The following article is a comment piece from the Palestine Coalition
The Labour Party government has indicated its intention to introduce an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill to further restrict the right to protest. Numerous reports suggest that the national demonstrations for Palestine are the principal target of these proposals.
Labour: regressing the right to protest
Given the repressive manner in which existing police powers have already been used to curtail these marches in recent months, this should concern all those who believe in our fundamental rights to freedom of expression and freedom of assembly.
According to reports published by the BBC, the Guardian, and elsewhere, home secretary Yvette Cooper has announced plans to make it easier for police to impose conditions on protests on the grounds that they might disrupt worshippers attending religious sites.
Several of these reports have referred to our marches and the claim that they have impacted on nearby synagogues, alongside references to the deliberate targeting of mosques during the racist mobilisations and disorder last summer.
It is utterly perverse to conflate far-right violence directed against a place of worship – which during the summer riots included setting fire to a mosque – with the large, peaceful, and diverse demonstrations, involving many Jewish people along with others, that we have organised to call for a ceasefire and an end to Britain’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Crackdowns on protest already happening
Not one of the 24 national marches that we have organised since 2023 has directly passed a synagogue along its route and there has never been a single reported incident of any threat towards a place of worship linked to any of our protests, as the Metropolitan Police themselves have acknowledged.
Instead, we have witnessed the unprecedented use of repressive police powers to restrict our demonstrations. This includes banning us from assembling at the BBC headquarters at Portland Place on 18 January on the pretext of a synagogue located at several streets distance, and preventing us from assembling at Park Lane on 15 March due to two synagogues situated approximately twelve minutes’ walk away.
On both occasions our intention was to march away from the synagogues in question. For context, the legal restriction on protests outside abortion clinics – the purpose of which is to directly harass those using the facility – extends to 150 metres, which is approximately a two-minute walk.
Context
Members of religious congregations have the right to freely worship. All citizens should have the right to protest. Both rights should be protected. This cannot mean handing any one group a political veto over whether others can effectively exercise their rights.
Given the already extraordinary use of draconian police powers to circumscribe the right to protest with no democratic scrutiny, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the government’s real aim is to suppress the movement in solidarity with Palestine.
As Israel resumes its full-scale genocidal onslaught against the Palestinian people, the British government is seeking to silence those standing up for international law, rather than ending its complicity in Israel’s war crimes. We will not be silenced. We will continue to campaign and continue to march until a permanent ceasefire is secured, until Israeli apartheid is dismantled, and until Palestine is free.
Incompatible with the right to protest
Ben Jamal, director of Palestine Solidarity Campaign, says:
Members of religious congregations have the right to freely worship. All citizens should have the right to protest. Both rights should be protected. This cannot mean handing any one group a political veto over whether others can effectively exercise their rights.
It is incompatible with the right to protest to permit anti-abortion members of a Church to prevent a pro-choice march from taking place on a Sunday or allow conservative evangelicals to block a Pride parade.
Similarly, pro-Israel synagogue leaders should not be empowered to exclude demonstrations in support of Palestinian rights, to which they are politically opposed, from large swathes of a city on a Saturday.
Featured image via the Canary
