The Met may get its ‘peaceful’ march, but British society will pay the terrible price

I could easily be proved wrong by tomorrow night, but let me hazard a prediction. I suspect that Saturday’s pro-Palestine march in London will pass off fairly peacefully. It will be large (though only about a quarter as large as its organisers will claim). It will not come near the Cenotaph.

It will be presented as a success for Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner. “He called it right,” people will say. By the same token, the event will be presented as a defeat for Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary. Despite her provocative remarks, observers will argue, marchers protested with dignity. 

Rishi Sunak’s conduct will be seen as nudge followed by fudge. Commentators will note that he followed private focus groups enough to make anti-march noises, but not enough to win a change of plan. When his Home Secretary spoke out, he neither backed her up nor slapped her down.  

As political analysis, these comments will probably prove correct. As recently as Monday, the Met called for postponement, speaking of “the risk of violence and disorder”. I do not believe Sir Mark would have changed his mind and decided to permit the fifth march without private assurances from the groups behind it that they would keep their people in hand, and without the implied threat that they would turn nasty in the event of a ban. 

Such assurances will have emboldened Sir Mark with the Prime Minister. He will have judged the occasion can be made to look like good old British free speech and policing by consent.

Mrs Braverman, by contrast, will appear as someone who spoke loudly but carried a small twig. She will stand accused of trying to undermine the police force for which she is ultimately responsible, without benefit. If the march does encounter trouble with Right-wing counter-marchers, she will be blamed for that, too. 

As for Mr Sunak, he will appear negligible. Having declared that he would hold Sir Mark responsible, he will have to praise him if there is no disaster. What was the point of their meeting?

Well, you might say – if my prediction proves correct – that’s fine then. The Government got it wrong: the police got it right. It shows what a wonderfully tolerant society we are. 

It will certainly be a good thing if no one gets hurt this weekend. And yes, Sir Mark will have outmanoeuvred ministers. But we shall need to consider the price.

For many years now, the Met has behaved like the British colonial authorities in imperial days. Believing they could not win the hearts and minds of the locals, they have appeased their leaders to keep some sort of order. Assorted Muslim “community leaders”, some linked to extremist groups, have been invited to police the police in their dealings with Muslims. During one recent march, a “river to the sea” extremist, Attiq Malik, even joined the police in their control room.

In this sense, Mrs Braverman’s criticisms were right. Her newspaper article on Thursday may have been injudicious, given her situation, but what it said was essentially correct. 

Yes, “senior police officers” do “play favourites when it comes to protesters”. Compare the treatment you might receive for being a solitary, silent, praying anti-abortionist or a lockdown protester with the freedom to run amok enjoyed by Black Lives Matter, and you will note the difference in police warmth. 

And yes, for Islamists, the purpose of marching, especially of “rolling” marches each weekend, does resemble the political use of parades in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. It is, in Mrs Braverman’s words, “an assertion of primacy by certain groups”. She correctly describes these Hamas backers and fellow-travellers as people who “insist that their agenda trumps any notion of the broader public good”. For them, a march is not so much free speech as a power-grab.

This is what the ordinary citizen resents. Ours is not a colonial situation. This is Britain. These marchers do not even pretend to do anything good for Britain. Yet they claim ownership of the public space, while the police ignore and inconvenience the majority of citizens. The marches are, in the full sense of the word, anti-social. All this Suella Braverman identified.

We should recognise how selectively the beliefs which currently dominate our public culture are applied. One of these – covered, if you don’t like it, by the word “woke”; if you do, by the phrase “social justice” – is the idea that the West oppresses many people and that their hurt feelings should shape what we do and say – and whom we blame. 

Look at the arguments advanced for removing monuments of those linked with slavery or “colonialism”. A person of certain heritages has only to say he/she feels “unsafe” or “uncomfortable” to prompt demands that the monument be moved, covered up or cordoned off by trigger warnings. 

The latest report of the Archbishops’ Commission on Racial Justice emphasises that the key thing in such decisions is “to receive, and know how to respect and value, emotive testimony”. The more emotive the testimony, it implies, the more it trumps all other considerations – institutional independence, wider public opinion, freedom of speech. 

In such a culture, “microaggressions”, such as commenting on a person’s hair or asking where they come from, can be used to destroy the alleged aggressor. This hypersensitivity to the feelings of some groups has moved beyond common courtesy to cultural neurosis. 

Now apply these attitudes to these marches. There are approximately 300,000 Jews in Britain. Last month, about 1,400 mostly defenceless Jews (a small number British) were massacred in Israel by Hamas, often the old, women, and children. Some were raped. About 240 were taken hostage and remain so. 

So what are Jews here supposed to feel when march after large march takes place which makes no condemnation of these atrocities, though they are of a horror unique in most people’s lifetimes, when social media pullulate with celebrations of the pogroms or say they are Jewish lies, when crowds cry out for the destruction of the Jewish nation and no one cries out for the release of the hostages? Unsafe, I’d say, uncomfortable – and downright terrified. 

Surely the disparity is vast. No microaggressions here. The massacres are aggressions about as macro as you can get. Mr Sunak often says that Britain is visibly not a racist country. In general, he is right. Yet here is this blot so large that many cannot see it: big, repeated, threatening, anti-Semitic demonstrations in which significant numbers invoke their religion (Islam) to attack another (Judaism). You should not have to be Jewish to see how horrible this is and how dangerous. The Jews take the worst of it, but they are the canaries in a very dark mine which could poison the whole of our society. 

The phenomenon of Holocaust denial is well known. I find its madness grimly amusing: the people who love to say Hitler did not kill the Jews in truth admire him precisely because he did. What happened on October 7 presaged the Holocaust which Hamas and its allies will unleash if they gain power in the Middle East. Marchers like this weekend’s in effect deny this coming Holocaust. 

It is an “operational” matter to work out exactly what, on a given day, the police should do about this. But the issue at stake here is way above the pay grade of Sir Mark Rowley. It is one of the most serious challenges to political leadership in our time.