LONDON: Pro-Palestine organizations in the UK have condemned British government plans to give police greater powers over repeated demonstrations, calling it a “draconian assault” on the right to protest, and have vowed to continue mobilizing despite the measures.
UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced earlier this month that police will be granted new powers to impose tougher conditions on demonstrations by taking into account the “cumulative impact” of previous similar events.
Ben Jamal, director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, or PSC, told The Independent that the move represented “a further draconian assault on the fundamental right to protest.”
He continued: “This potentially has enormous implications. It could mean, for example, ‘you have already protested once, you can’t protest again.’”
Jamal said that police had previously invoked “cumulative impact” to block protest routes near synagogues, and that the Palestine Coalition, a network of six groups behind recent pro-Palestine marches, was prepared to challenge the new rules in court.
“The implications are really broad but they are specifically aimed at targeting our movement,” he said.
“We also know what’s happened in the past two years is extraordinary, there has not been a body of consistent protests like this in the numbers that we’ve been able to galvanize since the suffragette movement. It’s been responding to a fairly unique circumstance, which is a livestreamed genocide, and a continuing complicity by our government in that,” he said.
Israel has denied accusations of genocide in Gaza.
Tens of thousands of demonstrators marched through central London on Saturday, a day after a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas came into effect.
The PSC has announced further actions, including a mass student walkout on Thursday and a boycott of Barclays bank on Saturday.
Mahmood said that the proposed changes to the Public Order Act would not amount to a blanket ban on protests but were “about restrictions and conditions,” insisting that repeated large-scale demonstrations had caused “considerable fear” within the Jewish community.
No timeline has been set for when the new rules might take effect, though Mahmood said the ongoing review of protest legislation included consideration of powers to ban demonstrations outright.
Lindsey German, national convener of the Stop the War Coalition, argued that the reasoning behind the measures “did not make sense.”
She said: “The whole question of cumulative impact, if you think about a demonstration, they are meant to have an impact, they are meant to be effective, they are meant to keep highlighting the issue that hasn’t been resolved.”
German added: “We are assuming that we will continue demonstrating over the next few months, we are very concerned about the rules to restrict the law further … we fear it’s going to be increasingly difficult to protest in London. This is, either way, a denial of our right to protest.”
The Home Office has been approached for comment by The Independent.
