When political tensions are running high and there are risks to public order, any responsible politician would try to reduce the pressure, take advice from police on operational matters, and publicly urge calm. The home secretary, Suella Braverman, chose the populist road in the run-up to yesterday’s march in London to protest against Israel’s military action in Gaza: to throw caution to the wind, deploy inflammatory language and hint darkly at the worst-case scenarios that might take shape.
Braverman wrote her incendiary article in the Times in the knowledge that there was a fundamental disagreement between her and the commissioner of the Metropolitan police, Sir Mark Rowley, on policing strategy. She wanted yesterday’s march to be banned because it coincided with the solemnity of Armistice Day. But police powers to ban protests are – rightly – tightly proscribed by the Public Order Act: they can do so only if they believe that protesters will not comply with police restrictions and there could be serious public disorder, damage to property or disruption to the lives of the community.
It is true that the marches in previous weeks have contained unsavoury elements: there have been a relatively small number of arrests, including for offences related to terrorism and inciting racial hatred. But the marches, involving hundreds of thousands of people, have been peaceful and complied with conditions imposed on them by the police. That is not to say that every marcher supports a peaceful two-state solution in the Middle East; some have adopted chants associated with the Hamas charter commitment to destroy Israel. There is no moral justification for doing so, and it understandably causes distress to many British Jews. Use of the chants should be condemned.
But this does not provide a legal justification for banning a protest, on which the great majority of marchers will have been horrified both by the appalling acts of terror committed by Hamas on 7 October as well as the huge number of Palestinian civilians being killed during Israeli assaults on Hamas in Gaza. The legal threshold for banning a march is rightly high – the last time this power was used was over a decade ago – and it is the responsibility of the police to assess whether it has been met and to apply for permission to ban it if they judge it has. It is not for the home secretary to interfere by applying political pressure on the police to ban a march she does not like.
That is exactly what Braverman has done. And by using incendiary terms like “hate marchers” and “mobs” to mischaracterise whole marches of many thousands of people who are legitimately exercising their democratic right to protest, she implicitly encouraged far-right protesters to come out to counter-demonstrate on Armistice Day. Come out they did: there were several skirmishes between the far right and the police in central London yesterday morning in the run-up to the two-minute silence, with masked men chanting Islamophobic slogans yards from the Cenotaph, and arrests were made. There were further violent clashes in the afternoon, and the police had to work hard to prevent far-right protesters from confronting the marchers.
Throughout this, Rishi Sunak has maintained that Braverman retains his confidence. As prime minister, he is ultimately responsible for his home secretary’s behaviour: her undermining of the operational independence of the police and her stoking of tensions at a highly sensitive time, in a way that appears to coincide with what she believes to be in furtherance of her ambition to one day lead the Conservative party. She must be sacked.
