A power grab to create two-tier chants
BRUCE NEWSOME
KEIR Starmer’s Government is exploiting disgust with anti-Semitic protests to justify new powers to repress speech and assembly – even though it doesn’t need new powers to prevent anti-Semitic protests.
Precedent suggests that public authorities will use the new powers to repress everybody except those in the fashionable leftist milieu – including the anti-Semites who are being cited to justify new powers.
The power grab began on the day that an Islamist attacked worshippers (two died) at a synagogue in Manchester, on October 2, the first day of Yom Kippur.
When visiting the synagogue, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said she was ‘horrified by the anti-Semitic terrorist attack,’ and that ‘those who seek to divide us, they will fail’.
But she did not curb pro-Palestine (and anti-Semitic) protests of the same day . . . or subsequent days.
On October 3, Mahmood called the protests ‘unBritish,’ and called on the protesters to desist, and promised that the Government ‘will make sure that any protests that go ahead comply with the law, and where someone steps outside of the law of our land they will be arrested’.
Yet, two days later, Mahmood claimed that she and the police need new powers to stop them.
Mahmood’s claim is false.
The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 gives police powers to restrict protests in time and space, on ground of ‘serious disruption to the life of community’.
The Public Order Act (2023) criminalises ‘stirring up racial hatred’. The Act allows courts to impose ‘Serious Disruption Prevention Orders’ on repeat protesters. It empowers the Home Secretary to direct and to permit police to ban protests.
To be clear, I do not agree with these powers. They are illiberal and enable two-tier justice. I quote the Acts merely to prove that the Home Secretary is either dishonest or ignorant when she claims she lacks powers to stop anti-Semitic protests.
Since Mahmood is a barrister, and has years of experience in shadow government, and more than a year of experience as Justice Secretary, I doubt she is ignorant of these laws.
So, why does Mahmood need a law against ‘cumulative protest’ when she already has a law against ‘serious disruption’ (Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act), and a separate law authorising ‘Serious Disruption Prevention Orders’ against repeat protesters (Public Order Act)?
Notice too that Mahmood phrases her prospective law with a flexible threshold. ‘Cumulative disruption’ is not quantified. Thus, it is unfalsifiable, like the standard for ‘grossly offensive’ in the Online Safety Bill. Law enforcers can draw that line wherever they want.
Even the Guardian reported concerns about the illiberalism and two-tier justice inherent in Mahmood’s prospective law.
I suspect Mahmood is taking advantage of a public mood for intervention against Islamists, to garner more powers for two-tier justice.
Her new law will further privilege Islamists, and further repress the already-repressed.
As anybody knows, given a brain and a news source, police and prosecutors routinely use current powers to support Palestine, gay ‘pride’ and other fashionable leftisms – however incongruous (think ‘Queers for Palestine’).
Pro-Palestine protesters routinely glorify Hamas (outlawed by the Terrorism Act of 2006), demonstrate hatred of Jews (outlawed by the Racial and Religious Hatred Act of 2006), and encourage crimes against Jews (outlawed by the Serious Crimes Act of 2007).
Yet these crimes are rarely prosecuted. For instance, within the first month of the Hamas invasion of Israel of October 2023, Palestine-flagged cars raced through Jewish neighbourhoods, with occupants chanting ‘fuck the Jews, fuck all of them, fuck their mothers, rape their daughters, and show your support for Palestine’.
Later, four men were charged with using ‘threatening, abusive or insulting words, or behaviour, with intent, likely to stir up racial hatred’.
But the cases were dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service.
The Home Secretary at the time, Suella Braverman, condemned the CPS’s decision.
Mahmood, then Shadow Justice Secretary, did not.
Starmer at the time claimed that Braverman’s criticisms of the police’s privileging of pro-Palestine protesters were ‘sowing the seeds of hatred’.
In 2024, a Jewish group posted videos of police escorting Palestine-flagged marchers who said they were looking for Jewish ‘blood’, pelted Jews with missiles, and told police that ‘Zionists’ were walking dogs as a ‘provocation’ and that any further dogs would justify violent responses. And the police nodded in agreement.
While police and prosecutors were privileging pro-Palestine marchers, they were repressing critics of anti-Semitic tweets, counter-protesters against anti-Semites (including, infamously, a bystander arrested for ‘provoking’ protesters by being ‘openly Jewish’), and even bystanders filming pro-Palestinian marchers.
Also repressed are trans-sceptics, those who refer to the biological gender of child abusers who transition to ‘female’ after indictment, drivers who remove climate-change protesters from highways, wavers of British flags (but not foreign flags), critics of asylum hotels (including Lucy Connolly, jailed for 31 months, for an incendiary tweet), protesters against asylum hotels, including three men jailed for violent disorder outside the hotel in Epping that was housing a foreign sexual predator, who received a shorter prison sentence than any of them, and anybody else who can be smeared as racist or far-right.
Conveniently, Starmer’s Government over-reacts against Palestine Action after it split with the Labour Party. In July, it was proscribed as a terrorist group, even though it has never engaged in terrorism – except to trespass, vandalise and praise Hamas, all of which other radical leftists get away with.
Indeed, over the first weekend since the attack in Manchester, police arrested more than 500 people at a Palestine Action rally in London.
Yet police did not have any response to pro-Palestine protesters who had already posted their plans to glorify Hamas’s invasion of Israel, on the second anniversary of the October 7 massacre.
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp tweeted that ‘the Government must send a zero-tolerance message with actions, not words’.
Shadow Education Secretary Laura Trott tweeted that ‘these protests are incitement and they are not legal’. Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick called the protests a ‘f****** disgrace.’
But Mahmood repeated the lie that public authorities cannot prevent them. Starmer similarly urged protesters to pause, but also urged police to use the ‘full force of the law’ against those who call for violence against Jews.
The next day, in far away India, Starmer mooted even more powers to curb protests. ‘I’ve asked the Home Secretary to look more broadly at what other powers are available . . . I think we need to go further than that in relation to some of the chants that are going on at some of these protests.’
Which chants?
Expect a law against ‘seriously offensive chants’, of which only the Labour Party’s opponents will run afoul.
This article (A power grab to create two-tier chants) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Bruce Newsome
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