Today (5th Sept) Shabana Mahmood has been promoted to home secretary by Sir Keir Starmer in a major ministerial reshuffle following the resignation of Angela Rayner. As the new Home Secretary, her first and immediate decision should be how to deal with the Palestine Action supporters who will carry banners and placards in Parliament Square supporting Palestine Action (PA), an organisation labelled as terrorist by this weak and misguided government.
More: DUBIOUS proscription of Palestine Action as terrorist organisation
The protestors will break the law if they support PA and they will. They are prepared to be arrested. They want to swamp the police and send a message to the Home Secretary and this enfeebled government that proscribing PA as a terrorist organisation was misguided and a curb on freedom of speech. Note: An alternative scenario to the one discussed here would be for the new Home Secretary to de-proscribe Palestine Action. Many wise commenters have said that it was a grave mistake to label it a terrorist organisation. It has led to a lot of problems and protests.
The best thing the new Home Secretary could do it to instruct law enforcement to police the protest tomorrow to ensure that it goes off peacefully which it will because these protestors are instructed to be totally peaceful; not even talk! But not to arrest them. I know the police act independently but I am sure the Home Secretary can have a word in the ear of the Met Police Commissioner.
It is a waste of a massive amount of police personnel and time to try and arrest 1000 protestors which is the projected number.
The police have a discretion to arrest or leave alone. Take the latter choice please. It makes sense. These are peaceful individuals who simply wish to express their reasonable views in public. This is allowed in what it meant to be one of the world’s most longstanding and well-regarded democracies
I would urge the Home Secretary not to think of this as a war with these protestors almost all of whom are decent British citizens who’ve never committed a crime in their long lives (a lot of them are pensioners and highly educated).
These are not the kind of people the police should be arresting. They should arrest career criminals and repeat offenders who are involved in mass car thefts or horrendous levels of shoplifting. The police do almost nothing about these burgeoning criminal offences. They are incredibly commonplace in the UK and on the increase.
Stolen cars are often shipped out to places like Russia on the day of the theft. These are sophisticated gangs using high tech. The police ignore most car thefts. These are cars valued at £40,000! A big theft.
