Yes - stop these marches already.
Good points in here. I have provided most of the article since it is behind a paywall.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/05/14/right-to-protest-ban-palestine-march-london-extremism/
"The right to protest shouldn’t trump the rights of the rest of usEmpowering extremist marchers only weakens the rest of us. Such coercion is corrosive to British democracy"
"I am glad the word “coercion” is in the report’s title. That is what the public hate. Few want protests banned: they accept demonstrations as part of free speech. But many feel that the recent extremist protests – often large, repeated and borderline violent – have an intentionally coercive effect.
The most significant example is the Gaza marches, which have been pretty much weekly in London since October, and the related campus protests. To understand how threatening they are, one must recall why they happened.
Their organisers say they are inspired by the “genocide” committed by Israel against Gaza. But the protesters never express disapproval of the almost uniquely vile event which drove Israel to attack Gaza – the Hamas October 7 massacres of 1,200 mainly unarmed, mainly Jewish people and the taking of more than 200 hostages, many still held and exploited as bargaining chips.
If you are Jewish, and you see thousands of fellow British citizens filling the streets, many shouting their hatred of you and none expressing sympathy, you must feel scared. Here are thousands who do not mind your kin being murdered. Some even rejoice. That is a horrible thing to experience in a free country. It should not be an automatic right to stage such protests.
Fear among Jews only grows when the Metropolitan Police seem to regard their desire to demonstrate against the protests as more objectionable than the protests themselves. The marchers coerce the police: the police coerce the Jews. The wider public feels coerced, too – driven off the streets which belong, collectively, to us. These streets are turned into a weekly stage-set for a cause which, though important, directly involves few British people.
Even the highest public authorities feel coerced. If protest makes it difficult, occasionally dangerous, for legislators, ministers, constituents, and officials to move in and out of Parliament, that suggests the protests have the power to affect what goes on there. This turns out to be true – hence Mr Speaker Hoyle’s breaking of parliamentary convention about which vote to take in Parliament. He said he acted to protect the security of Labour MPs who were being threatened on social media.
Lord Walney’s report will show that the Gaza protests are not an elongated “one-off”, but part of a series of actions by extreme-Left groupings whose hatred of “Zionism” is also embraced by Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion and more. The name of the Kill the Bill movement, which protested violently against the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, could be understood to convey a sinister ambiguity, since “the Bill” could mean not only the legislation but also the police.
Lord Walney wants to ensure that government and law-enforcement agencies understand these ideological links better. They have got the measure of largely stupid, disorganised Right-wing thuggery. Against the more sophisticated, multifarious threat of the extreme Left, they are much weaker.
This loose extreme-Left alliance sharing protest skills against the common good in the name of human rights is noxious in a free country. To use a Cold-War word which should be re-employed by the intelligence services, it is subversive.
Another highly relevant question is, who pays for such protests? At least two types of unacceptable costs are involved. One is the cost of the policing itself. There should not be an open-ended right to have free police for every demonstration. A chief constable should be able to forbid the repetition of a march if it costs too much. Another is the damage done to ordinary people and businesses by disruptive activities – the shops that cannot trade, the defence manufacturers, energy suppliers or meat companies picketed, the motorists who cannot travel, the delivery lorries which cannot get through the blocked M25. Surely march organisers should be liable for these costs. Lord Walney certainly thinks so.
Almost by definition, a protest march tries to expand its power beyond its numbers. If we invariably let it happen on demand, we empower it. The rest of us are weakened.
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