When the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill was going through Parliament in 2021, there was huge public concern, expressed in a nationwide Kill the Bill campaign. Labour’s opposition to the Bill was lukewarm at best, as if Labour MPs were not particularly concerned that draconian new powers would be given to the police. Reassurances were given by Ministers that the police would be “measured and proportionate” in their use of these new powers.
We saw what that means on Thursday last week (27th March), when more than 20 uniformed officers from the Met smashed in the front door (without even ringing the doorbell) of the Quaker Meeting House in Westminster. They then arrested six young women holding a meeting in one of the rooms they’d hired to discuss concerns about the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the Climate Emergency. They were detained “on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance”, as defined under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act. Their home addresses (or those of their parents if they were still living at home) were subsequently raided “to gather further evidence”.
“Measured and proportionate”? For those fluent in Orwellian doublespeak, read “dangerously over the top and disproportionate”. That’s just the way the Met works: unaccountable, institutionally racist, and patiently honing its repressive skills to serve what it anticipates will be ever more authoritarian governments in the future.
The Quakers were outraged. Paul Parker, Recording Clerk for the Quakers responded: “no one has been arrested in a Quaker meeting house in living memory. This aggressive violation of our place of worship and the forceful removal of young people holding a protest group meeting clearly shows what happens when a society criminalises protests”.
Yesterday, a Quaker gathering was convened outside New Scotland Yard, responding to the Met’s violence and repression with peaceful, respectful reflection.
There were two or three hundred of us there. Only when future outrages of this kind result in two or three thousand people dropping everything else to stand in solidarity with those whose rights are being suppressed, will I begin to hope that people are beginning to understand what’s really going on here – as this country of ours is turned, by stealth and through the connivance of both major parties, into a full-on police state.
Jonathon Porritt
