Rishi Sunak said on Wednesday he will hold Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley “accountable” for his decision to greenlight a pro-Palestinian demonstration on Armistice Day.
The Met chief on Tuesday said the legal threshold for banning it had not been met so far and it would be allowed to go ahead unless the intelligence picture changed.
He said that police would “do everything in our power” to ensure that the commemorations would take place without disruption.
But the Prime Minister said he would be meeting Sir Mark later on Wednesday to discuss the situation.
He warned: “This is a decision that the Metropolitan Police Commissioner has made. He has said that he can ensure that we safeguard remembrance for the country this weekend as well as keep the public safe. Now, my job is to hold him accountable for that.”
He added: “We’ve asked the police for information on how they will ensure that this happens. I’ll be meeting the Metropolitan Police Commissioner later today to discuss this. My view is that these marches are disrespectful.”
In response, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer accused Mr Sunak of "cowardice" for "picking a fight" with the Metropolitan Police over their decision to allow a pro-Palestinian demonstration to take place on Armistice Day.
The Labour leader tweeted: "Remembrance events must be respected. Full stop.
"But the person the PM needs to hold accountable is his Home Secretary. Picking a fight with the police instead of working with them is cowardice."
Organisers of the controversial march on Armistice Day claimed to have been “vindicated” by Scotland Yard’s decision to allow it to go ahead.
Chris Nineham, from the Stop the War coalition, one of the groups organising Saturday’s march from Hyde Park, said he and his colleagues would do “everything we can... to make sure that there is nothing anti-Semitic, nothing calling for violence” during the protest.
He also insisted that the march “isn’t about religion, it isn’t about race” but instead was intended to protest “about a humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza.
Responding on Wednesday, Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer said there had already been arrests for “incitement to racial hatred” at previous marches since Israel began its offensive in Gaza in response to the murderous Hamas attack and urged the Met to keep the future of Saturday’s march “under review”.
But Mr Nineham insisted that earlier protests had been “remarkably well-organised and in general very orderly”.
“We have been vindicated by Sir Mark Rowley’s comments that there’s no public order case for banning the demo, that you can’t ban a demo simply because you don’t like it,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Tory MP and former defence minister Tobias Ellwood said, however, that he still believed it should be postponed.
Earlier Health Secretary Steve Barclay stressed that there were ongoing talks with the Met over whether the protest should go ahead.
“I think there'll be ongoing discussions on this,” Mr Barclay said on Sky News, adding that it would be "provocative" to go ahead with Saturday's march.
“There is a legal threshold and the commissioner is of the view that that legal threshold has not been met. Obviously, the Home Office and colleagues will discuss that over the course of the day.”
The minister added that it was “outrageous” that a war memorial in Rochdale had been sprayed-painted with the words “free Palestine”. Two teenagers have been charged by Manchester police over the incident.
“The right to protest, the freedoms that we have, are freedoms that we have as a result of the sacrifice that people made in giving their lives, and it's something people I think will be very upset to see and very concerned about,” Mr Barclay said.
But Lord Soames, a grandson of wartime prime minister Winston Churchill, has pushed back at the Government pressure over Saturday’s planned protest and at Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s use of the term “hate marches”.
“I think that a lot of people died during the war to assert freedom,” he said late Tuesday on LBC.
“It's nowhere near the Cenotaph. It's in the afternoon and most of these people, 90 per cent of those people are not there to make trouble. They're there to express a deeply held view. And I think it must be allowed to go ahead and I think it would be a great mistake to play politics with it.”
Veterans’ affairs minister Johnny Mercer urged former military personnel not to join counter-protests and stressed that the route of the march is not due to go near the Cenotaph in Whitehall.
