In defence of counter-protest

It can hardly have escaped the notice of anyone who, like me, had the misfortune to journey through central London early on Saturday morning, ahead of the latest in a seemingly interminable series of pro-Palestine marches, that the capital was already heavy with menace.

Despite the US-brokered ceasefire announced the previous day, demonstrators were everywhere, daring passers-by to say something, register a disapproving look, hold their gaze a little too long, reveal their real or imagined Jewishness — already suspected, of course, given your failure to march with them, wear a keffiyeh, drape yourself in the Palestinian flag, whoop and holler, dribble and gurn, while a variegated assortment of cosseted public-sector types shouted through loudspeakers about “the Jews who control the world”. They would continue marching, they announced, squeezing as much deliberate ambiguity into the phrase as they could muster, until Palestine was free, “from the river to the sea”.

You can’t grasp the subtle savagery of the intimidation until you’ve felt it firsthand.

Later, when the protest proper began, the crowd swelled to over half a million, and cries of “death, death to the IDF” rained down over the city, a lone counter-protester holding a “Stand Up for British Jews” placard was led away by police in handcuffs. His “crime”? Attracting the attention of a group of pro-Palestinian demonstrators. It was an arrest that followed a now familiar pattern, and should leave anyone who cares about freedom of expression uneasy.

Last year, for instance, Niyak Ghorbani, an exiled Iranian who staged a counter-protest at a London rally, was arrested after holding up a sign reading “Hamas is a terrorist organisation.” Video footage showed him surrounded by demonstrators before police intervened and led him away.

In another case, Met officers threatened to arrest Gideon Falter, chief executive of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, for being “quite openly Jewish”. The incident, which occurred in April 2024, saw Falter — who had just left a synagogue wearing a kippah — told by a sergeant in Aldwych that his presence might “inflame tensions,” and later warned by another officer that he would be arrested if he did not leave.

In a liberal democracy, spontaneous and lawful counter-protest is as much a right as protest itself

In the case this weekend, the legal basis was almost certainly the same: the common-law power to prevent a breach of the peace — a doctrine allowing officers to remove someone if their presence is likely to provoke imminent violence, whether by them or against them. In legal terms that rationale stands: the officer acts to forestall disorder before it occurs. Operationally, this reflects the post-2011 shift in UK policing towards facilitation and de-escalation. Formalised in NPCC and College of Policing guidance, this model emphasises enabling peaceful protest while intervening proportionately to prevent violence — although, as is increasingly obvious, in practice “facilitation” too often favours the larger crowd over the lone dissenter.

But the deeper issue is philosophical. In a liberal democracy, spontaneous and lawful counter-protest is as much a right as protest itself. The proper course is to let the interaction play out long enough to see who moves towards violence. If it’s the group rather than the individual, arrest them; and if the crowd piles in, call for backup. Senior officers would no doubt scoff at this operationally and financially fraught proposal to act in defence of Millian liberalism. But the danger is that those “pragmatic” judgements are solidifying into a principle of their own.

When one person with a dissenting view is surrounded by hundreds who disagree, and the state removes the one rather than restrains the many, we publicly enact an acceptance of mob rule. The right to organise a mass protest mutates into a right to occupy public space, free from pushback, with the police acting as de facto enforcers of whichever crowd can summon the greatest numbers. In today’s climate, that crowd is anti-Israel and, increasingly, anti-Jew.

Authoritarian regimes purify civic life and enforce a monoculture very deliberately, as an assertion of their power. Here in the UK, living amid the ruins of a decades-long technocratic experiment to reconcile democracy, multiculturalism and cultural relativism, the state now capitulates to those with the greatest numbers and the most menacing voices — not from strength, but to avert disorder on a scale it no longer has the resources to police.