WHEN almost 900 people are arrested in London for holding a cardboard sign, while the same action in Edinburgh sees no arrests at all, something has gone badly wrong with the law.
The government’s ban on Palestine Action has created precisely the crisis many warned it would. It is not just unpopular — it is unworkable. On Saturday (Sept 6), the Metropolitan Police spent eleven hours arresting 857 out of 1,500 peaceful demonstrators in Parliament Square. In Scotland, 85 people held the same signs and were left alone. The contrast could not be starker.
This is the definition of inconsistency. A law that can be enforced in one city but ignored in another is no law at all. It creates a postcode lottery for rights: in London you can be arrested for holding a placard, in Edinburgh you cannot. How can such a law command respect?
Amnesty International has already warned that these arrests are unlawful. Barristers acting for the Home Secretary have gone further, advising that campaigning against the ban is not itself illegal. Yet the Met pressed on regardless, driven by Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley’s public promise to arrest anyone who defied him. The result: hundreds of ordinary citizens — vicars, RAF veterans, Holocaust survivors’ descendants, retired teachers and healthcare workers — dragged into police vans for an act of peaceful dissent.
It is difficult to imagine a more vivid demonstration of a law’s weakness. The ban is not only authoritarian in principle, it is unenforceable in practice. Defend Our Juries are right to call this Labour’s “poll tax moment” — an unpopular, unjust measure that ordinary people will refuse to accept.
The law should be enforceable, consistent and fair. A government that claims to uphold the rule of law cannot keep one that fails every test.
