Discovery Analytical Resourcing

Enough is Enough ?

More laws to restrict protests to be introduced

Nick King

6 October 2025

Following on from a week of actions around the annual Labour Party conference in Liverpool, Defend Our Juries has maintained its campaign for rescission of Yvette Cooper's proscription order that targeted Palestine Action back in July. Over a thousand potential participants had pledged to support the 'Lift The Ban' event set last month for 4 October 2025.

Saturday's protest in London, timed to start at 1pm, had to relocate from Parliament Square to Trafalgar Square. Participants were seated holding handwritten signs in a co-ordinated condemnation of genocide and support for non-violent direct action in preventing complicity with it. Also on the same day, a march and protest took place in Manchester organised by Greater Manchester Friends of Palestine.

Fallacious proximity

Before the demonstration, controversy was stoked by certain Jewish community representatives calling for the organisers to postpone the protest. Their opposition was ascribed to an antisemitic terrorist attack outside Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester. The appeal - 'to respect the grief of British Jews' - was picked up by the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, and the Metropolitan Police, as well as being echoed sympathetically across headline broadcast media. It later came to light that two of the casualties of the incident, one of which fatal, had resulted inadvertently from police use of firearms during a remarkably rapid intervention.

A Defend Our Juries spokesperson, commenting on Friday, 3 October 2025, clarified the group's position:

"[Thursday's] attack was actual terrorism and we join others across the country in condemning it unreservedly ..." But: "it couldn't be clearer that [Saturday's] action, which is in Trafalgar Square and not near any synagogue, is about defying the Government's absurdly authoritarian proscription of Palestine Action and the Government's complicity in the genocide being committed by the Israeli government."

Interviewed on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Dave Rich, a director at the Community Security Trust (a charity offering security advice to the Jewish community in the UK), condemned the decision to carry on:

"I think it's phenomenally tone deaf, to say the least, for so many people who claim to care about human rights and care about freedoms, to be taking police resources away from protecting the rights and freedoms of Jewish people to live their lives and go to synagogue in safety."

A perspective, perhaps, that sounds somewhat endogenously-obsessed, when for an extended period of time throughout the year dozens of non-combatant Gazans have been murdered daily.

Jewish Lift the Ban supporter, Zoe Cohen, took a less-myopic view:

"Those who have used the attack on the Jewish community in Manchester to call for today's vigil to be cancelled, are wrongly conflating the actions of the Israeli state with all Jews. Jewish people around the world are not responsible for Israel's crimes ... Cancelling today's vigil would have perpetuated this dangerous narrative which fuels anti-Semitism."

"I am one of a significant number of Jewish people who have taken part in these actions because we refuse to stand by while our government enables Israel's genocide and bans the protest group which seeks to stop that complicity by disrupting arms factories. Fifty-three Palestinians were also killed on Thursday and they have names and stories too. Every life matters. When I was brought up learning about the Holocaust and we said 'never again', I learnt that this means 'never again' for anyone."

More laws

Several constabularies were called in to assist the Metropolitan Police make 488 arrests on Saturday relating to breaches of the Terrorism Acts, six of which occurred on London's Westminster Bridge with the unfurling of a banner above the river. The chair of the Police Federation, Paula Dodds, observed at the weekend that the force was being asked to accomplish too great a mission, declaring:

"Enough is enough! Our concentration should be on keeping people safe at a time when the country is on heightened alert from a terrorist attack. And instead officers are being drawn in to facilitate these relentless protests. There aren't enough of us ... We are emotionally and physically exhausted. What are the politicians and senior police officers going to do about it?"

What Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is going to do is more of the same, announcing on the day following the demonstration an increase in police powers to restrict repeat protests that cause communities to 'feel unsafe and intimidated'. The intention is to implement new regulations via revised sections of the Public Order Act 1986. It is claimed that the regular occurrence of protests in the same location somehow comprises a 'cumulative impact' of nuisance-value elevated to provoke fear.

Lobby pressure

Announcement of the measures comes pursuant to a meeting of Starmer and Mahmood with representatives of the Jewish Board of Deputies, whose president referred to them as 'a necessary start' and the fruit of many months lobbying activity:

"But the government now needs to go further. We will work with them to ensure that these and other measures are as effective as possible in protecting our community."

Unlike the tangible impact of multifarious transgressions of international norms by the Israeli Government, the assertion of any meaningful adverse correlation between support for Palestinian rights and the security of the British Jewish community lacks substance. Unease about the ongoing impact of pressure on the Home Secretary to clamp down on British freedoms of expression are, however, significant. To cite a single instance: while acknowledging that arresting those "peacefully sitting down" and silently protesting should not be police work, Amnesty International contends that such resort to exceptional powers abuses the Government's human rights obligations ...

"Amnesty has long criticised UK terrorism law for being excessively broad, vaguely worded and a threat to freedom of expression. Police responses to these peaceful protests only further confirm that our concerns are justified."

Beyond outright banning, it is unclear exactly how Mahmood's reaction will alleviate Police Federation complaints or otherwise be used to target Palestinian solidarity. The residual impression generated resembles a reactionary tic to keep on digging for an escape from the bolthole created, again under the influence of lobbying, by her predecessor's discretionary order. The social alienation intrinsic to this policy was articulated succinctly by British journalist and long-time Israeli resident, Jonathon Cook, in his regular substack column:

"Politicians, the police and the media want millions of us to imagine we are alone in grieving the slaughter of Gaza's children - and that our grief is shameful ... I and millions of other Britons, some of them Jews, have been grieving for much longer - over the killing of tens of children in Gaza not on one day last week but on every single day, without break, for two years. And yet no politicians or media seem to think it important to respect my grief."

Lift The Ban protest - 4 October 2025, Trafalgar Square, London