If, like me, you’ve spent the last three years battling to defend the right to free speech, often from over-zealous police officers, the policing of yesterday’s pro-Palestinian protest was a bit of a shock. Apparently, you can be arrested for comparing a WPC to your “lesbian nan”, but chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – code for wiping Israel off the map – is totally fine. In one bit of footage circulating on Twitter yesterday, a protestor clambered down some scaffolding, having been shouting slogans from a rooftop, and was handed back his Palestinian flag by a police officer who’d been holding it for him.
So, where should the police draw the line?
Robert Jenrick, the immigration minister, thinks the Met granted yesterday’s protestors far too much latitude. He told Sky’s Sunday Morning With Trevor Philips: “Chanting ‘Jihad’ on the streets of London is completely reprehensible and I never want to see scenes like that. It is inciting terrorist violence and it needs to be tackled with the full force of the law.”
The Times has some of the gruesome details of the protest:
As the pro-Palestinian march began, riot police were stationed beside monuments along the route, including the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square and Eros in Piccadilly Circus, following intelligence that some demonstrators planned vandalism.
Among posters seen at the march were ones stating “Stop the new Holocaust” and “Zionism is the new Nazism”. One demonstrator held a poster that said “From London to Gaza, globalise the Intifada”. One protester who had a placard stating “Gaza is a holocaust” had it confiscated by officers and was asked to attend a police station.
Ten arrests were made in London relating to the use of fireworks, affray, a public order offence and the assault of an emergency service worker. Five Metropolitan Police officers suffered minor injuries.
The force earlier said it had identified a hate crime offence after footage was published on social media of a small group of protesters chanting the words “Yahud”, the Arabic word for Jew, and “Hamas”.
The words “Nazi Israel” were scrawled on a building in Piccadilly, while protesters graffitied “Free Palestine” on a wall of the Dorchester hotel on Park Lane.
Speakers at the rally included Mick Whelan, the general secretary of the Aslef train driver’s union, and Daniel Kebede, the leader of the National Education Union. Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader, and John McDonnell, the former shadow chancellor, also attended.
Last week, the Met said there had been a 1,350 per cent increase in hate crimes against Jewish people since Hamas attack, compared with the same period last year.
At a separate rally in the capital, about 300 supporters of the Islamist group Hizb ut Tahrir protested outside the Egyptian and Turkish embassies, claiming those countries were not doing enough to help Palestinians. At one point, a speaker asked the crowd, “What is the solution to liberate people from the concentration camp called Palestine,” to which one attendee shouted: “Jihad, jihad, jihad!”
The Met said that counter- terrorism officers had reviewed the footage of the man shouting Jihad but they had “not identified any offences arising from the specific clip”.
The force said: “The word jihad has a number of meanings but we know the public will most commonly associate it with terrorism … However, recognising the way language like this will be interpreted by the public and the divisive impact it will have, officers have identified the man involved and will be speaking to him shorty to discourage any repeat of similar chanting.”
In the Spectator, Andrew Tettenborn points out that the Met has been less tolerant of pro-Israeli protestors than pro-Palestinian ones:
On Wednesday, pro-Palestinian protesters encountered one of these vehicles in Parliament Square. They stood menacingly in front of it, shouting anti-Israel invective. What did the police do? Instead of preventing an attack on the van and clearing a passage for it, they stopped it and spoke to the driver. They told him they could not allow him to proceed and shortly later ordered him to switch off his display immediately and leave the area. The chief executive of CAA, when he arrived, was prevented from crossing to speak to the driver. Nothing, it seems, was done about the protesters.
What were the reasons for this apparent exercise in suppressing the speech of one side but allowing that of the other? At the time, the police present used phrases like “breach of the peace” and “your own safety”. In a subsequent statement, they said they had acted for “public safety” and to prevent the van “becoming a point of tension or conflict”, and added, slightly disingenuously, that they had earlier prevented an ugly mass march on the Israeli embassy.
In a way, you can understand the actions of the harassed coppers on the ground, who were clearly out of their depth and one suspects lacking determined leadership. They deserve sympathy rather than brickbats. Indeed, they may even have been acting lawfully. (The CAA are currently investigating the legalities, and it is certainly true that the existing law is not entirely certain when it comes to how far a person is entitled to speak his mind amid a hostile crowd threatening violence.)
Nevertheless, this whole development is distinctly worrying.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Met police chiefs will be summoned to the Home Office to explain their failure to arrest protestors chanting ‘Jihad’ yesterday. The Telegraph has more.
Stop Press 2: It looks as though the only people on Saturday’s march that got into trouble for waving an inappropriate flag were a couple of lads holding up an England flag. You can see our boys in blue hard at work apprehending these dangerous, far Right hate-mongers here.
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In the final stages of their grasping attempt to keep control they will make more and more blatant attacks on human liberty. At the same time the grasp will always be weaker than it was before. Like unto a Chinese finger trap where the more they try the weaker they become. The final few months will be nasty and when they leave the building there will be a nasty vacuum. It will take decades just to disentangle and rectify the evil structures that they have created
In fairness to the SC justices, the social media scum where only too happy to censor, the federal government and their agents where pushing at an open door.
I’m not sure they were to be honest, although they are large organisations now with many people, some of whom perhaps were happy to be censors.
But on the whole, companies don’t want to be regulated. Social media companies much prefer the early days when anything went and nobody bothered them about what was on their platforms.
So that the government was coercing social media companies to censor people isn’t refuted. It’s just that the harm previously or ongoing to the plaintiffs is unproven, is that it?
The law is an ass.
I think the issue is that the previous concrete harm is now over and the present and future harm is hypothetical. It’s just about plausible, though Thomas dissented and I rarely disagree with him about anything. The underlying principle is that the court isn’t there to scrutinise the executive or legislative branches, but to resolve ongoing disputes between injured and injuring parties – I think that’s a good principle, perhaps in this case not applied correctly.
It’s already important that the censorship is recognised and recognised to be probably illegal. Maybe the mistake was not to have dealt with this while the censorship was ongoing.
In better news the court ruled here that federal courts have the authority to say what the law is even if “expert” executive agencies disagree with them about what the law says. This overturns precedent whereby the court deferred to “experts”. This has potential implications for example on the leeway a body like the CDC has: 22-451 Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (06/28/2024) (supremecourt.gov)
I don’t even know why it comes a surprise that corporate and state power have become fully merged. Surely this is the obvious goal and ultimate endpoint of power centralised to the maximum. And of course it is a mathematical surety that this snowball will accelerate as it fattens. A runaway train doesn’t do it justice because a runaway train gets faster but doesn’t get bigger. We enter a time of the giant snowball where they are defeated internationally and the only option left to them is to cannibalise their own countries in an effort to extract the last drop of blood. And they will do that because they don’t just want 99 percent of your vitality they want all of it.
The similarities between this case and the Finch / Surrey Council case are remarkable but in contradictory ways.
Leggatt in the Finch case managed to extend the law, albeit in only one direction, such that he deliberately flouted the bedrock of law itself and effectively disregarded the reasonableness principle which is that determinations should be based on what would be reasonable to the common man. To infer that a decision to grant a drilling permit such that the potential outputs of the drilling should be taken in to account is proper cart before the horse stuff. Leggatt made the grotesque assumption that any oil derived from drilling would lead to CO2 emissions without even taking in to account the many ways in which crude oil is used. Furthermore, and by extension he obviously was of the opinion that CO2 is in itself bad. His opinion,which many dispute, was used to rewrite law. Perhaps he could advise his scientific credentials.
In the US the majority judges chose to shrink their viewpoint – just because Government agencies have threatened social media companies in the past does not mean they will use similar tactics in the future. And Joe Biden is really a saint sent to save the U. S. A.
Like virtually everything in the world today language is being stretched, manipulated beyond reasonableness and mangled in order to serve political purposes. Wholly symptomatic of this abuse is the now frequent appearance of the word ‘lawfare’ where the law is being routinely abused in search of malevolent ends – the above two cases being prime examples.
On a more vicious front lawfare is being used to shut down dissenting voices eg Tommy Robinson, Reinar Fuellmich, the ex Ambassador to Azerbaijan (?), Alex Bellfield, Julian Assange and certainly others I have missed.
Orwellian times indeed.
I think the Finch case is nuanced. There is not necessarily anything wrong with the notion that a licence for a new product should include understanding and accounting for the known knowns, and how or if it will leave a trail of pollution, such that you might not want it after all. The problem with the Finch case is that the judges on the one hand believe we know more than we do, and on the other have not invoked a reasonable cost benefit criteria for assessing what we do, and finally have not sought to remedy unclear regulation by sending it back to parliament and have instead made a decision themselves – which actually makes everything worse.
” “That’s a nice little social media platform you’ve got there – be a real shame if the Federal Trade Commission opened an antitrust investigation into it,” etc”
That’s not so subtle. What they are doing is bypassing the 1st Amendment onto social media platforms.
We should remember the social media platforms were very willing to do the Administration’s bidding on most things. The radical left seem to be in control in the whole of the swamp and most of the boardrooms of America.
This is outcome of this decision is best discussed by a constitutional legal expert. Do you have one daily sceptic?
Hi Freddie
The American principle of “a man of standing” i.e. someone who is actually inured and so there is a case to answer (which is a principle which may of course apply elsewhere), is a key reason why the American constitution did not save its people from the overreach of covid, and also will not do so over net zero issues – when in principle it should. It can only fight a rear guard action when of course it’s too late and people have been injured.
The principle skews the basis of law making in favour of the meddling progressives.
Surely any new law or action is not required to have a single man of standing. Instead new laws are based on cost benefit analysis based on your average man in the street – not some literal man of standing.
So where the defence of a constitution is concerned the same principle should apply. If the Government or someone were to do such and such it would likely undermine people’s constitutional rights.
Until we get ‘constitutional court systems’ which can actively defend constitutions based on principle rather than waiting for someone to be injured and then them being able to afford to stand up to a government in court, injustice will continue to reign.