UK Grants Police New Powers to Crush Peaceful Protests as Palestine Action Demonstrations Continue

After the British government's ban on the group Palestine Action earlier this year failed to silence demonstrations against the genocide in Gaza, the UK's Home Office announced Sunday that it would give police sweeping new powers to crush peaceful protests.

Police arrested nearly 500 more pro-Palestine demonstrators on Saturday—including many Jewish activists—who participated in a protest calling for the government to "Lift the Ban" on the protest group Palestine Action, which was outlawed under Britain's anti-terrorism law in July.

Those arrested included an 83-year-old Anglican priest, the 79-year-old daughter of a Holocaust survivor, and a 79-year-old Jewish man with terminal illness, among hundreds of others who held signs in opposition to the ban as part of a "silent vigil."

That ban was instituted after members of Palestine Action were accused of vandalizing planes at a military base and has been widely criticized, including by former members of the Labour government that passed it. Even the UK’s Joint Terrorism Analysis Center acknowledged in a leaked March report revealed last month by the New York Times that the vast majority of the protest group's actions “would not be classified as terrorism.”

Prior to Saturday, more than 2,000 people had already been arrested since the ban went into effect for voicing support for the outlawed organization. Despite this, the demonstrations have continued, and the Home Office, which handles matters of public safety, announced Sunday that more drastic measures would be taken.

It said police forces would be given new powers under the UK's existing policing law, the Public Order Act, to put new conditions on "repeat protests" and allow senior police authorities to relocate or "to ban protests outright" based on their "cumulative impact."

"The right to protest is a fundamental freedom in our country. However, this freedom must be balanced with the freedom of their neighbours to live their lives without fear," said Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood. "Large, repeated protests can leave sections of our country, particularly religious communities, feeling unsafe, intimidated, and scared to leave their homes. This has been particularly evident in relation to the considerable fear within the Jewish community, which has been expressed to me on many occasions in these recent difficult days."

In the wake of the deadly attack on a Manchester synagogue last week, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer had called on the group Defend Our Juries (DOJ) to call off Saturday's demonstration in order to "respect the grief of British Jews this week.”

But DOJ organizers said in a statement Friday that "many Jewish supporters of Defend Our Juries have warned that postponing tomorrow’s action would risk conflating the actions of the state of Israel with Jewish people around the world, as [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu seeks to do, who bear no responsibility for Israel’s crimes, which could fuel antisemitic hatred and prejudice."

Other leading Jewish figures in Britain have denounced the UK's criminalization of Palestine Action. In August, more than 300 of them, including Jenny Manson, chairperson of Jewish Voice for Labour, signed a letter to Prime Minister Keir Starmer and then-Home Secretary Yvette Cooper denouncing the ban as “illegitimate and unethical.”

According to a poll by YouGov in July, 37% of British people said that in the Israel-Palestine conflict, they sympathized more with the Palestinians, while just 15% said they sympathized more with the Israelis. Others said they sympathized with both equally or were unsure.

In a widely circulated BBC News interview on Sunday, Mahmood defended the Home Office's new restrictions on the basis that it was distasteful for DOJ to protest against Israel at a time when Jewish people were in mourning and that police should have the ability to intervene in such protests.

"I don't think it's offensive to ask people to show a little humanity towards a community that's suffered a terrible tragedy. That's the first loss of Jewish life, simply for being Jewish, on British soil in centuries," she said. "Just because you have a freedom doesn’t mean you have to use it at every moment of every day."

DOJ responded in a post on X: "This is what the home secretary thinks of democracy. Your freedoms are only freedoms within a specific timeframe, a designated location, and only if permitted to be used by Shabana Mahmood. We are fighting for all our freedoms. We will not be deterred." The group has said it will only continue to escalate its protests and called for more demonstrations in November.