The Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, has been accused of bowing to political pressure by banning pro-Palestine demonstrators from ending their march this Saturday with a rally outside Downing Street.
The marches in London have regularly ended both at Trafalgar Square and near Downing Street on Whitehall to allow the huge crowds to safely disperse from two locations.
Organisers were told on Wednesday that the police would not allow the expected 300,000 demonstrators to rally on Whitehall this Saturday, however. According to Ben Jamal, the director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), senior officers liaising with them claimed to have been unable to consult with government offices and businesses about the disruption.
The Met refused to engage in any further discussion with the organisers of the protests, Jamal said. “The rationale that was given was: ‘We have not fully consulted with the stakeholders in Whitehall,’” he said. “When we press [them and say], ‘Well, who is it that you need to consult with?’ [they say] it is government offices that are based on Whitehall and businesses.
“Well, I think everybody knows there’s a tiny handful of businesses on Whitehall. And the second rationale was: ‘Well, we haven’t worked out our dispersal plan.’ And our response to that was, well, it would be the same dispersal plan that we’ve operated five or six times before.
“The numbers require it because it increases the sort of flow particularly when you’re talking about Trafalgar Square and … it gives people more exit points, it makes dispersal easier and it prevents any sort of crushing, where everybody is trying to get to one point.”
Jamal claimed that the Met was under pressure from the government to restrict the marches, which began after the start of the war in Gaza. The war was sparked by Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October in which 1,200 were killed.
“They have responded to that by being increasingly politicised and repressive in the way that they are policing our marches and other protests as well,” Jamal claimed.
In November, Rowley defied calls for a ban on a pro-Palestinian march through London on Armistice Day as he insisted on the independence of his force.
A Met spokesperson said: “We must balance the rights of protesters with the rights of others. The scale and frequency of marches is causing serious disruption to many Londoners. We do not support a request to extend the march into Whitehall. Our teams continue to work with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and many others ahead of Saturday. We aren’t going further than that at this time, but our discussions continue.”
The “Stop the Genocide, Ceasefire Now” march is due to start outside Broadcasting House on Portland Place in London at midday on Saturday and end by 4pm.
The former shadow chancellor John McDonnell called for the Met to re-engage with the march organisers. He said: “There’ve now been several huge demonstrations organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign which have been well managed with cooperation between the organisers and Met police. I would urge the police to meet with the organisers urgently to resolve this and respect the wishes of the organisers.”
