that period, I should have been in a position to see examples of such violence because the police had made remarkably few arrests by then. Most came later.

If this claim from the police is true, they need to produce the evidence from the body cams all the officers there were wearing. Punches thrown at the ranks of police would be clear in such footage.

What I saw was a great deal of what the police are terming “verbal abuse”: that is, every time a group of 10 or so officers were dispatched to arrest one of the silent protesters sitting on the green in Parliament Square, many of them elderly or infirm, other protesters who were observing the proceedings would gather around the arresting officers and try to shame them.

Chants of “Shame on you!”, “You’re on the wrong side of history!” and “What will you tell your grandchildren?” were intended to make the task of carrying out the arrests as difficult as possible for the officers involved.

It was clear that many of those officers were struggling emotionally with the task of arresting peaceful pensioners. Most looked down at the ground or at the chests of the chanting protesters, but refused to meet our gaze.

A few looked like they were cracking under the pressure. I noticed one male officer who was pale, sweating profusely and his eyes darting around erratically. Shortly afterwards he started lashing out, trying to push the chanting protesters over.

From what I could see, most of the “scuffles” in video footage are examples of something similar: incidents in which one or more police officers “explode”, releasing pent-up frustrations at the protesters for reminding them of how illegitimate and demeaning the job of arresting silent pensioners trying to stop a genocide was.

No sympathy

2. Doubtless some people watching these confrontations will feel this was unfair on the police, who were “just trying to do their best in a difficult situation”.

Let us remember something important: The task assigned to the police is to enforce a political policy that lets the UK government carry on being complicit in genocide. It lets the government tear up a system of international law that was specifically established to prevent future Holocausts. And it lets the government further erode fundamental civic and legal rights that our ancestors won over many generations.

If we are going to reclaim our rights to protest and to struggle to halt our government aiding a genocide, and to reclaim our streets from a police force working for a government that seeks to vilify and silence its critics as “terrorists”, the first line of confrontation will inevitably be with the police.

Whether that’s “fair” or not, it is the British government that crafted this reality for us. They set the terms of the confrontation.

If the police are not happy about being made to enforce Palestine Action’s proscription because so many people reject it as an abuse of state power, then they can make their feelings known – very strongly, if they wish – to the government. They have many private and public channels to communicate their view that are not available to us.

But that is precisely the opposite of what the police command is doing at the moment.

The Met’s jackboot, back-to-front logic was fully on display in another weaselly statement they issued to the media.

The force accused the demonstrators of using tactics to “overwhelm the justice system” and added that the protest “required significant resource which took officers out of neighbourhoods to the detriment of the Londoners who rely on them”.

The Met leadership are playing an openly politicised game of blame-shifting – on behalf of the government and the billionaire-owned media, both of which are delighted to strip the British people of the right to protest and the right to challenge the profits that accrue to a tiny wealth elite from the war machine currently exterminating the Palestinian people.

If the police are worried that precious human and financial resources are being wasted on arresting and prosecuting pensioners on terrorism charges, they know the address for their grievance: the authoritarian, genocide-complicit government of Sir Keir Starmer.

A call to courage

3. A final point. It is the government that has changed the rules of the democratic game to make it a terrorist offence for the first time in this country’s history to support – as more than 1,500 people did at the weekend – a direct-action group.

Everyone involved in these protests wants to break a proscription system that has made it a terrorist offence to say anything positive about Palestine Action – and for at least one of the two following reasons:

Either because they believe Palestine Action’s proscription is designed to silence what was the most tangible way of halting the British government’s complicity in the Gaza genocide – by focusing attention on British arms sales to Israel and spy flights from RAF base Akrotiri on Israel’s behalf. The government’s collusion in the genocide explicitly violates international law and rulings from the International Court of Justice.

Or because they see that Starmer’s government is engaged in massive constitutional over-reach, crushing the most fundamental of our hard-won civic rights of free speech and free assembly. For the first time in this country’s history, the government has expanded already-draconian terror legislation, empowering it not just to jail members of a direct-action group but to jail anyone who wishes to have the right to discuss the potential merits of what Palestine Action was doing.

In short, you don’t even need to support the methods of Palestine Action to be incensed at the government’s grossly anti-democratic measures. Some 120 years ago it was not necessary to support the criminal actions the Suffragette movement engaged in to still believe that the public should be free to express an opinion on what the suffragettes were trying to achieve: the vote for women.

But what the British government has done is make the equivalent conversation today about Palestine Action impossible – if you don’t want to be convicted of terrorism and spend up to 14 years in jail.

That ought to outrage anyone who believes in the importance of British democracy – whatever political party they support, or however they feel about the slaughter and maiming of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza.

Notably, the Met had carefully barricaded off a part of Parliament Square where there is a statue to Millicent Garrett Fawcett, a feminist writer who led the Votes for Women movement in the early years of the 20th century. She is shown carrying a banner bearing her famous slogan: “Courage calls to courage everywhere.”

Despite the best efforts of the British police, the call of the 1,500 silent, courageous protesters on the green could be heard echoing through Parliament Square and far beyond.

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

---

All my posts are freely accessible, but my journalism is possible only because of the support of readers. If you liked this article or any of the others, please consider sharing it with friends and making a donation to support my work. You can do so by becoming a paid Substack subscriber, or donate via Paypal or my bank account, or alternatively set up a monthly direct debit mandate with GoCardless. A complete archive of my writings is available on my website. I’m on Twitter and Facebook.