THE Metropolitan Police arrested two pro-Palestine protesters for shouting ‘Globalise the Intifada’ at a peaceful demonstration outside the Ministry of Justice on Wednesday night, in a dangerous state escalation to silence the right to protest in Britain and criminalise dissent.
The Metropolitan Police chief, Mark Rowley, said yesterday that the two were detained on Wednesday evening for chanting slogans involving the word ‘intifada’, along with another protester who attempted to obstruct their arrests.
They also made two further arrests for public order offences, one of which was racially aggravated.
Earlier that day, both the Met police and Greater Manchester Police (GMP) chiefs said anyone chanting slogans such as ‘globalise the intifada’ would face arrest, threatening the hundreds of thousands who have marched on UK demonstrations against the Israeli genocide and mass murder in Gaza and who have shouted these slogans for years.
A Met police source also said that other chants such as ‘from the river to the sea’ could also lead to an arrest as part of a more robust police approach to ‘anti-semitism’, the Telegraph newspaper reported.
Rowley had previously insisted that hate crime legislation restricts the action his officers can take when policing such events.
But, using the pretext of the unconnected Australian Bondi Beach and Manchester synagogue terror attacks, Rowley and the GMP chief said they would now be far more robust.
‘Violent acts have taken place, the context has changed – words have meaning and consequence. We will act decisively and make arrests,’ they declared.
PM Keir Starmer, ex-chief of the Crown Prosecution Service and the UK’s chief jailer, and senior ministers have alleged that protesters’ slogans such as ‘globalise the intifada’ and ‘from the river to the sea’ amount to a call for attacks on Jewish people.
His official spokesman claimed that: ‘There is no other interpretation of the demand to internationalise the intifada than as a call to attack Jewish communities around the world.’
This police crackdown on the democratic right to demonstrate and shout slogans follows last year’s government proscription of the anti-Israeli genocide Palestine Action (PA) group as terrorists and the arrest and imprisonment on remand of two dozen PA members, known as the Filton 24, and the mass arrest of hundreds of other protesters for holding placards of ‘I support Palestine Action’, or even a blank poster.
The ban was slammed by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign at the time saying that: ‘We know that the real terrorists and criminals are those who continue to facilitate Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinian people.’
Eight of the PA prisoners are on hunger strike with one, 20-year-old Qessar Zuhah, rushed to hospital in a critical condition on Wednesday after 46 days on hunger strike, with Palestine supporters demonstrating outside Bronzefield Prison in Surrey demanding her release.
These dictatorial moves by the British state follow the roll out of facial-recognition cameras across England and Wales to constantly spy on the population, the mass surveillance plan introduced by PM Starmer to control asylum seekers and youth, and the abolition of jury trials for less serious offences.
What is next? Well, obviously it is to gag the trade unions and forbid slogans for a ‘General strike’ and ‘Kick this government out’ and ‘Socialism now’, and even to ban strikes altogether.
However, these open moves to impose a police dictatorship on Britain come not from a position of strength of the UK ruling class. On the contrary, the UK capitalist economy is bankrupt, in economic recession and isolated internationally and is now turning its venom on an undefeated working class which is refusing to return to super-austerity and 1930s-style destitution.
In fact, the government is in acute political crisis and facing a settlement of accounts in Britain with a rampant working class whose trade union leaders are sitting in their offices and refusing to defend their members and the working class by calling trade unions out on a general strike to bring down this government, that is rushing headlong to impose a police dictatorship in the country.
Workers must demand their unions force the TUC to call a special congress to organise a general strike to bring down this right wing government and go forward to a workers’ government and socialism in Britain and to inspire EU workers to do the same.