The Metropolitan Police is more frightened of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign than the Palestine Solidarity Campaign is of the Metropolitan Police. This is the central fact of life in the public order debate today – and does much to explain the context of Sir Lindsay Hoyle’s decision to break with long established Parliamentary convention in order to avert large scale threats to MPs.
The Speaker’s reasoning should puncture the Panglossian narrative of the Met and of other forces that the Palestine protests are largely peaceful. The truth is that these outwardly orderly marches are based on a discourse of threat – to which the Met responds by effectively ‘taking the knee’.
No British institution is sacred to the protestors
Senior officers fear that if they do not allow these protests to go ahead, with relatively minor qualifications, there will be chaos – and even radicalisation. They remember, for example, Salman Abedi, the Manchester Arena bomber of 2017, was first spotted at a pro-Palestinian demonstration outside No. 10 back in 2015.
The effect of these Palestine protests has been to expose the Parliamentary process to a level of collective intimidation rarely seen since the first half of the nineteenth century. Even during the Northern Ireland Troubles, despite the targeting of individual MPs, the business of Parliament itself continued unimpeded.
This is one of the consequences of the bargain forged by the Met and other forces with the march organisers: you deliver mostly orderly marches, and in return you will enjoy hegemony on the streets. The terms of this accommodation thus trumps the rights of ordinary Londoners to go about their business, the retail sector and tourists – not to mention the disabled, who too often find themselves unable to move around in the vicinity of the protests. As was shown in Policy Exchange’s paper ‘Tarnished Jewel: The decline of the streets around Parliament’, much of this has been going on since well before the events of 7 October: but it has spiked dramatically since then.
No British institution is sacred to the protestors. This was exemplified by the projection of the slogan ‘from the river to the sea’ onto the Elizabeth Tower perhaps the most high-profile act of ‘cultural appropriation’ in these times – with Met officers standing by. Recall also the Palestine demonstrations of last November, which overshadowed the run up to Remembrance Sunday.
The Met thinks that it has done rather well in all this. With much self-satisfaction , it proclaimed last week that, ‘The protests we have seen since October have thankfully been largely peaceful and we must take this into account in our policing approach’. If the protests are so peaceful, why are Parliamentarians again being advised by the authorities to hide their lanyards? If the marchers are so peaceful, why have other counter protesters – such as groups displaying posters of the hostages or bearing signs that Hamas is a terrorist group – been instructed to leave by the Met ‘for their own safety’? The Met’s bureaucratic self interest in avoiding the risk of clashes between police and protesters, means that it frequently shuts down alternative and entirely lawful activities.
Certainly, as far as Westminster is concerned, ample laws already exist to tackle problematic protests: they are simply not being enforced. Section 143 of the Police Reform & Social Responsibility Act 2011 states that it is prohibited to ‘obstruct, by the use of any item or otherwise, the passage of a vehicle of any description into or out of an entrance into or exit from the Parliamentary Estate, where that entrance or exit is within, or adjoins, the Palace of Westminster controlled area.’ Some of the roads adjacent to the Palace of Westminster are protected as part of the ‘key national infrastructure’ under section 7 of the Public Order Act 2023 – and it is a criminal offence to do an act which interferes with their use. More broadly, section 14 of the Public Order Act 1986 enables the police to apply conditions to a ‘public assembly’ if the people organising the protest had a purpose to ‘intimidate others with a view to compelling them not to do an act they have a right to do’.
The Met’s performance badly needs some real scrutiny now. The Police and Crime Committee of the London Assembly enjoys the power to investigate any matters of importance to policing in the Metropolitan Police District, including holding the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime and the Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime to account.
However, the buck stops with the Home Secretary. Senior Met commanders have been feeling cocksure ever since they saw off Suella Braverman. They feel they have successfully reasserted their own expansive interpretation of ‘operational independence’. They believe they now have a Home Secretary who can be ‘managed’.
James Cleverly must prove them wrong. He should direct His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary to conduct an inspection under Section 54 (2B) Police Act 1996 into the activities of the Metropolitan Police regarding how they have managed protest.
As the Prime Minister’s Adviser on Political Violence Lord Walney has recommended, protest exclusion zones around the Houses of Parliament, MP’s homes and their constituency offices need to be established. Indeed, Parliamentary authorities are well aware of a helpful Irish precedent under Sections 7 and 28 of the (Irish) Offences Against the State Act 1939 – which prevents public meetings and processions within half a mile of the Oireachtas, or Parliament, in Dublin.
Parliament itself also needs to reassert its authority by demanding that the Met do better. The projection of images onto parliamentary buildings – such as those slogans displayed on the Elizabeth Tower – has been flagged as a breach of planning laws since at least 2016.
As Lord Carlile of Berriew KC, a former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, points out to The Spectator, both Parliament and Westminster City Council could have applied to a judge within minutes for an emergency injunction against the protestors – and obtained a court order.
The Met thinks that it has done rather well in all this
He raises the concept of contempt of Parliament – normally used for an MP or Peer who violates their Parliamentary role. There are few if any precedents for addressing the issue of projections. But we are in novel terrain here, where the purpose of projecting images is to intimidate Parliamentarians, by demonstrating to them that outsiders can take over Parliamentary buildings. Carlile concludes that a finding of contempt of Parliament would have to be made via a resolution in one or both Houses.
The greatest of British trade unionists, Ernest Bevin, used to lament that the problem with the British working classes was their ‘poverty of aspiration’. Much the same could be said of the Met nowadays – and, also, of the political classes. The consequence has been a coarsening of British political life: we are probably a way off from becoming the Weimar Republic, but the paranoid, conspiracy theory believing crowds surging outside the Palace of Westminster this week made more than one Parliamentarian think back fearfully to the events of 6 January 2021 at the Capitol in Washington DC.
‘King mob’ needs to be dethroned by a self-confident constabulary – enforcing the laws forged by a democratically elected Parliament. Simple, isn’t it?
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