Is there anyone in the Met Police, I wonder, low-minded enough to think of things in PR terms? “I’ve got a good wheeze, guv,” I imagine some grizzled lifer piping up. “Let’s get tooled up, kick in the door of a Quaker meeting house and chuck a bunch of unarmed young women in the back of the paddy-wagon.” Could such a move, his superior might have wondered fleetingly, look in any way heavy-handed if reported on the front page of a newspaper? If they did, the thought evidently soon evaporated.
It was an advertised meeting, not a terrorist cell
So here we are. No fewer than twenty – twenty! – officers, some equipped with tasers, raided the Quaker Meeting House in Westminster on Thursday and cuffed and hauled off no more than six – six! – women between the ages of 18 and 38. The women were at an open ‘welcome meeting’ of Youth Demand – an activist group associated with climate change and Palestinian rights. Here were cuffs and tasers ranged against a fearsome arsenal of breadsticks and hummus. (There was a certain amount of playing up to stereotypes on both sides, it seems.) Would they, you wonder, have been quite so gung-ho about kicking in the doors of an Anglican church? Or, for that matter, a mosque?
It is, to say the very least, a bad look. It’s a bad look given the thuggish policing of Covid restrictions and politically incorrect tweets, of anti-monarchist protests, and of the all-female vigil after the rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a policeman. It’s a bad look, too, given that it comes at a time when on the other side of the Atlantic plain-clothed federal agents concealing their faces with masks were caught on camera disappearing a PhD student on the street after she wrote an anti-Israeli op-ed for her student newspaper.
The reason I frame this as a bad look – as a PR decision – is that the Quaker thing is a tiny bit of a red herring: these weren’t Quakers at prayer, but a group of activists who had hired a room in the meeting house. (There was a life-class going on in one of the other rooms – which presumably resulted in Carry On-style scenes when plod burst in to search that room too.)
Nevertheless, if you can avoid a headline involving the police bashing down the door of a place of worship for the world’s most famous pacifists, it’s worth trying to. It isn’t the first job of the Met to secure flattering headlines – but PR is a *bit* important. Our cherished model of policing by consent is made a lot easier when people feel they can trust the police.
But let’s leave the PR issue aside and look at the merits of the case. Reader, you may well be among those – so am I – who find it extremely annoying when young protesters decide that the best way to raise awareness of their cause is to hose government buildings down with red paint, lie doggo in the middle of motorways, or sellotape themselves to police horses. As I wrote here not long ago, in connection with Palestine Action terrorising the employees of defence contractors with sledgehammers, a conviction in the righteousness of your cause doesn’t legitimate any amount of thuggery.
So it’s possible that these breadstick-chewing young women were planning a protest of great obnoxiousness that would affright all right-thinking members of the public. Youth Demand had been making noises on social media about an attempt to ‘shut down London’ in April. (Shutting down London sounds a bit ambitious, but who knows? They might well have succeeded in blocking a street or two and making some people late for work.) They have, apparently, been associated with the old red-paint-on-the-MOD dodge. The same organisation picketed Sir Keir Starmer’s home – which rightly saw some of its members had up on public order offences. Civil disobedience by very definition involves breaking laws and taking the consequences, that said, and opinions vary widely on where the line of acceptability should be drawn.
But I’d make two points here. One is that you need to break the law before you take the consequences. Even if you think all keffiyah-wearing activists are revolting toe-rags who deserve to be chucked in the cells with dispatch, it’s traditional to wait until an offence has been committed before you sail in with the cuffs and tasers. This is dismayingly close to Philip K. Dick’s idea of pre-crime. Of course, if you’ve got reason to believe a cell of terrorists is planning a spectacular, you jump in and arrest them before they can present a threat to life; but ‘suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance’ doesn’t seem to me to clear quite that bar. And these women, were, again, in a Quaker Meeting House talking about nonviolent direct action. It was an advertised meeting, not a terrorist cell, and one person there reports that some of the six women arrested were curious first-time drop-ins rather than members of the organisation.
The second point is that even if you think a threat to public order should be treated with the same severity as a threat to life, you’d need to have pretty strong evidence before you start rounding people up. A couple of frisky tweets won’t, I think, do it. If they really did have a nailed-on case that these young women were planning acts of severe criminality, would they have gone about things the way they did? One of the activists says that they were detained without a lawyer or a phone call for more than twelve hours, and their student room ransacked by police at 2am while they were in custody. That sounds a lot like a fishing expedition: a search for evidence of criminality after arrest rather than, as would be proper, the other way round.
From where I’m standing it stinks. As one of the women arrested, 20-year-old Ella, put it, ‘the government thinks it is worth spending massive state resources on policing a bunch of kids before we’ve even stepped into the road’. Also, bless the Quakers. One Mal Woolford, an elder of the Westminster Quaker Meeting, described how he expressed his outrage at finding the police thundering through his building thugging up his guests: ‘The only resistance I could put up was to make tea and drink it in front of them without offering them any.’ If you really want to learn about making nonviolent protest classy, these are the guys to pay attention to.
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