Britain’s Conservative government has revealed plans to ban protests at sites including Parliament, the Whitehall seat of government, City and Town halls and MPs homes. The move is targeted immediately at protest against Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza but has a much wider application.
On Wednesday, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak—referring to the mass demonstrations over Gaza and those against MPs backing the genocide—told senior police at a summit in Downing Street, “There is a growing consensus that mob rule is replacing democratic rule… We simply cannot allow this pattern of increasingly violent and intimidatory behaviour which is, as far as anyone can see, intended to shout down free debate and stop elected representatives doing their job.”
Referring to a peaceful protest on February 21 outside Parliament when MPs were due to vote on a Scottish National Party ceasefire motion, a Home Office document published following the police leaders’ summit stated, “In recent months, we have witnessed attempts to hijack legitimate protests and subvert the democratic process.” This culminated with “protestors [who] threatened to force Parliament to ‘lock its doors’.”
Such incidents were not “legitimate means of achieving change through force of peaceful argument. They are part of a pattern of increasingly intimidatory behaviour seemingly intended to shout down and coerce elected representatives and hijack the democratic process through force itself,” it said.
These lies are to justify proposals to restrict and ban protests, as part of an overall clampdown on fundamental democratic rights that have been in the works for years and have been brought forward in response to the biggest anti-war protests since those against the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The Times newspaper on February 23, under a headline “Pro-Palestinian protesters plotted to force parliament into lockdown,” first propagated the lie that protesters had tried to shut down parliament ahead of what turned out to be an aborted ceasefire vote. It wrote “The Times has obtained a video of a speech [Director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign Ben Jamal] gave in the build up to the protest in which he tells a crowd: ‘We want so many of you to come that they will have to lock the doors of parliament itself.’”
The speech was in fact given by Jamal on February 17, at the conclusion of a national rally in the capital attended by a quarter of a million people. Jamal actually told the crowd that on February 21, “we are planning the biggest lobby in parliamentary history. We want to see a queue stretching from Parliament all the way through Whitehall. We want so many of you to come that they will have to lock the doors of parliament itself.”
Suppression of opposition is a central tenet of fascism.
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Britain’s Conservative government has revealed plans to ban protests at sites including Parliament, the Whitehall seat of government, City and Town halls and MPs homes. The move is targeted immediately at protest against Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza but has a much wider application.
On Wednesday, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak—referring to the mass demonstrations over Gaza and those against MPs backing the genocide—told senior police at a summit in Downing Street, “There is a growing consensus that mob rule is replacing democratic rule… We simply cannot allow this pattern of increasingly violent and intimidatory behaviour which is, as far as anyone can see, intended to shout down free debate and stop elected representatives doing their job.”
Referring to a peaceful protest on February 21 outside Parliament when MPs were due to vote on a Scottish National Party ceasefire motion, a Home Office document published following the police leaders’ summit stated, “In recent months, we have witnessed attempts to hijack legitimate protests and subvert the democratic process.” This culminated with “protestors [who] threatened to force Parliament to ‘lock its doors’.”
Such incidents were not “legitimate means of achieving change through force of peaceful argument. They are part of a pattern of increasingly intimidatory behaviour seemingly intended to shout down and coerce elected representatives and hijack the democratic process through force itself,” it said.
These lies are to justify proposals to restrict and ban protests, as part of an overall clampdown on fundamental democratic rights that have been in the works for years and have been brought forward in response to the biggest anti-war protests since those against the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The Times newspaper on February 23, under a headline “Pro-Palestinian protesters plotted to force parliament into lockdown,” first propagated the lie that protesters had tried to shut down parliament ahead of what turned out to be an aborted ceasefire vote. It wrote “The Times has obtained a video of a speech [Director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign Ben Jamal] gave in the build up to the protest in which he tells a crowd: ‘We want so many of you to come that they will have to lock the doors of parliament itself.’”
The speech was in fact given by Jamal on February 17, at the conclusion of a national rally in the capital attended by a quarter of a million people. Jamal actually told the crowd that on February 21, “we are planning the biggest lobby in parliamentary history. We want to see a queue stretching from Parliament all the way through Whitehall. We want so many of you to come that they will have to lock the doors of parliament itself.”
Suppression of opposition is a central tenet of fascism.