On Saturday, according to the Daily Telegraph, pro-Palestinian protestors ‘brought Oxford Street to a standstill on one of the busiest shopping days of the Christmas period’. The organisers, Sisters Uncut, declared that ‘Christmas is cancelled’ while placards read ‘no shopping while bombs are dropping’ – a reference to Israel’s military response to the 7 October massacre in which Palestinian terrorists murdered 1,200 Jewish men, women and children.
The Telegraph recorded that the marchers had ‘walked slowly’ along Oxford Street and ‘forced fashion retailers Zara and Puma to temporarily lock their doors’. They wrote that the demonstrators ‘made their way from Soho Square towards Oxford Circus, holding up buses and taxis’.
The Metropolitan Police shouldn’t be defunded or defended
Sky News, meanwhile, reported that the marchers stopped outside Puma, which sponsors the Israeli national football team, and chanted ‘shut it down’. They also gathered outside Zara and accused it of ‘supporting genocide’. Pro-Palestinian campaigners say a Zara fashion photoshoot featuring limbless mannequins, which was shot in September, was mocking casualties from the bombing of Gaza, which began in October. According to Sky’s correspondent: ‘The aim was to cause disruption and they succeeded. Traffic ground to a halt as the marchers made their way to Regent Street, with other stores locking up as they passed.’ The Independent described the demonstration as ‘bringing traffic to a standstill’ while participants ‘waved Palestinian flags, played music and let off coloured smoke’.
Newspaper reports were corroborated by videos from the event, many of them posted on X by the protest organisers themselves. It’s important to document all this because some people are attempting to downplay the protests and minimise their impact on retailers and shoppers.
Among them are the Metropolitan Police. Here is what the force tweeted about the incident:
We’ve seen some suggestions that Oxford Street was ‘closed down’ earlier which isn’t really an accurate reflection of today’s events. While a large group of protestors walked down the road, traffic and pedestrians were still able to get around. Officers were with the group throughout and the level of disruption was monitored closely. Some shops did decide to close their doors for a short time whilst the protest passed, but then re-opened and have carried on with their day’s trading. The area has been packed with people and as you’d expect two days before Christmas. It’s still very busy with lots of shoppers and tourists who have largely been able to carry on as normal.
The most cursory glance at the videos disseminated by Sisters Uncut on social media suggests the Met is engaging in what is fashionably termed ‘gaslighting’. What is so troubling about the tweet is that the Met seems to sees its job as managing public opinion towards a Gaza-related disruption at a time when such disruptions have become more common. Perhaps their objective is maintaining ‘community relations’ or discouraging counter-protests. But defusing potential public anger over a political cause disrupting Christmas shopping is not the job of the police, especially when such image management services appear to be extended only to certain causes.
Conducting themselves in this manner will not buy the cops any let-up from those who call the Met institutionally racist, and march against its officers’ every use of force. But it will have an effect on others. The people I have in mind range from socialists to reactionaries, social democrats to conservatives, liberals to centrists, but who are as one in believing in neutrality, process, empiricism and the rule of law. The very concepts that are rejected by the progressive ideology that seems to have captured the Met.
These people object on principle to politicised policing; they also believe that the Met press office would not be doing spin on their behalf if they had occupied Oxford Street. Am I wrong about that? Does anyone seriously believe that if similar numbers had obstructed a busy Christmas thoroughfare to demand a general strike or nationalisation of the top 200 companies in Britain that the Met would have gone to bat for them on social media? Or if the same size of crowd had taken over Oxford Street to call for an end to immigration or protest against multiculturalism?
I am a who-will-police-the-police sort of person, but I notice that friends more sympathetic to the thin blue line are growing sceptical, if not a little hostile. This crosses the political spectrum, taking in not just left-leaning feminists, centrist dads, and liberal legalists, but Tories who instinctively defend the boys in blue, right-wingers who think Dirty Harry should be a police training video, and normies reassured by the sight of a cop and wondering when the policing bureaucracy got taken over by sociology graduates. These are the sorts of people who, for different reasons, spent quite a bit of summer 2020 rolling their eyes whenever their expensively miseducated offspring said ‘defund the police’. I suspect they would still roll their eyes – but the police have nonetheless lost a degree of legitimacy in their minds.
That’s purely anecdotal but I suspect others will recognise it. Like other institutions, policing, and the Met in particular, has been on a journey that will look like reputational self-immolation to some and the assertion of a new ruling ideology to others. While that timeline certainly doesn’t begin on 7 October, it is a landmark date because it tested the ability – the willingness, really – of the Metropolitan Police to uphold the King’s peace in a way that was even-handed, dispassionate and unswayed by the considerations of identity-based politics. And the Met sure passed that test with flying colours! There was no undue indulgence shown to large-scale displays of intimidation. No one at any march called for intifada or the destruction of Israel. If you say otherwise, you’re just trying to stoke a culture war, and you’re ‘far right’, and maybe you’re even committing a hate crime.
There’s a certain genre of Very Sensible People who regard these matters as irrelevant side issues, social media driven distractions, populist panics – you know, a bit vulgar. They get in the way of the real issues, which are defined as whatever topics were discussed on the most recent News Agents podcast.
The Very Sensible People should always be ignored, but they should be ignored extra hard when it comes to the compromising of institutions integral to public order, social harmony and the maintenance of the state. The police are one such institution and once they cease to be seen as a servant of the common good – once they come to be viewed as sectional, political or capricious – not only is the institution harmed but the social order it upholds is too.
The Metropolitan Police shouldn’t be defunded or defended. It should be reminded of its duties and compelled, by institutional or legislative reform if need be, to comply with them.
Comments