Never let a good crisis go to waste

TetleysTLDR: The summary

Britain’s leaders hate the Gaza marchers because they’re peaceful, relentless, and right. Every banner exposes the Government’s complicity in war crimes, the weapons sales, the diplomatic cover, the silence. Every arrest of protesters shows how increasingly wrong footed our Government is. Rather than face that shame, ministers and media use the actions of one deranged individual not connected to any of the anti-Genocide groups to smear a whole movement. Most protesters don’t hate Jews; many are Jewish themselves, demanding justice and an end to bloodshed, anti-semitism is as much frowned upon in the marches themselves as it is elsewhere. But fear has been manufactured, stoked by partisan lobby groups and echoed by compliant broadcasters, to turn solidarity into suspicion. Meanwhile, far-right rallies pass quietly as peaceful marchers are arrested, creating Britain’s first political detainees in decades. The proscription of Palestine Action and heavy-handed policing show how dissent is being criminalised. This isn’t about safety, it’s about power and every crisis, every tragedy, is just another excuse for a Government terrified of the truth.

TetleysTLDR: The article

The Government hates the anti-Genocide marchers.

They hate them because they are embarrassing the hell out of the Government. They hate them because they are peaceful, because every banner and chant shines a light straight into the eyes of a Cabinet up to its neck in complicity. These protests expose what ministers would rather bury: that British weapons, British diplomacy and British silence have all helped make Gaza burn. There are senior figures in this Government who have earned the right to explain themselves at The Hague, so for them to claim that peaceful protest is somehow illegal is quite frankly taking the piss. It's obscene. And yes, some parts of the Jewish community that identify closely with the Israeli state dislike these marches too, because they expose the horror being done in Israel’s name, but that discomfort is political, not religious. It comes from seeing crimes dragged into daylight, not from prejudice against a people.

This is how governments manage protest: take one act of madness, inflate it into a threat, and use it to smear everyone demanding accountability.

It’s not public safety they’re worried about. It’s public scrutiny. Week after week the Gaza marches have shown the moral majority of Britain standing against slaughter carried out with Western weapons and diplomatic cover. Those crowds make ministers squirm because they show the gulf between the people’s conscience and the government’s complicity.

The truth is simple. The vast majority of people marching for Palestine are marching because they have a conscience and not because they hate Jews. They’re not there for Hamas and they are equally appalled by senseless violence against Jewish people. Many protesters are Jewish themselves: you’ll see banners reading Not In Our Name and Jews Against Genocide beside Muslim, Christian and secular marchers.

They’re united by a belief that no state should bomb civilians with impunity and no ally should pretend it isn’t happening or arm the perpetrators. Trying to tie these people to the actions of a lone attacker is not just wrong, it’s disingenuous, it's deceitful and it's obscene. But coming from our Government it isn't surprising.

No one should blame Jewish communities for feeling frightened right now either. What happened on Yom Kippur was truly awful and has created ripples far beyond Manchester. Fear is a natural response when you are told, day after day, by people who should be looking after the communties' interests that people marching for Palestinian lives secretly want to harm you, there's no wonder there is fear. That fear hasn’t arisen in a vacuum. Since the first marches began, some prominent advocacy groups like CAA, the BoDs and media outlets have repeatedly framed them as threatening or antisemitic. Their campaigns defend the policies of the Israeli government more than they reflect the diversity of British Jewish opinion. That message seeps into communities, turning solidarity into something that feels like menace. The result is tragic: ordinary Jewish people, who deserve both safety and truth, are made to feel endangered by protests that are, in reality, demanding the very opposite of hate: an end to collective punishment, an end to bloodshed, an end to racism in all its forms. The real obscenity is that fear has been weaponised to protect political power, both here and in Israel.

When senseless violence occurs, as it did this week, it was minutes before the Government was claiming this was linked to the anti-Genocide marches. Those poor men who lost their lives do not deserve to be politicised by a piece of shit government hiding its own guilt. And then of course broadcasters rush to 'the religious voice of authority'. In the UK that often means the so called Chief Rabbi, Rabbi Ephraim Mervis, out on cue, deliberately blurring the lines between one man’s deranged act and the hundreds of thousands who’ve marched peacefully week after week. You’d think he was some kind of spiritual authority for all Jews the way the media parades him around: “The Chief Rabbi says…” as if he’s the Jewish equivalent of the Pope, the Dalai Lama, or the Archbishop of Canterbury. He isn’t. Not even close.

His title, 'Chief Rabbi', applies only to the United Synagogue, a very particular strand of British Orthodoxy, one that is deeply, openly and unapologetically pro-Israel. He speaks for a narrow, partisan community, not for Britain’s Jews as a whole. In fact, many Jewish groups, Jewish Voice for Labour, Na’amod, Rabbis for Ceasefire, and thousands of ordinary synagogue members from different Jewish communities utterly reject his stance. They’ve been out on the same streets as everyone else, calling for an end to the slaughter, waving placards that say “Judaism ≠ Zionism.”

Of course you wouldn’t know that from watching the BBC or reading the Times. They never show those Jews. They only show Mervis, the Government’s favourite rabbi, wheeled out whenever Downing Street needs moral cover for its complicity. It’s performative sanctity, a smokescreen for war crimes.

The TV rarely if ever shows other Jewish voices. Their absence creates the illusion of consensus: that every Jewish Briton stands behind Israel’s government, and that criticism of that government is somehow anti-Jewish. It isn’t. It’s political speech, and a democracy worth the name should protect it.

The Government isn’t trying to protect Jewish people from harm; it’s trying to protect itself from shame. Every time tens of thousands march through London, Manchester or Glasgow, it’s a living, breathing indictment of Britain’s role in Gaza. It’s the public refusing to swallow the line that 'Israel has the right to defend itself' justifies entire families wiped out on an industrial scale, long after the terrorists who planned and carried out the attack on October 7th had been eliminated.

That’s why Palestine Action was proscribed. Whatever you think of their actions or motivations it was never because it was a terrorist organisation, it clearly isn't, but because it made the Government look weak and guilty. Activists exposed Britain’s role in supplying arms and political cover for the bombing of civilians. Now, even with the ban, the embarrassment keeps coming: hundreds of people willing to be arrested, standing up in the face of state intimidation. It’s all very well for ministers to thunder about 'the rule of law,' but it means very little when the same duplicitous bastards are complicit in war crimes - that's against the law too. The difference is that the Government enforces one law and buries the other.

You only need to look at who gets policed and how

When far-right mobs march through city centres with fascist slogans, the police line is thin, the arrests minimal, the coverage mild. But when families, students, pensioners, the disabled, trade-unionists and clergy take to the streets calling for a ceasefire, the response is militarised: kettling, mass arrests, surveillance the kind of policing reserved for enemies of the state, not citizens exercising a democratic right. Hundreds of peaceful protesters have now faced arrest and prosecution simply for refusing to stay silent about Gaza. For many, it marks the return of political detainees to Britain for the first time since the peace process in Northern Ireland. That’s what happens when conscience collides with state convenience. The same culture of overreach haunts armed-police operations too. The speed with which lethal force is sometimes used raises hard questions about training, accountability and the value placed on human life. When suspects are killed before any evidence is tested, we lose not only lives but the chance to learn what truly happened. We will never know the perpetrators true motives, his criminality, his mental health because he'll never have his day in Court to face justice. Shoot-to-kill may tidy up a headline, but it leaves democracy a little poorer every time it’s deployed. And lets not even mention the elephant in the room: the deafening silence in the media about how one of the worshippers was actually killed by a police bullet and others were injured by the police in the crossfire.

Once the narrative is set, the response is predictable. The Home Office promises tougher measures. Police powers expand. Peaceful protest becomes a public-order issue, dissent a security concern. The Terrorism Act, Public Order Act and Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act are twisted into tools for silencing conscience. Britain is edging toward a state where protest is tolerated only when it changes nothing, where moral outrage is treated as a risk to stability, not the lifeblood of democracy. The same politicians that clapped for the suffragettes would have proscribed them within a instant.

Now the police are claiming the protests are 'exhausting' them. Spare us the violins. Nobody forced you to treat peaceful demonstrations like military operations, to kettle pensioners and students, or to throw half the force at people carrying banners instead of tackling real crime. Rowley knows as well as anybody that this is a bad law yet he still sends his forces out to mass arrests. If the police are tired, it’s not because of the protesters, it’s because they’ve been made the front line in a political war against conscience.

Governments have always known how to weaponise fear. Call it national security, community cohesion, or counter-extremism : the labels change, but the effect is the same: narrowing the space for dissent.

Every time the streets fill with people demanding justice for Gaza, Downing Street hears a threat to its own legitimacy. And so it should. Every week of marches proves that ordinary citizens can see through the spin, and that truth is the one thing they can’t legislate away. You can arrest a pensioner and use five police officers to carry them away, what you can't arrest is an idea.

Britain’s leaders are not defending the public; they are defending themselves from accountability. They can ban marches, smear protesters, and hide behind selective voices, but they cannot erase the images of bombed-out hospitals and starving children that fuel those protests.

The people on the streets know it. They know that being moral sometimes means breaking ranks, that silence helps no one, and that a democracy which fears its own conscience has already lost the argument.

So when the next tragedy is spun into another excuse to criminalise solidarity, remember the pattern. Remember the line they live by: Never let a good crisis go to waste.

Sources & Further Reading

Liberty (2024). Policing Protests: How New Laws Are Silencing Dissent.
Analysis of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and Public Order Act 2023, detailing their impact on the right to protest.
https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk
Amnesty International UK (2024). Britain: Peaceful Protest Under Threat.
Summary of the shrinking space for lawful demonstration and cases of disproportionate policing.
https://www.amnesty.org.uk
Human Rights Watch (2024). Israel’s Assault on Gaza and International Humanitarian Law.
Documentation of potential war crimes and the role of international suppliers.
https://www.hrw.org
United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 20 & 21.
The legal foundations for peaceful assembly and protest rights under international law.
https://www.ohchr.org
House of Commons Library (2024). Protest Law and Policing Powers in the UK.
A neutral overview of legislation and recent policy changes affecting demonstrators.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk
Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT). UK Arms Exports to Israel: Government Data Briefing.
Factual summary of export licences and the relationship between the UK defence industry and Israel.
https://www.caat.org.uk
Reporters Without Borders (2024). The Role of Media Framing in Protest Coverage.
Discussion of bias and narrative shaping in mainstream reporting.
https://rsf.org

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