Met Police are now ACTIVELY obstructing this week’s pro-Palestine national march

Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), coalition partners, MPs, Peers, and trade union leaders have expressed serious concern at a Met Police threat to place severe restrictions on the march for Palestine on Saturday 7 September. In short, cops have:

• Threatened to impose new orders to disrupt the established patterns of the protests.
• Refused to participate in negotiations in a transparent and accountable way.

Met Police: obstructing the pro-Palestine march

PSC and its coalition partners have expressed their serious concern that the Met Police are threatening to place severe restriction orders on this Saturday’s Palestine protest, without explanation or rationale.

The Met Police are attempting to delay the start time by one hour and 45 minutes to 2:30pm, despite the fact that the usual assembly time of 12pm for a 12:45pm start has been advertised for several weeks. No explanation has been given for these moves, announced to organisers at 4pm on Friday 30th August, after the police themselves cancelled a meeting to discuss the demo on Thursday morning.

This is the 18th national march for Palestine since October 2023, and the normal assembly time has been public for weeks. The timing is imperative for supporters travelling from around the country.

Changing the start time from the normal 12:45 pm to 2:30pm is completely impractical and will cause major problems, especially for people coming from outside London, who have already, in their thousands, made transport arrangements.

The organisers first informed the police of their plans on 8 August, more than three weeks ago. The Met Police has already insisted on changes to the assembly point of Whitehall, and delayed meetings with organisers consistently. It refused all meeting times suggested to discuss details, insisting that the only availability was at 10am on Thursday 29 August, and then cancelled the meeting at 9:30am.

The Met Police then informed organisers that it wanted the start time pushed back, without explanation. The concern is that these kind of delays, lack of communication, late changes, and imposition of conditions to what are entirely peaceful demonstrations are forming a pattern of obstruction.

Overarching support

PSC and the Coalition partners have received support at short notice from a range of MPs, Peers and Trade union leaders to urge the Metropolitan police to avoid causing disruption and accept that the march should go ahead at the normal, planned time.

A public statement which you can read here has been signed by:

MPs Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, Apsana Begum, Zarah Sultana, Grahame Morris, Clive Lewis, Ayoub Khan, Iqbal Mohammed, Ian Byrne, Jon Trickett, Andy McDonald, Richard Burgon, Ian Lavery, Imran Hussain, Bell Ribeiro-Addy;

Lord John Hendy, Baroness Christine Blower, Lord Bryn Davies;

Mick Lynch, general secretary RMT, Fran Heathcote, general secretary PCS, Daniel Kebede, general secretary NEU, Maryam Eslamdoust, general secretary TSSA, Sarah Woolley, general secretary BFAWU, Mick Whelan, general secretary ASLEF, Alex Gordon, president RMT, John Leach, assistant general secretary RMT.

The Met Police must rethink its approach

Ben Jamal, PSC director, said:

Our plans have been in place and communicated to the Met police for weeks. We have worked with them on every one of the 17 Marches for Palestine so far to ensure we can exercise our democratic rights in a safe, peaceful and effective way. But continually the Police have delayed meetings, tried to make changes at the eleventh hour on assembly points, and then consistently imposed restrictive orders on the protests without rationale or giving clear evidence.

As they have publicly acknowledged, the marches have been overwhelmingly peaceful with no threat of major public disorder. To make changes to the start time seems to us to be a tactic designed to deter people from attending. All bar one of the 17 previous marches have assembled at 12 without issue and started no later than 1pm.

These national Marches are huge logistical exercises with tens of thousands of people coming from all over the country. They have followed a tried and tested set of arrangements regarding the assembly time and having a pre-announced route. It makes no practical sense for the Met to attempt to unilaterally rip up those arrangements. This creates unjustified obstacles and logistical problems that we do not regard as acceptable. We urge the Met to rethink their approach.

Featured image via the Canary