325 Arrested Outside the Embassy as the Ban Faces Appeal
The Metropolitan Police say 325 people were arrested at a protest supporting the proscribed group Palestine Action outside the American embassy at Nine Elms on Saturday, 320 of them for expressing support for a proscribed organisation under the Terrorism Act. At least 4,000 arrests have now been made over the group.
The numbers are now the story. A single afternoon produced 325 arrests, and the cumulative total since the group was proscribed last year is now put at more than four thousand — a scale of arrest under terrorism legislation for expression rather than for violence that has no obvious precedent in recent British policing. That four-thousand figure is a calculation rather than an official total; the organisers call it “truly dystopian”. Three approved outlets give three different months for the proscription, so none appears here. Officers worked into the evening, walking people to vans to applause from the crowd. What makes the figure provisional is that the legal basis is itself under challenge: the Supreme Court is due to review the proscription after the group’s co-founder was granted permission to appeal, and the Home Office says it will defend the ban robustly. If the appeal succeeds, several thousand arrests will have been made under a designation subsequently found unlawful; if it fails, the arrests continue. Because these are live criminal and appellate matters this item carries the police figures, the legal basis and the appeal, and nothing about the merits of either side.