Policing for the dealers of death
Yesterday, at a protest organised by Defend Our Juries in Parliament Square, London, more than 500 protesters, many of them elderly, were arrested for holding banners supporting the organisation Palestine Action, proscribed last month after invading an RAF base to spray red paint into the engines of two aircraft used to refuel planes which conduct spying missions over Gaza out of RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus. The group has carried out a series of actions targeted at companies which supply the Israeli military and this was going on well before the genocide began in 2023; there had been calls to proscribe them before, but the decision was made once the news of the Brize Norton air base invasion broke. Nothing the group has ever done meets any traditional definition of terrorism; they have never killed anyone, nor carried out any action that endangered or was intended to intimidate the general public, but the Terrorism Act 2000 uses a broader definition that does away the need for a group to target the general public or try to kill anyone. At the time, animal rights activists were running a “direct action” campaign targeting companies that bred animals for experimentation, some of which were family farms, and their tactics were often described as terrorism. The same act also criminalises not only carrying out group activities or fundraising, but any public expression of support, such as carrying a banner or wearing a T-shirt giving the impression of support, or making statements which are reckless as to whether they give the impression of support. All this for organisations which need not be involved in actual terrorism; rather, it’s terrorism if the government call it that.
It’s no secret that some powerful people are annoyed at the continual protests in London against the genocide in Gaza. We frequently have Jewish accounts on Twitter whingeing that London “is not safe for Jews” every Saturday (as that’s the day they are usually held); one the occasion that the protesters wanted to demonstrate at the BBC’s Broadcasting House, the government intervened to ban it, on the grounds that there was a synagogue a few streets away and it was the Sabbath. There are, however, rarely arrests at these events for anything more than speech offences under the aforementioned Terrorism Act. The same cannot be said, of course, for the “peaceful demonstrations” outside hotels housing migrants or refugees arrived via the “small boat” route; these demonstrations routinely attract thuggish elements and have led on a number of occasions to violent acts that target the migrants themselves, and when people have posted on social media calling for such hotels to be burned, and are convicted of long-established crimes of incitement to violence, we see Reform supporters calling them political prisoners and calling for their release, with Rupert Lowe (MP for Great Yarmouth, leader of Reform splinter group) having indicated his intention to host her at parliament on her release; some of these same people have been congratulating the same police for arresting hundreds of “useful idiots” (fancy a supporter of Israel calling someone a useful idiot!) or “radical leftists” supporting the ‘psychopaths’ of Hamas.
Arresting more than 500 people for a non-violent speech offence isn’t a good use of public resources. As a result of years of cuts to the criminal justice system, it takes years for serious crimes to get before a court, with some victims dropping out after a year or two. I heard that personnel were drawn in from other police forces across the country to police what they knew would be a non-violent protest, because anti-genocide protests have been, since the start. We have enough problems in London; we have a spike in mobile phone thefts, while bicycle and motorcycle thefts routinely go unpunished with victims expected to rely on insurance to deal with the problem, with the result that pavements have strips reading “Mind the Grab” warning of snatch thieves and it can cost upwards of £1,000 to insure a 125cc motorcycle in London for fire and theft. When my bike was stolen a few years ago, I had to just buy a new one for £400 (which is what my old one also cost), and my bike was used to get me to town and to the park, not to bomb tents or kill doctors and schoolchildren. The police can and do refuse to deal with certain crimes for lack of resources; the prosecution service can and do refuse to prosecute because it would not be in the public interest, and there is no better example of “not in the public interest” than prosecuting someone for holding a banner (something, by the way, nobody was doing until the government banned it!) supporting an organisation that sought to arrest a genocide when the government refused to
When people criticise the police, they and their supporters commonly remind us of who we’d call on if we were raped or if our house was burgled or our relative was murdered. They fly the “thin blue line” flag, or use it as their profile picture (some police forces allow it as a patch on the uniform; the Met does not). Who is it keeps us safe, they ask? Yet it’s not much safety to be only safe if you keep your mouth shut if you have opinions the powers that be despise. The American Founding Father Benjamin Franklin famously wrote that “those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety”; we are currently in that state of having neither. Our police are protecting those who deal death and oppression, denying us our freedom while neglecting our safety.
Image: Defend Our Juries.
