Sir Keir Starmer told the BBC’s Today programme this week that some pro-Palestinian protests may need to be halted, citing what he called the “cumulative” effect of repeated marches on the Jewish community in Britain. The remark was made amid a wider rise in antisemitic incidents, the US embassy in London raising its travel threat level to “severe,” and fresh arrests of two Green Party candidates over alleged antisemitic online posts. A junior minister, Alex Davies-Jones, struck a more cautious note, saying further restrictions would have to be balanced against the “fundamental right to protest.” The prime minister himself was heckled on a visit to the heavily Jewish neighbourhood of Golders Green.
The received wisdom
The reaction from large parts of the British left, and from the liberal commentariat more generally, has been swift and familiar. The charge is that the government is floating the idea of bans on political speech aimed at a foreign policy question — the conduct of the Israeli government, and Britain’s relationship to it — and that this represents a dangerous expansion of executive power over the streets. Al Jazeera’s coverage frames the prime minister as targeting chants like “globalise the intifada,” which he has called racist. The Guardian notes the Met commissioner’s simultaneous assessment that Jewish communities face “the biggest threat,” and the BBC, in its write-up of the PM’s remarks, records a minister’s concession that protests have been “hijacked.” The broader progressive worry is that public order law, once loosened, tends not to tighten again; that the definitions of “hijacked” and “cumulative harm” are inherently elastic; and that the principal victims of expansive police powers in Britain have historically been trade unions, Irish republicans, and the black left.
A different read
All of those worries are reasonable. I share several of them. And yet the reflexive civil-liberties framing, comforting as it is, misses what is actually happening on the streets of London, Manchester, and Birmingham.
Begin with what is known. Weekly marches through central London have continued, at scale, for more than eighteen months. The government’s own terrorism adviser has, according to the BBC, called antisemitism “a national security emergency.” Two parliamentary candidates of a party that currently sits in the Commons have been arrested over alleged antisemitic online posts. A French nun, as the BBC separately reports, was assaulted in Jerusalem in an episode the paper situates in a broader rise of harassment of Christians in the city — a reminder that intolerance in this conflict runs in more than one direction. None of this, taken alone, justifies a ban on protest. Cumulatively, it does suggest that the current policing settlement is not working for the minority on whose safety it most obviously bears.
The conservative, and for that matter the classical liberal, tradition has always distinguished between speech and conduct, and between peaceable assembly and intimidatory massing. The British legal inheritance, from the Public Order Act 1986 onward, already draws those lines; the question is only whether it is being enforced. The prime minister’s remark — framed in his Today interview as a reluctant concession rather than a crusade — is best read not as a call for new powers but as a public admission that the old ones are being misapplied, and that the criterion “cumulative effect on a threatened community” belongs inside the proportionality test that police already perform every Saturday morning.
That is a small move, but it is not a trivial one. Edmund Burke, who understood these questions better than most, wrote that “the only liberty I mean is a liberty connected with order.” A right to march past a synagogue every week for two years, chanting slogans a substantial share of the country finds menacing, is not obviously a higher good than a Jewish family’s right to go to shul without police escort. Reconciling those claims is what proportionality is for. It is a conservative virtue, not a progressive one, to notice that abstractions have victims.
What makes Starmer’s intervention politically awkward, rather than wrong on the merits, is the company it keeps. His government is simultaneously defending the return of an asylum seeker to France under the controversial “one in, one out” scheme, losing control of its own Brexit politics, and — as the BBC’s political correspondents have noted — dealing with a persistent backbench revolt. A prime minister whose authority is weakening is not the ideal steward of the hard proportionality judgements that protest law demands. But the underlying diagnosis — that the present weekly-march settlement has become, for a specific minority, unbearable — is accurate, and the alternative framings on offer from the further left (that concern for Jewish safety is itself a racist contrivance) are so much worse that the choice is not really close.
What to watch
- The Met’s operational response. Whether the policing guidance is quietly tightened without new primary legislation will tell us how serious the prime minister is.
- The Green Party’s disciplinary processes. Two candidate arrests is not yet a pattern; a third will be.
- The local elections next week in Scotland and Wales. Starmer’s standing on this — and a dozen other questions — will be tested at the ballot box, not the despatch box.
- Legal challenges. Any ban, or serious restriction, will be judicially reviewed within weeks, and the resulting judgment will shape public-order law for a decade.
— J