Protest organiser banned, under bail conditions, from attending any kind of demo – but others still held including those who simply arrived from the ‘wrong’ direction
Anti-genocide protest organiser Chris Nineham, a founder member of Stop the War, has been released on bail after being violently arrested yesterday during London’s peaceful National March for Gaza after police changed the march’s route to please pro-Israel pressure groups and swamped the demo with riot units and outside police forces. The bail conditions imposed ban Nineham, who has been charged under the Public Order Act with organising an illegal demonstration, from attending any kind of demo, so his associate John Rees gave an update to waiting supporters:
Nineham was one of dozens arrested yesterday – many, like Nineham, violently – with even a pregnant woman manhandled and dragged away by police:
Many of those arrested for supposedly bypassing a police blockade between Whitehall and Trafalgar Square had simply arrived at the square from Charing Cross Station on the Strand, behind the blockade – yet were still kettled and arrested, including some who were reportedly simply tourists trying to visit the famous monument.
Many of those arrested are still being held. At the time of writing pro-Palestine groups are calling for more support at protests outside police stations in Sutton, Bromley, Peckham and Wandsworth, to support them and demand their release.
John Rees is right – Keir Starmer, the ‘long-time servant of the security state’ – and his regime are engaged in all-out war on the freedom of UK citizens, many of them Jewish, to assemble, to protest, to report and to resist Starmer’s mushrooming police state, especially but not only on the subject of Israel’s genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
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As John Rees rightly says. Starmer is overseeing – i.e. imposing – “an all-out assault on the right to free assembly, on the right to free speech. It is unprecedented in modern times.. It is unprecedented for the police to arrest a senior officer of a major protest organisation… It is, in short, a state attempt to close down protest on the question of Palestine – but it won’t stay on the question of Palestine. Every campaigner in this country, everybody who cares about free-speech, every trade unionist who wants to be able to demonstrate around an industrial dispute must be aware that this is a knife held at the throat of their ability to organise freely and openly in this country. We utterly reject it….”
A ‘long-time servant of the security state’ is not a person who should be in the Labour Party, not less its ‘leader’ and, as such, should not be curtailing our civil and political rights to free speech and expression.