In the early hours of August 10th 2011, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) arrived at Highbury Corner Magistrates Court in London. Amidst the eruption of popular outrage which followed the killing of Mark Duggan, Keir Starmer had cancelled his family holiday and intended to make a “morale-boosting” visit to his colleagues at 4am. The former human rights lawyer had activated the ‘Additional Courts Protocol’ and instructed prosecutors across the country to work around the clock to restore order. This unprecedented manoeuvre was, in the words of one of Starmer’s senior colleagues, designed to ensure “the shock and awe of the criminal justice system.”
On Saturday January 18th, the “shock and awe” of British justice returned to London’s streets as the Metropolitan Police violently arrested at least 70 anti-war activists during the first national demonstration for Palestine of 2025. Among those charged with public order offences were Ben Jamal, the Director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and Chris Nineham, the demonstration’s chief steward. Both Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell were interviewed under police caution in the following days.
Acting with the explicit support of the Home Office, this authoritarian police response marked yet another escalation in the British state’s long-running campaign to curtail the right to protest – enabled in no small part by Keir Starmer’s actions as DPP. Recent years have seen climate activists imprisoned for simply planning a protest on Zoom, trade unionists – already facing the most restrictive labour laws in Europe – have been confronted by a determined campaign to remove their right to strike, and, last Saturday, one woman wearing a Keffiyeh was arrested for arriving at the demonstration “too early”.
Gradually, successive British governments have accelerated a coordinated campaign of civic repression which aims to demobilise mass-political expression and limit the agency of the British public. Having promised “a politics that treads a little lighter on all of our lives”, Keir Starmer’s cabinet have inherited this project with renewed zeal. Using the long arm of the state to crackdown on popular dissent, Starmer hopes to minimise popular confrontation with his leadership – just as he and his allies did inside the Labour Party after 2019. If the periodic organised intrusions of the public into the political sphere can be constrained, then it can remain exclusively the domain of the ruling class, insulating Labour’s project of managed decline and entrenching the electoral apathy which assured the Party’s victory at the ballot box last July.
In 2015, Tariq Ali defined the extreme centre as “the political expression of the neoliberal state.” In adhering to this task, Starmer is at a distinct disadvantage compared to his predecessors. Almost half a century of deregulation has hollowed out or erased many of those social and institutional mechanisms that might once have mediated class conflict. Consequently, the role of civic repression in buttressing the British establishment has taken on new significance.
It follows then that the contemporary assault on the right to protest is motivated by an obvious class interest. It is no coincidence, for example, that Lord Walney, the UK Government’s “independent” Adviser on Political Violence & Disruption, is simultaneously a paid lobbyist for the arms industry who happens to advocate for the proscription of organisations like Palestine Action.
However, Lord Walney’s role in fostering today’s draconian crackdown pales in comparison to that of his boss. Keir Starmer’s response to the 2011 riots ensured that, with sentencing guidelines formally abandoned, more than 2,000 people were handed jail terms which were four and a half times longer than the same offences would normally warrant. 23-year-old Nicholas Robinson, for example, was sentenced to six months behind bars for stealing a £3.50 case of bottled water. Such ludicrous punishment – and devotion to the disciplinary instincts of the British state – can be traced throughout Starmer’s tenure as DPP. Just one month before Mark Duggan’s killing, 20-year-old Frances Fernie was sentenced to 12 months in a young offenders’ institution for throwing two placard sticks, which hit nobody, during a march against the Cameron government’s austerity agenda.
Keir Starmer’s principles change on a dime. However, his authoritarianism can be traced throughout his career as DPP, Leader of the Opposition and now Prime Minister. Such a quality is far from unique on the right-wing of the Labour Party. In 1998, noting New Labour’s tendency to abandon democratic practice, Stuart Hall characterised the government’s “authoritarian populism” as “corporate and managerialist in its ‘downward’ leadership style and its moralising attitude to those to whom good is being done.” Viewed in this context, it makes perfect sense that the new Labour government has made no attempt to repeal the raft of anti-protest legislation signed into law by successive Conservative governments over the last 14 years – and in fact weaponises the Public Order Act (2023) to restrict freedom of assembly.
More generally, Starmer’s decisions following the riots and since he became Prime Minister expose the true function of ‘law and order’ in Britain. In 1992, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary John Woodcock admitted that, “the police never were the police of the whole people but a mechanism set up to protect the affluent from what the Victorians described as the dangerous classes.” Today, the “dangerous classes” form the ranks of London’s “hate marches” which have been singled out for special treatment by the British political and media class over the last 12 months.
Since October 2023, the anti-war movement has routinely brought hundreds of thousands of demonstrators to the streets of London, Manchester and Glasgow in solidarity with Palestine. Undeterred by Suella Braverman’s slander, the Metropolitan Police’s threats or the mainstream media’s vilification, the movement retained a historic rate and scale of mobilisation as Israel’s genocide unfolded. Within weeks this popular outrage overcame the feeble arguments of politicians who time and again denied the legitimacy of the demand for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. By December 2023, 71% of the British public found almost no representation for their support for this position among Britain’s dominant political parties. Through the prism of Palestinian solidarity, the anti-war movement plainly illustrated that the interests of British imperialism were beyond the remit of representative democracy. Out of step with the public, but tied materially to the collective punishment of the Palestinian people, Downing Street last week escalated its repression of a protest movement that continues to offer political expression to this alienation.
The crackdown was in keeping with a concerted effort to quell pro-Palestine sentiment around the globe. Last December, CIVICUS Monitor established that 10% of worldwide civic repression in 2024 was related to Palestine solidarity activity. In the United States alone, some 3,200 students were arrested during the wave of encampments that swept college campuses last Spring. Militarised police fired live ammunition, pepper balls and tear gas at peaceful protestors as law enforcement sought to clear tents from college lawns across the country.
The over-policing of anti-imperialist protest in the West is not new. “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with,” said Governor Ronald Reagan of anti-Vietnam war demonstrations at the University of California in April 1970. One month later, the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four young peaceful student protestors at Kent State University. In the aftermath of the massacre, the campus’ students hung banners that read: “From My Lai to Kent State: Politicians are murderers”. In so doing, they exposed the hypocrisy of the ‘rules-based international order’ from which the governments of the global north have long drawn their legitimacy. Today, this informal set of norms which sustains US economic and political dominance is unravelling in real-time, spurred on by mass demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine across Western capitals.
This unique capacity to undermine the credibility of the world order as it is presently constituted is why in Britain, and around the world, Palestine solidarity activity has come in for such severe repression. And it is why, in the face of state-sanctioned sabotage, we must continue to march.
